These discourses, given in the chapel at Ecogia, in August 1956, have not been rewritten, but simply retouched. Should they have been published? We have done so; we have tried, very simply, in catechetical fashion, to suggest answers to certain questions, both old and new, that the mystery of grace poses to each one of us, in the hope that the reader will go on to a more profound reading of the scriptural texts.

CHARLES JOURNET
August 1957

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The Judaeo-Christian revelation of God's love. —2. The presence of immensity by creation and the presence of indwelling by grace. —3. Difference between human love, which presupposes the being of things, and divine love which creates the being of things. —4. The 'common' love of God for all creatures and his 'special' love for his friends. —5. The universe of natures and that of grace. —6. Habitual or permanent grace. —7. In what senses is it finite and infinite? —8. Some Scripture texts. —9. Different degrees of grace correspond to different degrees of indwelling. —10. Sons of God, brothers of Jesus, co-heirs with Christ.

II. Actual Grace

1. Actual and habitual grace. —2. Divine foreknowledge and human freedom. —3. The scheme of the good act; opposed errors of Pelagius and Luther; the Catholic doctrine. —4. Molinism and Thomism. —5. Divine motion and human freedom. —6. Divine foreknowledge of the good act. —7. The scheme of the bad act. —8. 'Thy destruction comes from thee, O Israel; from me comes thy help'. —9. Normal and miraculous divine initiatives. —10. Sufficient and efficacious grace: Pascal, the "Lettres Provinciales," Jansenism. —11. Divine foreknowledge and the initiating of evil acts. —12. The drama of history. —13. Inequality of grace. —14. Charismatic graces in the service of love.

III. Predestination

1. The mysteries of grace are mysteries of love accepted or refused. —2. Texts from St. Paul on predestination. —3. Refusal on the part of the non- predestined. —4. The erroneous doctrine of double predestination to hell or to heaven. —5. Predestination as a speculative question and as a cause of personal anxiety. —6. St. Paul's doctrine on the mystery of Israel: God's summons, neglected by the mass of the Jews, passes to the Gentiles, but will return to Israel. —7. At the time of Israel's general defection, 'a remnant' remained faithful. —8. Distinction between vocations concerning the present time, in which God is completely free to choose or reject whom he will, and vocations concerning eternal life, in which he is bound by his love. —9. Exposition of Romans IX as applied to vocations concerning the present life. —10. The same concerning eternal life. —11. Conclusion.

IV. Justification, merit, consciousness of the state of grace

1. What is 'justification'? —2. 'God does not justify thee without thyself'. —3. The stages of justification. —4. Justification a greater work than creation. —5. Miraculous types of justification. —6. Is venial sin always avoidable? Does it lessen sanctifying grace? To what degree is grace, once lost, regained? —8. The doctrine of 'merit'. —9. Our merits are gifts of God. —10. Merit and reward. —11. Can one merit for another? Merit "de congruo" means more than simple prayer. —12. Can we merit temporal goods? —13. Can we merit the grace of final perseverance? —14. Can we 'know' if we are in the state of grace? The Protestant view. —15. The Catholic view: no absolute certainty apart from the case of confirmation in grace. —16. The reason for this. —17. Moral or practical certainty of the state of grace: the signs of the state of grace. —18. Fluctuations of conscience.

1. The existential states of grace. —2. The first proclamation of the Judaeo-Christian revelation was an answer to the problem of evil. —3. God could have created man in the state of pure nature, that is in a tragic and divided state. —4. In fact, he created him in a state of harmony. —5. Invisible supernatural gifts and visible preternatural ones. —6. Physiological state of the first man. —7. Era of religion without intermediary. —8. The age of Adam's grace the age of the Father. —9. Myths of a 'golden age'. —10. Effects of the fall. —11. The window in Sens cathedral. —12. The fall permitted in order to replace Adam's grace in the universe of creation by Christian grace in the universe of redemption. —13. Christ's universe better than that of the first Adam.

1. The breakdown of Adam's grace. —2. Recapitulation of the universe of Christ and Christian grace by anticipation. —3. Grace under the regime of the law of nature. —4. Outward forms of worship. —5. Holiness always possible under the law of nature. —6. Sporadic mediation of prophecy and mediation of the sacraments. —7. The forces of evil. —8. Grace under the Mosaic law. —9. Continuity of prophecy and divine institution of the sacrament. —10. The same grace orientates Jews and Gentiles towards Christ. —11. Christianity existed in an initial state before Christ. —12. Christ's cross threw its shadow over the world from the time of the fall. — 13. It is Christian grace that is offered to children at the dawning of their moral life.

1. The age of Christ's presence: the entire Church gathered up in the Virgin Mary. —2. The age of the Holy Ghost- Christian grace by derivation. —3. Derivation by contact and at a distance. —4. The mystery of derivation by contact. —5. Grace that is fully Christian is the condition for a more intimate mode of indwelling by the divine Persons. —6. With fullness of mediation appears fullness of grace. —7. The graces of contact come to us through the hierarchy. —8. Christian grace is orientated. —9. It is sacramental.

1. The apostles had to take to the ends of the earth the graces of contact that constitute the Church in her completed state. —2. Resistance of the powers of evil: these are active even within Christians. —3. Pre-Christian religion. —4. Judaism. —5. Islam. —6. Dissident sects. —7. The world of atheism. —8. Uncovenanted Christian graces. —9. The Church shares in their distribution. —10. They constitute the Church in an initial and restricted state. —11. A few examples: from India. —12. From Judaism. —13. From Islam. —14. The different erroneous religions form round the Church zones less and less favorable to the penetration of Christian grace. —15. Is the distinction between graces of contact and graces at a distance to persist to the end of time? —16. Final existential state of Christian grace: beatifying and transfiguring grace.

I should like to speak to you first of the essence of grace, according to St. Thomas's treatise on grace; then of its existential states, for which I shall make use of data drawn from other sources, notably Aquinas' treatises on Christ and the sacraments.

1. The very first thing, one which must never be forgotten, which we shall never adequately grasp, is that the Judaeo-Christian revelation is the revelation of the love of God for us, of a love which will never cease to astonish us here below because it surpasses all we could possibly conceive, and of which we can never plumb the depths. To know the depths of God's love for us, we should have to be God. And the effects of this love are disconcerting and surprising to us, precisely because we are unable to comprehend its Source. They are disconcerting to the purely rationalistic reason, even to reason pure and simple.

2. The first act in which God's love pours itself out is creation. God is the Infinite, the Absolute. He possesses being, intelligence, love, beauty to an infinite degree. We should not say he has being, intelligence, love; rather, that he is Being itself, Intelligence itself, Love and Beauty themselves. He dwells in himself; he is lacking in absolutely nothing. Why, then, did he create the world?

When man acts, it is always to procure for himself some benefit; but God could gain no benefit from creation. So then we are compelled to say that, if he created the world, it was through pure superabundance, pure desire to communicate his riches, pure disinterestedness, through love. Here we border on the mystery of his presence in creation. This is a presence at once of causality and conservation; the same divine omnipotence that makes the universe emerge from nothingness keeps it above nothingness; just as I exercise the same force to lift a weight and to keep it at the height to which I have raised it. The divine presence envelops and penetrates all creatures. It is a knowing presence, which pierces the secrets of hearts; a powerful presence, which gives beings their activity, gives to the rose-bush for example the power to produce a rose; a presence of essence, which also gives the rose-bush the power to 'be' what it is. These are the three aspects of his presence in creation. It is intimate to creatures. Strictly speaking, God is more present to things than they are to themselves. 'God who art in my heaven more my heaven than heaven,' said Pere Chardon; he is in me more me than myself. And if for one instant he were to forget the world, it would fall immediately into nothingness.

Yet God who is so mysteriously present to the world is not immersed in the world; he is not dissolved in things. He keeps his absolute transcendence. If, then, he fills all things, it is as the infinite Cause of an effect that is imperfect and limited: 'Do not I fill heaven and earth?' (Jer. xxiii. 24), he asks, and the psalmist says, 'If I ascend into heaven, thou art there; if I descend into hell, thou art present' (Ps. cxxxviii. 8).

There is a second act of God that is still more overwhelming. It is a little like the act of a mother who feels the child she has brought into the world is too remote, and takes and presses him to her heart. God unites himself in a new way to the souls who open themselves to his grace and his love. This is a presence still more mysterious, more hidden, the presence of indwelling. We read in the Book of Proverbs (viii. 31): 'My delight is to be with the children of men', and in Ecclesiasticus (xxiv. 11-13): '. . . I sought rest, and I shall abide in the inheritance of the Lord. Then the Creator of all things commanded and said to me, and he that made me rested in my tabernacle. And he said to me: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel.'

That God desires thus to come down secretly into our universe to find his dwelling in it is a truth already perceived dimly in the Old Testament. But the fulness of this revelation is to be found in the New Testament. Consider, for example, the opening verses of chaper xxi of the Apocalypse: 'I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . .And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men; and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people, and God himself with them shall be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Nor mouning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more; for the former things are passed away.'

In this second way, God cannot dwell in material things; but where there is a spirit, he is able to come down and hold converse with that spirit. And this presence of indwelling is conditioned by the descent, in that spirit, of grace in its fullest meaning. You see the importance of grace: it transforms the soul and fits it for the immediate indwelling of the divine Persons.

3. The word 'grace' has three interdependent senses. The first is that of well-wishing. We say of someone: he has the favor, the grace, of the king. So it is an act of love that comes down to make contact with some being. The second sense is that of something given to a person to signify or symbolize this well-wishing. So it is a gift. And the third sense is that of gratitude on the part of the person who has been favored: he is grateful, he gives thanks. You see the interdependence: the favor precedes the gift which, when it is received by someone worthy of it, calls forth the act of thanksgiving.

The uncreated divine Grace, the uncreated divine favour, causes in us created graces, created gifts and benefits, for which we render acts of thanksgiving.

We shall leave aside this third meaning and consider the first two.

There is one great difference between God's love and man's, between God's favour or grace and that of a man: God's love is creative, it pours out being and goodness into things, whereas man's love presupposes the goodness, the beauty of things. It is because a thing is, because it is good or beautiful that it draws me to love it. When it is fully good, it ravishes me; when it is only partly good, it invites me: I can love a human creature in spite of all it lacks, because there is some good in it, because I think of it as willed by God, redeemed by the blood of Christ. Someone may be uncongenial to me, but if I remember the words of St John of the Cross: 'Put love where there is none, and you will reap love', my love will go out to meet him in the attempt to provoke response. But I am not able by my love alone to produce or create the goodness or beauty of any thing; not even a mother, by her act of loving, can change the heart of her son who is a sinner. It is otherwise with God's love, which is prior to the being and goodness of things. That is easy to grasp: before the creation, there was nothing; God could not look on the world and be in love with its beauty. God first willed the world—willing and loving are the same with him—and the world budded forth and grew, as the outcome of his act of love. The world exists because God loved it; it continues because God continues to love it. There is, therefore, an inversion to make when we go from man's love to God's: man's love follows upon the goodness of things, God's is creative of the goodness of things.

4. We must now observe that God's love is of two kinds:

(a) a love which St. Thomas calls common, by which God loves the blade of grass, the star, the pebble of which the film "La Strada" speaks.... All these beings are, and they are by an act of divine love and volition. Even the sinner has his being, even the devil, and this being would not subsist did not God continue to will it. What is evil in the devil is his perverted will, the act by which he annuls the love offered to him; but his being itself is a richness; being is always a splendour, a participation in the divine Source. In this sense we can say that the common love of God extends to all that exists, in so far as it exists;

(b) a special love by which God elevates the rational creature above the conditions of his nature, clothes him as if with a new nature, brings him into a new universe. He makes him a sharer in the divine life by pouring into him created grace. Created grace is a reality, a quality, a light that enables the soul to receive worthily the indwelling of the three divine Persons. St Thomas says of this second love that it is absolute, because God wills to pour into the soul by its means the absolute eternal Good, in so far as it can contain it, in faith here below, in the beatific vision hereafter. Along with itself grace brings its very source, the Trinity in its entirety, just as the sun itself is given to us in one of its rays. Once there is the state of grace, there is the indwelling of the divine Persons; and once there is this indwelling, it produces itself in the soul that which makes it possible, namely grace. Of course, we bear this treasure in weak vessels, as St Paul says (II Cor. iv. 7): our heart is weakened by the original wound and the accumulated wounds of our past sins. Nevertheless, we are certain that if God's love falls upon us it cannot fail to purify us.

You know that the Lutheran, protestant teaching is quite different. It denies the existence of created grace. It holds that God can love his friends without endowing them with a new reality. It acknowledges only uncreated grace. God's love for his friends falls on them without creating or changing anything in them. Man, since the first sin, remains wholly corrupted. If he believes, that is if he has confidence in Christ, God regards him as just on account of Christ's death, but this man is not interiorly illuminated and sanctified; he remains intrinsically a sinner, polluted. He is, according to Luther, 'at once sinner and just'.

5. There are, then, two universes. First of all, the universe of natures: the nature of a mineral, of a plant, of an animal, of a man—animated body, incarnate soul—and also of the angels. God could have created a universe composed solely of natures, but in this hypothesis what would have been our relations with God? We should know the world by reason and from the world we should ascend to God as to its source. We would know God only through a glass, darkly. What we would see first would be the universe, its riches, its beauty, its being, and doubtless that is something! It is something, but it is being which is weak, limited, fugitive; philosophers call it contingent being. The universe is solid enough to be more than nothingness and to demand a cause, a justification; but not sufficiently so to be its own justification. It is borrowed being, dependent on the Being per se, the Absolute. Then, in the order of natures, we would know God as the great X on whom the world depends. He would be the Master, the Creator, but we could not enter into a relationship with him as friend to friend. Aristotle said we cannot speak of friendship with the immortal gods, because friendship supposes a certain equality.

But God does not leave us in that condition. He comes out to meet us, and his desire is to set up in us a new universe of life, light and love, so that we may be able to make our way towards the depth of his being and intimacy with him, to speak to him as our friend. That is the mystery of the elevation of our nature by grace, and that is why we call this new life supernatural. It transforms, imbues our whole being to make it proportionate to an end hitherto unknown to it, one which goes beyond our nature. God raises us up, rather as the artist uses an instrument to make it produce what by itself it would be incapable of—joy, sadness, prayer. Something beyond its own power acts through the instrument: it is a human heart that touches the instrument and the effect produced, being on the plane of its cause, is a human effect. If divine grace comes down into me, I shall no longer be in community only with the things of earth and with men, but with the divine Persons, with all that is deepest and most hidden in the heart of God.

The saints have been wrapt in contemplation before these two immense mysteries of God's love: the presence of creation and conservation, the presence of immensity; and above all the presence of indwelling, by which man is not only a child of men but child of God. St Thomas observes that, even in the natural order, we find something that, if we carry it to the extreme, enables us as though by a leap to understand this elevation of man above his own condition and his entry upon intimacy with the divine life. The physico-chemical activities of the mineral world function, in their natural state, on the mineral plane alone; but they are utilized by life at the biological stage. The vegetative life, for instance, lifts up a plant or a tree towards the sky, instead of abandoning it to the law of gravity. When sensitivity comes, it utilizes biological laws: the eye must be moistened (vegetative life) so that it can see (sense-life). And when we come to reason, we see it using sensitivity and the passions for a work of human reason. You see, then, how a lower order whose laws remain in force is, as it were, assumed into the orbit of a higher order, and this still within the sphere of nature. Can God, then, not take over man too, with his reason, to make him gravitate round him? We have to admit that he can. He remains man, but attracted and invited to enter the orbit of a superhuman life.

6. Are we to conceive of this light of grace as coming to us like a ray shining through a pane of glass from which the light fades once the ray has gone? Is it simply a movement on God's part raising us towards him in a transient way, passing through us only to let us fall back afterwards into our solitude? That was the idea of one medieval theologian, Peter Lombard. Or should we envisage grace as a divine movement which, at the moment it touches us, permanently enriches us with living roots enabling us to make acts of love every time we wish to? Yes, that is the true view. That is the thought of St Thomas summing up the traditional teaching. Consider, he says, the world of natures: God does not use the rose tree as an opportunity for producing the rose! God puts in the rose tree a certain permanent quality which causes it to bear roses. This seed has an innate aptitude which makes it produce this flower and this fruit. Likewise in the animal kingdom: this egg gives this kind of bird. Every being acts according to its bent. There exists in it a permanent determining principle which lies at the source of its way of acting. This is what is called its nature. The occasionalist philosophers say that each time God acts he uses beings as occasions, but without having endowed them with particular natures. And Malebranche, in particular, 'If I want to move my finger or hand, it is necessary for my act of will to act on my imagination, and thence on my muscles. But I do not know, in reality, what has to be done for the movement to be completed. Since I know nothing at all about that, it is not I who move my hand.' According to this view, God would use beings as immediate occasions for his acts and they would then be like phantoms. No! God has created a universe of natures and has endowed beings on every level, and they are as it were permanent sources of activity.

Well then, asks St Thomas, will God act in the supernatural order with less love than in the natural order? No, God will not be less condescending and beneficent; he puts in us a permanent quality we call habitual grace. 'Habitual' comes from the Latin word "habere," to have. Grace is a habitus, a having, an endowment we possess continuously and which is the source in us of activity. The divine action, when it takes hold of me—say that I am in a state of sin—and if I open myself to it, places me in the state of grace, that is to say in a stable condition of grace. If I sleep, I am still in the state of grace; when I wake up, I make an act of faith or love in virtue of this permanent root which remains in me ready to act.

You know that man has certain faculties—intellect, will, sensitivity— which are rooted in the soul. The intellect is the power of the soul to know the universe, to receive in itself the impression of things and then to penetrate within them by contemplating them; the will is the faculty which, unlike the intellect, does not receive the world into itself to view it in a disinterested way, but leads us out to make contact with things. The soul is like a tree-trunk, with the faculties as its principal branches. Grace comes into the essence of the soul, and then diffuses into our faculties the infused theological virtues: faith into the intellect, raising it up, placing in it a ray of the light by which God knows himself; hope and charity into the will: God places in it a ray of the love with which he loves himself, and I am able to love God in some degree as he loves himself. Grace also brings the moral virtues to the faculties. It is like a graft which, added onto the soul and its faculties, makes it act in a divine manner.

7. Grace is, as it were, a participation in the divine nature. That is the definition always quoted by theologians. It is to be found in the second Epistle of St Peter (i. 3-4): 'As all things of his divine power which appertain to life and godliness are given us through the knowledge of him who hath called us by his own proper glory and virtue. By whom he hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature....' For us to be able to know and love God in the most hidden depths of his mystery and as he is in himself, the principle of knowing and loving, which is in God in an infinite degree, has to be, as it were, carried over into us; that is what grace does. It is—and this is a mystery—at one and the same time finite and infinite. It is finite because it is in my soul which is finite. If I am able to grow in grace, if it can be more intense in another soul than in mine, that is a proof that it is finite. But if it makes us enter into the divine intimacy, it must be at the same time infinite. How are we to understand this paradox? Let me give you an image: the eye, if you take it in itself as an organ, is finite (in its structure); but if you consider its tendency and the scope of its field of vision, it is infinite (tendentially, intentionally). We may therefore say that the eye is finite constitutively and infinite intentionally or tendentially. Well then, something of the sort, but much more profoundly mysterious, happens with grace. Its source is God. God sees himself, not by a ray of his light, but by his whole light; he is wholly transparent to himself, and he loves himself by his love which is infinite. In me there is a ray of his life and his love, that is to say a finite participation in the divine nature; but grace in me is directed immediately on to the infinite depths of God. You see the mystery, simultaneously finite and infinite in character.

When death comes, grace will lead me to God immediately seen and possessed, and my soul will be filled to overflowing. But even now, in the night of faith, my soul takes hold of God, and that is what is called the indwelling of the divine Persons.

8. This profound mystery is revealed in several places in Scripture, which speaks of God's indwelling in us, or of the indwelling of the divine Persons or of the Holy Spirit who represents the whole Trinity, for where one of the divine Persons dwells there dwell inseparably the two others. 'Know you not,' says St Paul to the Corinthians, 'that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? But if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which you are' (I Cor. iii. 16-17). God comes as a guest asking us to admit him, and he converses with us if we really desire it. It is no longer a simple relation of creature and Creator, servant and master, but of friend with friend. St Paul says again: 'Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price' (I Cor. vi. 19-20). We do not belong to ourselves, we belong to God and his infinite love. From time to time, man questions himself: What am I? Is this life in time something of real value, if I am of such slight account? Yes, this life has a great value, since I belong to God who wishes to take possession of my whole being. The being and soul of a man are more precious than we can imagine: 'We are the temples of the living God' (II Cor. vi. 16).

St Paul goes on to say, in the Epistle to the Romans (viii. 9): 'You are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.' For it is certainly possible to refuse the descent of God's love into us. But if we do not refuse, he takes the initiative himself. 'The Spirit of him who raised up Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you.' The infinite God will immortalize in heaven these poor habitations he has borrowed from us for a moment at one point of time and space.

We have the great text of St John (xiv. 23): 'If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and will come to him and take up our abode with him.'You see: if anyone loves me. If there is created love, that is to say created grace with all that goes with it, with its virtues of faith, hope and charity, then 'my Father will love him, we will take up our abode with him.' We have a guest with us, we are never alone; and who is our companion? No other than the Trinity in its entirety.

In the Apocalypse, Chapter iii, 20, we read: 'Behold I stand at the gate and knock. If any man shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.' It is like an evening meal, when we venture to speak of the most intimate and profound matters which we would not mention in the daytime. And he will come, not only to speak to us, but to give us the power to reply to him ourselves: 'and he with me.' When anyone is in the state of grace, then there is a dialogue, conversation of friend with friend. So we see that the dissipation of mind which so prevails in the world today is a form of madness. We need times of silence: 'Be silent, and see that I am thy God in thy heart.' In times of difficulty or sadness, in times of suffering, if you frequently call to mind that God is in you to give you his love, you will not be alone, you will find the Guest within you, and he will answer you.

9. The indwelling of the divine Persons is, then, always the accompaniment of grace. The two mysteries are co-relative. Grace is like a net we throw over the Trinity to hold it in captivity. Or here is another way to visualize it: when you bring into a room a source of light, it illuminates the walls; so, when the divine Persons come to us (here we have the source, uncreated grace), they illuminate the walls of the soul (here we have the effect, created grace). And if you possess grace, then the source of grace, the three divine Persons, is there too. In the very gift of sanctifying grace, says St Thomas, the Holy Spirit himself is sent and given to man to dwell in him. The uncreated Spirit is given in created grace, as the sun is given in its rays. The uncreated Gift of the Spirit and the created gift of grace are simultaneous. There are differences of degree in the life of individual souls; but in each of them the intensity of grace and the intensity of the indwelling increase with the same movement.

The saints come to such a vivid awareness of these riches that at times they feel as if their heart would burst. Admittedly, God may lead them by desert paths, and St John of the Cross says that, at times, God seems to be asleep in the soul. But all at once he arouses himself, and the impact he makes is so violent that, if it lasted, it would be mortal: the soul, as yet unfortified by the light of glory, seems then to be unable to support the power of the divine Persons.

Each Holy Communion should intensify in us this grace and this indwelling. We should come away from it, our souls more open to, and more deeply penetrated by, the Trinity.

Such are the gifts God makes to the least of souls that rises from a state of mortal sin. A man who has made only a poor confession, with a love still weak, and who has received absolution, already possesses grace and is dwelt in by God. Both the grace and the indwelling desire to grow stronger in him.

10. If grace, in the words of St Peter, makes us 'participators in the divine nature' and communicates to us, in some measure, the divine nature, it makes us children of God, sons of God. The child has the nature of its parents; what is born of a bird is a bird, what is born of man is a man, what is born of God is God. 'The light', says St John, 'came into the world, and to as many as received it, to them he gave power to be the sons of God, to them that believe in his name, who are born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God' (John i. 13). And again: 'Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called, and should be, the sons of God.... We are now the sons of God (I John iii. 1-2). And St Paul: 'The Spirit himself giveth testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of God' (Rom. viii. 16).

Jesus, also, is Son of God. We are, therefore, brothers of Jesus. God has predestined us to reproduce the image of his Son, 'that he might be the first-born among many brethren' (Rom. viii. 29). Those he sanctifies, Jesus 'is not ashamed to call brethren when he says: I will declare thy name to my brethren' (Heb. ii. 11).

And if Jesus is heir, we, as brothers, shall be his co-heirs: 'If we are sons, we are also heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ: yet so if we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him' (Rom. viii. 29). See, then, the ways in which we resemble Jesus.

Consider now the differences. Jesus is Son 'by nature,' he possesses necessarily the divine nature, by reason of the identity of his being and nature with the being and nature of the Father. We are sons of God 'by adoption,' we possess the divine nature by a free effect of the divine goodness, by a finite participation in the being and infinite nature of God.

Jesus is Son of the Father by eternal generation; we are sons of the three Persons of the Trinity by creation and adoption. There is an impassable distance between the first-born who is above all creation (Col. i. 15) and the multitude of his brethren, between his fraternity which is source and ours which is derivation. This is the meaning of the words of Jesus to Mary of Magdala, the morning of Easter: 'Go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God' (John xx. 17).

Jesus is heir by 'identification' of his glory with that of the Father: we are his co-heirs by 'participation' in this destiny. There is again an abyss between being heir of the divine glory by right of nature and being heir by right of merit, like the servant to whom it will one day be said, 'Well done, good and faithful servant . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord' (Mt. xxv. 21).

It is necessary to insist on the reciprocal relation between the finite gift of grace and the infinite gift of indwelling. This view is alone capable of bringing out the full dimensions of grace. Our catechism speaks of sanctifying grace, but scarcely at all of the fact of indwelling, which is of greater value, being the source of which grace is the effect.

1. The divine impulse which, if we do not stultify it, causes us to pass from sin to justification (where we are given habitual grace with the indwelling of the Holy Trinity) confronts us with the problems of the divine movement and human freedom.

Grace—we are speaking here of actual grace—is the divine impulse which produces in us acts of free adherence to God, of free acceptance and consent. God comes to me to draw me to him. I can interrupt or destroy this divine movement; or else I can let God act in me and take possession of my free will and make it assent, without violating it.

Actual grace seeks me out in sin to bring me to justification; then, when I am there, it comes back again and again, insistently, to carry me to a higher stage of sanctifying grace. God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached, because my whole life should be a journey on the way to Love. I cannot give a renewed assent to Love, nor above all can I give a more intensified assent than hitherto, unless a divine movement comes secretly to my heart to help it ascent higher. I can refuse it. But if I let God act he will raise me further, step by step, to a greater love. 'At the end of your life', says St. John of the Cross, 'you will be asked how you have loved'; that is to say, the degree of your love at the moment of death determines the degree of intensity the beatific vision will have for you eternally.

2. The relations of grace and freedom, of God's action and man's, is a great problem that continually preoccupied the thinkers of antiquity. Cicero said that either the gods have foreknowledge, knowing what will happen tomorrow, and we are not free; or else we are free, and the gods do not know what will happen tomorrow. Which are we to choose? According to Cicero, we have to accept human freedom which is certain, and so much the worse for the knowledge of the gods! But, said St Augustine, it would be absurd to choose between the two; they must both be held: divine foreknowledge and human freedom.

There we have the problem. How is it to be solved? Only Catholic teaching provides a solution or, to be exact, the teaching of St Thomas, for I see in him the confluence of all the efforts made by the preceding centuries. The understanding of Scripture possessed by the Fathers has always been preserved in the Church; and their solutions are coordinated, rethought in depth by St Thomas.

The way to solve the problem is, before all else, to distinguish clearly the case of the good act and that of the evil act. All who fail to do this go astray. They say either that man is equally cause of his good and of his bad acts, or else that God is responsible for man's bad acts as well as his good ones. To adopt the same method of explaining good and bad acts is a fundamental mistake that renders the problem insoluble.

3. First let us look at the structure of the good act. In the course of history two contrary positions are in constant conflict. In different terms and in various expositions of this question, we continually find this same conflict of two opposed theses, both of them erroneous.

On the one hand there is the position of Pelagius, a British monk, a contemporary of St Augustine who attacked him. The Pelagian error consists in saying that the good act is decisively the product of man alone. Of course, Pelagius says, God created the universe, placed me in the world, gave me my human nature with its faculties, and imparts abundant graces of illumination. But it is I alone who assent freely to God, and it is this assent which is decisive. Take an example of two men at the bottom of a well: God holds out his hand to each, and so is ready to help; but it is I alone who take his hand; I am, doubtless, saved because God first stretched out his hand, but the decisive factor is that I, by my free will alone, took the hand, whereas my neighbor did not. So the choice is mine alone.

On the other hand, there is the exactly opposite error, held by Luther, among others, in the Western world: the good act comes from God alone. Man is wholly corrupted. The act that saves him comes from God alone. God alone justifies the sinner, in the way in which we have seen Luther to understand justification: God decides to 'regard this sinner as just'.

On the one hand the aim is to exalt the human will, the greatness of man as a free being; on the other, to exalt God's omnipotence.

These flatly opposed views arise from a common initial confusion. They are like brothers at enmity, both sharing the same parentage. The error common to both is to think that divine and human action are mutually exclusive: either it is man who does the good act, and then it is not God; or else it is God, and so not man. We are asked to choose between the two, and this is precisely where the error lies. For who, in fact, does the good act? Both God and man together. Notice that I take these two opposing positions of Pelagius and Luther from the Western world; but in La Valle'e, Poussin's book on Buddhism, I remember coming across the same problem stated in India under a different imagery. Salvation, it was said, comes about either in the way of the kitten or the little monkey. When attacked by a snake, the monkey jumps into its mother's bosom, and the mother jumps up into the trees; the decisive act is the strength with which the monkey clings to its mother; this represents the Pelagian position. The kitten, on the other hand, when in danger, does nothing at all; the mother takes it by the skin of its neck, and does everything. That is the Lutheran position. There is, too, the figure of two railway-engines that face one another on the same line; when one goes forward, the other goes back, each in turn. Divine and human action are held to compete against one another.

But human action (created) and divine action (uncreated) are not on the same plane. Divine action (in relation to human action) is one of envelopment: it gives rise to it, gives it being and continuance. According to Catholic doctrine, we must say that the good act comes from both God and man, from grace and freedom.

If you draw a circle and set inside it God and man, grace and freedom, you have the Catholic doctrine as defined; you escape both the Pelagian and the Lutheran error (not to mention the Calvinist and, in our own time, the Barthian). But the problem now lies within the circle; how are the divine and human actions to be coordinated or subordinated?

4. There are two schools of thought on this. One is that of St Thomas Aquinas which, through St Augustine, derives from St Paul—the great traditionalist school.

The other arose in the age of the baroque and of humanism. It is that of Molina, a Portuguese Jesuit who, on account of certain unresolved difficulties, wanted to explain in a way hitherto untried the relation of grace and freedom. God and man, he said, act like two horses on the tow-path of a canal drawing a boat. The actions of God and of man are supplementary like those of the horses. Molina thought of them as simply added one to the other. His doctrine has not been condemned, since he said, as regards the good act, God and man, grace and freedom. But, as we see, he transposed to within the circle the preceding error and if he did not set them against each other, at any rate he juxtaposed the divine and the human action. He did not sufficiently grasp the difference in plane between divine and human action and stressed unduly, to an extreme degree, the power of the human will. Here, expressed in accepted Christian terminology, we find again the example just given: God holds out his hand, I take it.

5. The traditional doctrine, the only one rooted in Revelation, has not yet been defined because there still remain certain questions to elucidate. But the definition will come, already the general line is clear: human action is subordinated to the divine action. It is not only God and man, grace and freedom, but God through man, grace through freedom, that does the good act. Is the rose produced by the rose-tree? Or by God? Or else partly by God, partly by the rose-tree? We must say: the rose is produced wholly by the rose-tree as secondary cause, and wholly by God as first cause, the enveloping cause. God gives the rose-tree the ability to produce the rose. God, acting on the rose-tree to make it produce the rose, does not diminish, but rather enriches, it. The more he intervenes, the more excellent will be the rose-tree the more powerful its action, the more God gives the radium atom both being and the power to act by emitting rays. Thus he communicates to it something of his dignity as cause though, admittedly, to a very low degree. Now, in affecting the atom to endow it with activity, God does not violate it, but makes it fecund. The atom then is, as it were, a transformer of the divine energy and changes it into physical energy on the mineral plane.

Now take a rose-tree. In the winter, it is at rest; but when touched by God in the spring, life begins to awake within it and soon it brings forth roses. The rose-tree, then, is as it were a transformer of the divine energy into vegetative energy. The divine action does not impair its nature, but helps it act in the vegetative order.

A bird sings. When God touches its nature, he enables it, without violating it, to exercise its activities in the sensitive order. He enables it to sing in the way proper to a bird.

We come to man, a free being with intelligence and will, with his immortal soul greater than all the world; when God touches his soul he enables it to act according to its nature, which is to rule over things of a lower order. Freedom is not independence in relation to God: if God does not touch me, am I then free? O no! If God does not touch me, I act no more, I exist no more, I fall into nothingness. Freedom is to be found within God himself, as in its infinite source; the nearer I draw to God and the more I share in his rule over lower beings, the more I am free. My freedom is a dependence in relation to God, a dependence that gives me a power over and freedom of choice in regard to the lower things. Because my heart is made for the fullness of the good, the beautiful and the true, because my soul is greater than the world and the world offers me only partial goods (real or apparent) I can, confronted with these goods, assent because they are good, or refuse them because they are partially good.

Take the case of truth. I can look for it in the world of physics and chemistry, or of mathematics or philosophy, or anywhere you like. These will never be other than particularized truths, none of them can fill my mind to capacity. I am always free to turn my life to the pursuit of this or that aspect of the truth. It is the same with the good. You offer me such and such a good, life in the world, for example, or the religious life. I always have to give up some things good and choose others, which are good but particularized. Even if I choose the contemplative life, God shows himself to me in the aspect of a particular good: if I am a Carthusian, I cannot go out and preach to pagans or raise a family. You offer me only particular goods and I was made for total good. My soul keeps its power and freedom of choice. Then God, when he touches me according to my nature, does not infringe my freedom but, on the contrary, exalts it: 'God who made this delicate machine of our free-will is the only one who can move it without breaking it.' He does not impair natures, but makes them flourish. Who was more dependent on God than St Francis of Assisi, and who was freer? You could place him in any condition you like, throw him into a concentration-camp, he would still be in command of all that was lower in the scale of being, he would still be St Francis.

6. This then is the structure of the good act. God produces through me my free act and, since he knows all that he does, he knows this act. If I perform an act of love tomorrow, it will be because God has given me the enveloping and sustaining impulse. Does he know this act beforehand? Knowing beforehand is the act of someone immersed in time, and what I know in advance are only those things that are not free, they are predetermined facts whose cause is already posited today and whose development is inevitable. I know beforehand the stakes that have been laid. A doctor can say in advance that a disease will develop in a certain way and that death will result. I can say that the sun will rise tomorrow at such and such a time. But I cannot know a free act beforehand and with certainty, I can only make a conjecture: perhaps this person will do this particular act, which is good, or that, which is bad. If God were within time, he would be reduced to knowing the future only 'in advance'. But he would know in this way only predetermined events, the stakes already laid, the drama whose scenario was already written. But God is not in time; he is on the mountain of eternity. If I am on level ground and see a procession comes along, I see first the beginning, then the middle, then the end; but if I go up a hill, I see at a single glance the whole sequence. In God there is no past, present and future parallel to our past, present and future. He is on the mountain of eternity, whence he sees simultaneously the whole sequence of our past, present and future. In God there is no remembrance of things past nor, strictly speaking, foresight of things to come. There is in him but one vision, a single present and simultaneous look at what, successively, has been, is, will be. From his place of eternity God knows all the free acts his creatures have done, are doing, will do; he knows with a knowledge which does not precede these free acts, but is above them; he knows them not beforehand, but from all eternity. You see then, that when we say 'God knows beforehand', we are attributing to him a human manner of knowing.

So God's knowledge is safeguarded in the case of the good act. It is certain that, from all eternity, God sees himself instigating in me this or that good action, making it come to fruition, and that without violating my free will, but rather creating it. God's prescience from all eternity—the prefix must be understood not as meaning 'beforehand', but as signifying knowledge 'of a higher mode ('He to whom everything is always present knows the future not by prescience but by a knowledge of the present, praesentium scientia.' St Anselm, "Dialogue on the fall of the Devil," P.L., v. 158, col. 353.)—and human freedom are thus reconciled. We come, not to a contradiction, but to a great mystery. God is mystery; if you stop thinking a mystery of him, if you imagine him and his knowledge of the world after the fashion of man, everything falls to pieces.

7. Let us pass on to the structure of the evil act. This is a mystery too, but one of darkness.

Suppose I have to testify in court of law. I have to think what I want to say, I proceed from not doing to doing; there is an element of being there. If my testimony is true, all this being is ordered to truth; if it is false, there is the same amount of physical being, but the whole action is morally warped, anarchical; it is far removed from the purpose for which it was made. The power and the very act of witnessing were given me for the sake of justice; I use them for injustice, to destroy and not to build. So we must say: all that there is of physical being in the sinful act derives from God, the source of all being; all that there is of moral deviation comes from me.

The example given by St Thomas is that of a man whose brain's locomotive centres function well, but whose tibia is bent. As a result, whenever he walks he limps. If you try to prevent him from limping, you prevent him from walking; the two are inseparable. But the deviation comes from the bent tibia, not the moving centre. The whole action comes from the locomotive centre and the nerves controlling walking, which are themselves sound; the whole deviation comes from the bent tibia, from an intermediate cause, not from the source of the movement.

So it is with the act which is bad. All the being (physical) of the bad act comes from God, but all the deviation (moral) of the bad act, everything that causes the deviation of the movement given by God for our good, all the sinfulness, comes from man alone.

In the good act, God has the first initiative, he is the first, enveloping cause of the act, and man the secondary cause. In the sinful act, man is first cause of the deviation, that is of the non-being, the disorder, the destruction. Homo prima causa mali: man is first cause of evil! But can he be first cause of anything? Yes, he can be first cause of whatever is not a thing; he can do what is no thing, he can destroy, annihilate the divine action that comes to visit him. Here man can take the first initiative; he is first cause of the annulling of the divine action. So, you see, it is a mystery of darkness.

8. The divine movement takes the initiative in my regard; it is always attentive to my welfare. Its presence surrounds me like the air I breathe; if I place no obstacle in its way, it will bear fruit in me in good acts. But God does not create good acts in me without my doing anything. He does them through me. He does not deck me out in them as one decorates a Christmas tree with candles and sweets, which would be absurd; rather, he makes me produce good acts as the fir tree brings forth cones, that is to say by a vital process.

God is always knocking at the door of my heart. If I let him act, he makes me assent in a more and more excellent way. I cannot pride myself on this or pray like the Pharisee: 'Lord, I give the tithe of all I possess . . . while this publican is a sinner'. If I do something good, what I should say is, 'My God, I have so often refused you. Thank you for having helped me to consent this time. To you the glory, and not to me, worm of the earth.'

I can say 'No!' It is not that God has not helped me sufficiently. He was there, as I told you, knocking at the door of my heart. I have impeded his movement and in such wise that, if I continue to do so and death comes, it will be hell, separation from God. I shall not blame him, I shall never be able to blame him for not having helped me enough. It is I who willed to hinder the divine movement, I am to blame. None of the damned will arise at the last day to say, 'Lord, you did not help me enough.' They will all say, 'That is what 1 willed.' And they will go on maintaining that their choice was an excellent one. If a single one of the damned could say he was damned by God's fault, God would not be God.

So then, if I die in an act of love, it is God who will have enabled me to do this act, and I shall say, 'Lord, it is due to your infinite goodness that I am entering finally into your Light. You have sent me into Paradise, as an archer shoots his arrow at the mark. To you be the glory.' That is precisely what predestination is: the act by which God takes hold of me and causes me to give the ultimate assent to his love.

If I refuse, God comes again, seeking to raise me from the ruinous state into which I have fallen. He may rouse me to remorse; right to the end he pursues me with his mercy. If I decide to refuse to the end, that is my fault: I will that my will prevail over God's summons. So the text always cited by St Thomas: 'Thy destruction comes from thee, O Israel; from me alone comes thy help' (Osee xiii. 9), is applicable to each of us when we understand Israel as a figure of the soul. The man who has shut himself against grace would have been led by the divine action, had he not frustrated it, to do a good act, which would have been followed by other good acts till final justification. God offered him what would have produced the bud, which would have put forth the flower, and finally the fruit.

9. On the other hand, if I allow God to act, he will as a rule cause me to make first an act of faith, then of saving fear, then one of hope, and then will come a beginning of love: all is not lost, you can yet, with this grace, rise to your feet again.

I go to a church, to a confessional, confess my sins humbly, receive absolution and God's boundless pardon, and at that moment I am justified. That is how it happens in the majority of cases.

None the less, there may be exceptional cases. Instead of preparing a sinner gradually for justification, by a succession of movements each of which may be impeded, God may overwhelm him suddenly by an irresistible movement, as he did St Paul on the road to Damascus. He may cause him to enter Paradise with the suddenness of a man falling into ecstasy; he does so frequently, I think, but theologians say that this is in the nature of a miracle. The normal process is a series of graces which can be resisted but which, if accepted, will lead to one which is irresistible, victorious—a grace that will make me produce the good act and I will thank God for giving me the strength to do so.

Let us call the resistible graces that I may frustrate sufficient graces, and the irresistible ones offered in these when they are not impeded—as fruit is offered in the flower—efficacious graces. That will explain the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace.

10. This distinction brings to mind Pascal's "Lettres Provinciales," but we will not find there anything to throw light on it. Pascal rejects the doctrine, which he attributes to the Jesuits, according to which 'there is a grace given indiscriminately to all men and dependent on free will to the point that it makes this grace efficacious or inefficacious, without any additional help from God', a grace 'they call sufficient because it suffices by itself for acting'. That is the theory of the man at the bottom of a well, who has no need of help to take hold of God's hand stretched out to help him. We, too, along with Pascal, reject this doctrine. He attributes to the Dominicans of Saint Jacques a doctrine which may indeed have been held by several of them, according to which sufficient grace is the simple power God gives to all men of acting aright; we also reject this 'sufficient grace which does not suffice'. We hold that sufficient grace is the movement God gives to all men to make them act rightly, which they may impede (through their fault) or not impede (and then it infallibly attracts efficacious grace and leads to good actions). But Pascal maintained that there were no sufficient graces, only efficacious graces, and that these are not given to all men. Here we have the Jansenist error.

After the condemnation of the five propositions, the Jansenists themselves made no further difficulty about confessing that Jesus is the Redeemer of all men, as the Church sings at Christmas. Yet all are not saved. Is that their own fault? Or is it the fault of God in being too sparing of his grace? This is the crucial question. The true doctrine is that Jesus is the Redeemer of all men, even of those who will not be saved, for he obtains for them and grants them interior graces of such power that not one of them will dream of accusing God, and they will never cease, throughout eternity, to claim and to choose to be alone responsible for their own damnation.

11. Man alone is the entire cause of sin; in sin he alone has the first initiative. In sinning, then, do I take God by surprise, elude his knowledge, change his eternal plan?

To say so would be absurd. I should baffle the divine knowledge if, by myself alone, I were able to bring into the world the slightest fraction of being. But when I sin, it is not being but non-being, nothingness, that I bring into the world.

When does God come to know this nothingness? After he has established his plan? No. My sin of yesterday, my sin of tomorrow, it is not that God saw or will see me committing them; he sees me now: he sees me frustrating the prevenient movements of his grace. He sees this in the eternal present in which he establishes his plan. It is true that the divine plan is immutable, once it is fixed from all eternity. But it is fixed from all eternity only with the free defection of man taken into account. Thus man's sin does not modify the divine plan, but enters into its eternal and determined pattern.

All our difficulties come from representing God's knowledge after the fashion of man's. As soon as we take account of the transcendence of the divine knowledge, will and freedom, all contradictions disappear; but we are plunged in mystery. 'O the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!' (Rom. xi. 33).

12. Now we are at the point where we can form some idea of the drama of the world:

The first initiative always comes from God in the case of the good; so the initiative of created freedom itself derives from the divine initiative. But on account of the power of refusal which is a natural part of all created freedom, the first initiative always comes from the creature in the case of evil, God being able but unwilling to prevent the creature opposing him by refusal whenever it so decides.... The glory of the divine freedom is to make a work all the more beautiful, in proportion to the extent to which it allows the other [creaturely] freedom to undo it, because from the abundance of destruction it alone can draw a superabundance of being. As for us, part of the pattern as we are, we only see the strange intertwining of the threads that are woven on our heart. (Maritain)

13. This is the essence of what it is possible to say about actual grace. We have seen that God is bound by his justice and his love to give each one such graces that, if he is not saved, it is his own fault as a sinner, not God's. But God is not obliged to give the same graces to all. There are inequalities in the order of grace, just as there are in the order of nature.

We do not mean the inequalities that come from sin, from injustice, against which we ought to fight. What of the natural inequalities of men? Why do they exist? St Catherine of Siena says: so that each one may be, in regard to all the rest, both a giver and a beggar. St Thomas, viewing the whole of creation, explains that God was, doubtless, free to create or not. But if he willed to create with a certain magnificence, he had to multiply and diversify creatures, so that each should represent some aspect of his infinite richness.

So it is with grace. God imparts his gifts variously the better o show forth the beauty and perfection of his Church. It is like a garden where there are the white roses of virginity and the red ones of martyrdom, the holiness of innocence and that of repentance.

Think of little children at the moment of their baptism. They each receive the same baptism. Their state is the same, it is purely a state of waiting. But with the awakening of moral consciousness, when God knocks at the door of their soul, inequalities begin to appear. St Teresa of Lisieux, for example, began with a grace much superior to that of other small children. There must be every sort of thing in God's garden, not only all the different flowers but grass, too, and pebbles in the paths. And, after all, it is a fine thing to be only a pebble in the paths of Paradise!

14. We shall end with a word on what are called 'charismatic graces'. The word grace is here taken in a different sense, not unrelated to the former, but not so radical. It is no longer a question of grace "gratum faciens" (which makes the soul 'graceful' and gives it an attractive quality, itself a gift of God, who himself becomes enamoured of it); nor of actual grace (which precedes and follows sanctifying grace); but of graces not directly sanctifying the person receiving them, graces that simply enable him to perform acts which assist others along the road to sanctifying grace. They are useful socially.

St Thomas distinguishes two kinds of common good: the extrinsic common good of a collectivity, and the common good intrinsic to, immanent in the collectivity. The latter serves the former. In the temporal order, the 'extrinsic' common good of the army is victory, which is what is aimed at; the common good 'immanent' in, interior to, the army is its right order; it must be organized in such a way as to achieve victory. In the spiritual order God is the common good extrinsic to or distinct from the Church; the order of the Church is the common good immanent in the Church. So, then, sanctifying grace is directly ordered to be pleasing to God, the extrinsic common good of the spiritual universe. Charismatic graces, on the other hand, are directly ordered to the perfection of the Church, the immanent common good of the spiritual universe, and to promote in the Church the flowering of sanctifying grace.

How, asks St Thomas, can a man act so as to prepare others to receive sanctifying grace? Not by entering their heart (interius movendo) to turn it towards God; God alone can do that. But he can, from outside, perform a certain number of acts which may be like ladders enabling others to gain access to sanctifying grace (exterius agendo).

How are these charismatic graces to be recognized? By applying the passage in St Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians (xii. 27): 'You are the body of Christ and members of member. And God indeed hath set some in the Church: first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly doctors: after that miracles: then the graces of healings, helps, governments, kinds of tongue, interpretation of speeches. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all doctors? Are all workers of miracles? . . . No!'

These graces, which do not necessarily sanctify those who have them, are privileges. But the privilege reserved to a few is not what is most valuable; it is at the service of love, which is offered to all. One of these privileges is a prophetic light enabling one to transmit the message with a certain penetration. This light, this knowledge, is indeed called faith, but it is not the theological virtue offered to all, which alone is necessary for salvation. It is the 'faith to work miracles' offered to a few. For example, at certain moments a saint will feel that, if he asks God for a particular miracle, perhaps the raising to life of a dead person, God will grant it him; at other times, he will not pray for it. Such gifts enable their possessors to confirm their message. There is also the gift of expression, of interpretation of tongues. The gift of tongues spoken of in the first Epistle to the Corinthians requires discernment. A certain exaltation may cause a man to speakin tongues, to utter words he is unable to explain. What accounts for this? Sometimes a morbid element. In the beginnings of Christianity these manifestations took place in various circles, and they may have been the vehicle of valuable lights or gifts; but a considerable discernment is necessary in such cases, and St Paul says that those who interpret are more important than those who speak in tongues, since the latter do not edify the community, but the former do.

The gift of tongues the apostles had at Pentecost was a grace of quite different quality from the gift of tongues to whose presence among the Corinthians St Paul witnesses, and which may still be found at meetings of Salvationists and other sects, where the divine and the human, the true and the false, the healthy and the morbid are intermingled. The gift of Pentecost, on the contrary, must have been wholly excellent. The best explanation I know is that given by Mickiewicz, a kind of prophet in the natural order. He used to speak in French at the College de France entirely without any sort of preparation. When he had an audience in front of him, all sorts of things came into his mind, and he succeeded in communicating his most profound thoughts in a language which was not his native tongue. This led him to explain how he conceived the gift of Pentecost. The apostles, so he thought, may simply have spoken in their own language, but their thought itself was instilled, in its pure state, into their hearers, so that 'each man heard in his own tongue', that is to say, in the sounds of his native language. To illuminate or stir, almost directly, the hearts of those present, by overcoming the language obstacle, was quite a different thing from the gift of tongues of the first Christian communities.

To these charismatic graces I would add other privileges: those of the hierarchy, that is the power of jurisdiction or the power of teaching with authority in matters speculative and practical which resides in the bishops and the Sovereign Pontiff, and the power of orders or the power of consecrating the Eucharist and administering the sacraments, all of them powers enabling some people to help others to attain eternal life. They are powers at the service of love, which is primary and given to all. In this connection, I like to recall that there is one precept of the Gospel Jesus asks us to observe, though he did not observe it himself: 'Cast not your pearls before swine'. He himself offered, gave his love to all! So much so that Bloy says—in a phrase characteristic of him—that the Holy Ghost 'prostitutes himself' to go in search of people in the gutter. Those who are given privileges will have to account to God for the way they have used them. If they do so in a holy manner, they may be brought closer to God, but in themselves these charismata are a burden, a service. We must recall in this connection the last words of Claudel's "Jeanne d'Arc au bucher": 'It is love that is strongest'.

1. On the basis of what has been said in the preceding pages we shall try to interpret a few passages of St Paul, principally on the subject of predestination.

These questions about grace are extremely mysterious and profound. If, in discussing them, we forget that God is a God of love, if we speak about them without steeping them in the atmosphere of divine goodness that knocks at men's hearts, we may well say what would seem theologically—or rather, verbally, literally—exact, but what would in fact be a deformation, misleading and false. Ultimately only the great saints, the great lovers of God, can speak of these matters without distorting them.

We must bear in mind, at the outset, that in the word predestination, as in prescience, the prefix 'pre' signifies an anteriority of dignity and excellence, not one of chronology which would suggest a scenario written beforehand. Predestination is a love-assignation made on high, a supreme divine destination in course of realization, a supreme 'prevenience' on the part of Love, a prevenience not refused, but accepted and finally brought to fulfilment.

2. The doctrine of predestination is a scriptural doctrine, a part of revelation, which we are to believe without doubting. But how is it to be understood? There is the Catholic interpretation, and the Lutheran and Calvinist one, to which we shall return later.

The word predestination we owe to St Paul. In the Epistle to the Ephesians (i. 4-5), he writes: 'God chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in his sight in charity. Who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the purpose of his will.'

Further on (ii. 4), we read: 'God, who is rich in mercy, for his exceeding charity wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ, by whose grace you are saved, and hath raised us up together and hath made us sit together in the heavenly places through ChristJesus.' Here the Apostle sees in advance the elect gathered together in the heavens round Christ, saying: thanks to you, O God, for having predestined us by your love. You are he who enabled us to utter the supreme assent we gave to you. To you be the glory.

The word predestination was already used in the Epistle to the Romans: 'Whom he predestinated, them he also called. And whom he called, them he also justified. And whom he justified, them he also glorified' (viii. 30). Here again the apostle sees in advance the elect gathered in the heavens, and reflects on how they have been led there by God. God first called them; he went to meet them with graces which they did not frustrate though they could have done so. If they assented to them, it was by a divine movement in them, for our assent always comes from God: 'thy salvation comes from me, O Israel, thy destruction from thee'. Since they did not refuse this first call, they went on to justification through a new divine movement; and those whom he has justified God finally brings to heaven. That is the supreme prevenience by which God enables us to die in his love.

3. When you reread these passages, they will give you no difficulty if you see tkem in the context I have indicated. You will remember that, if anyone is not predestined, itis because he refuses the call, and not once only, like the fallen angels, for again and again divine grace returns to, and even importunes, the human heart. How often? The apostles asked Jesus, 'Should we forgive seven times?'; and the answer was, 'Seventy times seven times' (Mt. xviii. 21-22). That is what Jesus expects of men, who yet are miserable creatures and loath to show mercy. Elsewhere he said, 'If your child asks of you a fish, will you give him a serpent? If he asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion? If he asks you for bread, will you give him a stone? If then you who are evil, give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father!' (cf. Luke xi. 11-13; Mt. viii. 9-11). So then he, too, will forgive me seventy times seven. He will return to knock again at the door of my soul. None the less, if I wish to refuse him, I can; I have the terrible power of saying no to God, of making a definitive refusal that will fix my lot for eternity. I can say to him: I do not want your love, I want to be myself, to be myself not in you, but against you, to be for ever like a thorn in your heart. This is the frightful refusal of hell.

What might possibly lead to a misconception on this point is the very moving parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke xvi. 19), where we see Dives beseeching Abraham to let Lazarus go and warn his brothers to change their way of life. Abraham, however, answers, 'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. If they do not hear them, neither will they hear if one is raised from the dead.' As you see, the purpose of the parable is to show that we have to hear now, while there is time; afterwards, it will be too late. But it would be a mistake to suppose that, in hell, the damned have the sentiments of charity attributed to the rich man. If one of the damned could say: Lord, allow me to tell others what thy love is so that they may not be damned like me, he would bring charity into hell, and hell would be blown to pieces. (We must always regard the intention of the parable—and the evangelist shows what this intention is—otherwise, its character would be altered, and we might be led astray. Consider the parable of the unjust steward, which scandalizes so many Christians through their misunderstanding of it.)

So, if anyone is not among the predestined, it is in consequence of a refusal for which he bears and always will bear the responsibility. He will persist in his refusal, in his hate—that, in fact, will be his torment—but he will never retract his original choice. St Thomas gives us a comparison. Take a man who hates his enemy. He wants to kill him. He thinks: If I meet him, I shall kill him. But he is prevented; perhaps he is in prison. Ah, he thinks, once I am out of prison! He lives by, feeds on his hatred. He may be told: 'Don't you see that the cause of your misery is your hatred? 'I do,' he replies, 'but that's the way it is; I want to have my revenge.' In any case, we know quite well that we can cling to feelings which torment us. This example is no more than an image of the perpetual refusal of the damned, the refusal because of which they are not among the predestined. Such is the Catholic doctrine.

What we have said earlier on the divine prescience serves to clarify this doctrine completely. We do not say, 'God does not predestine, God abandons and reproves those who he knows in advance will refuse his prevenient grace'. We say, 'God does not predestine; God abandons and rejects those who, as he sees, from all eternity, themselves take the first initiative in the final refusal of his prevenient grace.' From eternity, he takes account of their free refusal in the establishment of his immutable and eternal plan.

4. The erroneous doctrine put forward by Luther, and by Calvin in his Institutes is that, just as some are predestined to heaven, so are others to hell; God himself therefore drives them to hell, and they cannot escape it. This is the thesis of double predestination: one to heaven, which is just, provided that it is not understood in the sense of Luther and Calvin, for whom, as we have seen, the good act comes solely from God, and not from God through man; the other to hell. As you see, there is a twofold error here: predestination to heaven is misconceived and the idea of predestination to hell is introduced—a still worse aberration. For that matter, Protestants today no longer defend Calvin on this point; Karl Barth declares frankly that he cannot find this idea of predestination to hell anywhere in St Paul. (Yet, from the doctrinal point of view, some critics see, in the thesis of double predestination, the cornerstone of the Institutes.)

5. We shall meet in a moment those texts which, if misinterpreted, could be used to support Calvin; notably in Chapter ix of the Epistle to the Romans. I purposely choose these vexed points so as to show you how they are to be clarified. But is there any real need to deal with these questions? Is it not rather unwise to do so?

My own opinion is that we must act differently in different cases. Suppose I have to deal with someone who is troubled by the problem of predestination. He asks himself: 'Am I saved? If I am predestined whatever I do, I am sure of salvation; and if I am not predestined, whatever good I do is no use at all.' How should I answer him?

First of all, I should have to discern the meaning of the question. It may be a speculative one, a question of revealed truth, of theology. In that case I should give an answer which would doubtless entail a mystery, but not a contradiction. You know that a mystery is something that calls for our adoration, it is the dark night of God which is the spiritual food of the metaphysician, the theologian, the saint; whereas a contradiction is detestable, it is the dark night of incoherence and evil.

But perhaps it is a question which arises from real anguish of mind, a question asked by someone going through an interior trial, whom God wishes to nail upon the cross. In that case, I should not attempt any explanation; that would be beside the point. I would say, 'Bear with this trial at present, bear with it in darkness and make profound acts of faith; a very mysterious work is to be wrought in you. Later on, when God's intention in harrowing your soul has been fulfilled, come back and we shall talk over the matter again, and the answer I shall give you will appear to you as wholly true. But for the time being you are stunned, God asks of you an act of total abandonment to him. Make no attempt to evade it. If I began to argue with you, I should be failing in my role as "angel" appointed to help you and show you the way.'

What we are saying in connection with predestination is applicable to other matters. If anyone puts a speculative problem to you, try to elucidate it. You may not always have the answer pat, but the Church possesses it and you can easily inform yourself of it. But there is also God's plan for souls. I have in mind someone whose stumbling-block was the suffering of animals. None of the answers suggested to him gave him satisfaction. He was not in a condition to grasp them. The only thing he could do was to bear this state of anxiety as a cross; and that, no doubt, is precisely what God intended him to do. As for the question of predestination, the saints managed to find answers that resolved it, not theoretically, but concretely, in the dark night of love. For example: 'Lord, if your justice must one day condemn me, I will to be condemned, for I know your justice is adorable!' Or: 'Lord, if I am not to love you later in eternity, at least let me love you here in the present.' Or: 'O my God! You know I cannot endure hell, and I know that I am not good enough for Paradise. To what shall I have recourse? Your forgiveness.' That is how God restores such souls to peace. The devil said to St Teresa: 'Why give yourself all this trouble? The die is cast!' In her spirited way, she replied: 'Then it was not worth while for you to take the trouble to come and tell me!' Then the devil understood; he too is a wit!

6. Now let us take the point about the rejection of the Jews, as dealt with in the Epistle to the Romans (ix-xi). 'Salvation is of the Jews', Jesus had told the woman of Samaria. God had prepared this people, privileged among all the rest, to be the cradle of the Incarnation. Privileges, I have already said, are not the chief thing. The chief thing is love, and God dispenses that to all on account of Christ's death on the cross; each man can accept or refuse it. But, after all, Messianic salvation, the honour of proclaiming and receiving the Messias, was first offered to the Jews. And then, when the Messias came, the Jews as a whole ignored him, passed him by.

What does God do? He might have said: 'They did not want my favour: I shall take it away'. But God never does that. When the gift of his love is refused by one person or people, he transfers it to others. He does not shut the door of the feast; instead of the first ones invited, he sends for the poor, the lame, the blind (Luke xiv. 21). In place of the Jews, the immense multitude of the Gentiles is invited. Thus, the fault of the Jews becomes the salvation of the Gentiles. 'By their offence,' says St Paul, 'salvation is come to the Gentiles.... Their offence has been the riches of the Gentiles' (Rom. xi. 11, 12). And when the Gentiles who have accepted this light begin to lose their fervour, then God will cause the Jews to return. The mass of Israel—which does not mean each individual Jew, but the Jews as a people—jealous at seeing other peoples preferred to them (Rom. ii. 11), will finally come into the Church. And the conversions from Judaism which occur constantly as time goes on point to the place where, one day, the Jews will come in their multitudes. 'I would not have you ignorant, brethren,' says St Paul, 'of this mystery, that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles should come in, and so all Israel should be saved' (Rom. viii. 25-26). The apostle then concludes with the cry: 'O the depths of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways' (Rom. xi. 33).

7. Nonetheless, St Paul is deeply distressed that Israel, as a whole, refused the Messias born within it. 'I have great sadness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I wished myself to be an anathema from Christ for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh; who are Israelites; to whom belongeth the adoption as of children and the glory and the testament and the giving of the law and the service of God and the promises; whose are the fathers and of whom is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever' (ix. 2-5).

Has God then, asks the Apostle, failed to keep his word, since he had promised to Abraham a whole progeny? No: for the Church, at its inception, was wholly composed of Jews, with Our Lady, Simeon, Anna, the apostles; and it will never be so splendid as it was then. God's promise has not failed, because there was a 'remnant,' to use the technical term, which remained faithful when the mass had gone astray. St Paul explains here (Rom. ix. 6-8) that those who are of the posterity of Abraham are not all sons of Abraham. There is Israel according to the flesh, namely those who have descended from Abraham by way of generation; and also Israel of the promise, those who, among the descendants of Abraham, have the spirit of Abraham. And there are the Gentiles, to whom grace will be offered and who will be joined to these latter. They will form part of the Israel of the promise, the Israel of the spirit; not by way of generation and descent by the flesh, but by way of the spiritual regeneration given at baptism.

8. We now come to the principal passage. St Paul begins by asking if we can reproach God for choosing another people to replace the one he had first chosen, which had not accepted his gift. No, he declares, for God can without injustice choose whom he will and reject whom he will. In order to elucidate this answer of his, I want to make a distinction; it will give the key to the whole of this ninth chapter of Romans.

There are two sorts of vocations, destinations, calls. There are those concerning this present time, which might be called temporal ones, and in them God's choice is completely free. There are, in addition, those concerning eternal life, where God is not free to give or withold the grace which, if we do not refuse it, will lead us to our true home. God is not free, because he is bound by his love.

So then, to apply this distinction, can I reproach God for not having made me a poet like Dante, or for not giving me Pascal's genius? Or for having caused me to be born in this particular country or at this particular time? In this social class, with my particular temperament, my state of health? For not having given me, like the apostles, the grace of foretelling the future or working miracles? He is completely free; he is not accountable to me. But, when it is a question of eternal life, then God is not free, he is bound to give me such graces that, if I am not saved, it is my own fault. You see the difference. If I have an accident and chance to die when I consider I have the right to live longer, I cannot say to God that this is unjust. That is what St Paul means when he says that if the potter makes both a common vessel and a one of outstanding beauty, the former cannot argue with the potter. If it is fitting there should be common objects as well as works of art, what is there for the clay to say about it? It is the same with the temporal vocations of different people. Also with their 'prophetic vocation'. Why was it Israel that was the bearer of the prophetic message announcing the Messias? Why not other people as well? There is no answer.

I was asked by a small Chinese boy why Jesus was not born in China. I told him Jesus was born in Asia, not in Europe; that missionaries went to China, but that they came up against the resistance of the forces of evil. That, however, was not a direct answer; there isn't one. And to those who are always asking why God became incarnate in Israel and not in India, where mystical religions were flourishing, or in Greece, so alive to philosophical questions, it is possible to give reasons not without value. We may say, for instance, that the divine revelation would be exposed to adulteration from erroneous mysticisms, in the one case, or, in the other, to rationalization by philosophical gnosticism, and that its transcendence stood out most clearly when it made its appearance in a simple people, healthily human, a stranger to superstructures of thought. But, once again, none of these reasons is decisive.

Israel alone, then, received the prophetic vocation concerning the Messias. Does that mean that the other peoples were abandoned by God? No, for God sent them hidden graces, not so that they might be bearers of the Messianic Message, but to orientate them towards eternal salvation, in which regard not a single soul of any race was forgotten.

So you see there are two spheres, two planes. On one plane, that of temporal gifts and destinies, and of charismatic graces, God is completely free; he chooses whom he will and rejects whom he will, without any injustice. On the other plane, that of graces of salvation, God is doubtless free to give his children different and unequal graces, to one two talents, to another five. But he is not free to deprive any soul of what is necessary to it. He is bound by his justice and love to give each of them those graces which, if not refused, will bring them to the threshold of their heavenly country.

9. I think the distinction I have given will enable you to understand this ninth chapter. Read it first of all as referring to the sphere of vocations in this present life and the charismatic gifts. These are what St Paul begins with.

'Not as though the word of God hath miscarried. For all are not Israelites that are of Israel. Neither are all they that are the seed of Abraham his children; but in Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is to say, not they that are the children of the flesh are the children of God; but they that are the children of the promise are accounted for the seed. For this is the word of promise: According to this time will I come, and Sara shall have a son' (Rom. ix. 6-9).

Abraham had a son by Agar the slave, but Sara his wife remained barren. Then the angel came and announced that Sara would bear a son the following year. So from that time there were two sons: Ismael, son according to the flesh, and Isaac, the child of the promise. From which would the descendants come? From Ismael, whom Islam claims as forbear? No, but from Isaac, the child of the promise; by him the prophetic message was to continue. That does not mean that Ismael was rejected by God in what pertains to eternal salvation, but he was not chosen to be the bearer of the prophetic message.

Then comes another disjunction. 'And not only she. But when Rebecca also had conceived at once of Isaac our father.' They were twins, Isaac and Jacob. Which of the two will be the bearer of the prophetic promise? Here again, God is entirely free. 'For when the children were not yet born, nor had done any good or evil (that the purpose of God according to election might stand); not of works, but of him that calleth, it was said to her: The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written:Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated' (ix. 10-13).

'Jacob I have loved,' as bearer of the promise. 'Esau I have hated,' not as regards eternal life, but as far as the promise is concerned, I have disregarded him.

'What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? God forbid! For he saith to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy. So that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. For the Scripture saith to Pharaoh: To this purpose have I raised thee, that I may show my power in thee and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth' (ix. 14-18).

How is this passage to be understood? Moses was sent by God to Pharaoh to say to him; 'Let my people go.' But Pharaoh refused to understand him. Had he been more enlightened, he would have said, 'Go with thy people.' Then he would himself have entered into God's plan; he would have shared, in some degree, in the vocation of the people who were the bearers of the promise. But Israel left against his will, and he sent his army in pursuit of them. Pharaoh went wrong in the realm of high politics. This does not mean he was necessarily damned but that he showed forth the glory of God in spite of himself. Moses and his people passed over the sea wherein Pharaoh's armies were lost.

I shall continue the passage, still keeping within the first sphere. 'Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth' (ix. 18). That is to say, he leaves in error whomever he decides to. Pharaoh went astray on the level of high politics. Cyrus, however, saw more clearly and, freeing Israel from captivity, sent it back to its own country to rebuild the temple. He furthered the plan of God, and so is praised in Scripture.

'Thou wilt say therefore to me: Why doth he then find fault? For who resisteth his will? O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it: Why hast thou made me thus? Or hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction, that he might show the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy which he hath prepared unto glory?' (ix. 19-23).

Wishing to 'show his wrath' means to set on one side. The message is passed on in another way. 'As in Osee he saith: I will call that which was not my people, my people; and her that was not beloved, beloved; and her that had not obtained mercy, one that hath obtained mercy. And it shall be in the place where it was said unto them: You are not my people; there they shall be called the sons of the living God. And Isaias crieth out concerning Israel: If the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved . . . because a short word shall the Lord make upon the earth' (ix. 25-28).

10. We have read these passages as referring to the sphere of vocations in this present life. Now let us take some of them again in their application to the vocation to eternal salvation. This is not the plane St Paul directly refers to but, from time to time, it may have been underlying his thought.

First of all we take this text: 'Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated' (ix. 13). If this meant: I have lovedJacob in person, and saved him for eternal life; I have hated Esau in person, and rejected him for eternal life, then we should say that, from all eternity, God knows that the supreme initiative of Jacob's final act of love comes from himself; Jacob is saved by the divine goodness. And from all eternity God knows that the supreme initiative of Esau's refusal comes from Esau himself. Esau is rejected in consequence of this free refusal made, in spite of God's goodness towards him. He is rejected because he made these divine graces of no effect.

We must distinguish clearly between the way in which Jacob is saved (namely through the divine goodness) and that in which Esau is rejected (through his bad will). To fail to see this distinction and to say that God has the first initiative in Esau's damnation as he has in Jacob's salvation, that he is the cause of the former as of the latter, is to fall into the error of Calvin.

The second text is: 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy' (ix. 15). Taking this on the plane of the call to salvation, this is the Catholic interpretation: let us suppose a man to whom God has offered his love and who sins, freely refuses this love, destroys grace in himself. God could say to him, 'From now on, I shall leave you in your sin. Is that justice or injustice?' He would have to answer, 'It is justice.' But God might also say, 'In justice, I ought to abandon you, as I have in the case of others; none the less, once again, purely out of mercy and compassion, I shall go in search of you.'

Now let us look at the Calvinist interpretation: original sin has destroyed our free will. God chooses certain ones among us to be saved; he has mercy on whom he will have mercy. The rest are predestined to hell. And if you protest that it is iniquitous that men deprived of free will should be thrown into hell, Calvin will rise up against you and say that, since God does so, it is not iniquitous, but a mystery we must adore.

The third text is: 'The scripture saith to Pharaoh: To this purpose have I raised thee, that I may show my power in thee and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore he hath mercy on whom he will; and whom he will he hardeneth' (ix. 17-18). On the plane of eternal salvation, to 'harden' someone means, in the Catholic sense, to allow their consequences to follow on acts that he has voluntarily chosen to do. I have committed a certain sin, which will normally lead to certain other sins. If God does not intervene, out of pure mercy, to break this sequence of sins, if he abandons me to the logic of my own actions, he will be said to harden me. I go of my own free will down the slope which leads from sin to sin. Is it in this sense that Pharaoh was hardened? Was he personally rejected? How can we know? In the Calvinist sense, to 'harden' means to be plunged ever further into sin by a deliberate punitive action on the part of God.

The fourth text is: 'Thou wilt say therefore to me: Why then doth he find fault? For who resisteth his will? O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it: Why hast thou made me thus? Or hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?' (ix. 19-21). According to Catholic teaching, God is bound to give grace to all, but he is not bound to give it equally. He gives his servants one, two or five talents, to each according to his capacity (Mt. xxv. 15); and this diversity will contribute to the splendour of Paradise. But he is bound by his love to give each of us such graces that, if we fail to attain heaven, we shall have to admit our own sole responsibility.

The fifth text is: 'What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction, that he might show the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy which he hath prepared unto glory?' (ix. 22-23). God may abandon the sinner to his sin and the logical results of his sin; it is then that he 'shows his wrath', he 'endures with much patience' the vessels of wrath ripe for perdition. Why does he endure them? It may be that, at the last moment, he will visit them once again in his goodness. But God may also draw the sinner straightaway from his evil state; it is then that he 'shows his glory' in regard to the vessels of mercy. Both Peter and Judas deniedJesus, and he could have abandoned both of them to their sin; it would have been quite just. But he looked on Peter, and his look overwhelmed him; that was mercy.

In the Calvinist view, God endures with much patience vessels of wrath destined to perdition, just as he makes vessels destined to glory. That is the doctrine of double predestination.

11. The thought of predestination should never lead you to fatalism, or make you say: 'What is the use? All effort is useless?' You would be deceiving yourself, from the standpoint both of faith and of theology. What would we think of a farmer who said, 'God already knows whether I shall be harvesting or not next summer, so what is the use of sowing this autumn?' We would probably say to him, 'God knows from all eternity whether you will harvest or not, because he knows from all eternity whether you will sow or not. He sees, from all eternity, that Mary Magdalen will go to heaven, but only because he sees from all eternity that she will be converted. And, in the case of our refusal, he takes account of it from all eternity in framing his immutable plan.'

The thought of predestination may become a temptation to despair that the devil tries to induce in us. If God allows this temptation, it is not that we may give way, but so that we shall make firm acts of hope in our state of darkness.

Everyone, at all times, is liable to temptation against some point of faith; or against hope as, for example, the man who says 'I believe in the life of heaven for others, but not for myself; I am too much of a sinner.' And there are temptations against love. It is the great mystics, St John of the Cross and Mary of the Incarnation, who have best described these various trials. If we come across souls tempted in these ways, it is best to tell them simply, 'God is present within your heart, he is mysteriously cultivating its soil. That is an agony to undergo, but something very profound is in preparation, and the acts of faith and hope you make in darkness are perhaps the most valuable of all your life. In heaven you will be "eternally consoled by that which here below had plunged you into a desolation of soul devoid of all consolation".'

1. First of all, let us think about justification. This is a theological term, signifying the act by which God moves one who was in a state of sin into the state of grace. There is a passing over from the state of nonjustice in relation to God to the state of justice or holiness in relation to God; hence the word justification.

2. How is man's justification brought about? We recall the great sentence of St Augustine, so often forgotten by Protestants: 'God who created thee without thee will not justify thee without thee.' In the second discourse, we spoke of the cause of the good act. For Luther, it comes from God alone; for Pelagius, from man alone. Both these views misinterpret St Augustine's doctrine: God does not justify thee without thee. God justifies thee through the assent of thy free will; justification is an act of the free will moved by God. But is that possible? Certainly, says St Thomas, for God moves natures without doing them violence. God moves man, a free being, by actuating his free will, and God leads him from one free assent to another, if man does not frustrate his activations, to the assent of justification in which the decisive grace descends on him.

The one exception is in the case of the very young. Original sin, in which they are born, is transmitted to them by way of generation, without any personal culpability on their part. Consequently, God does not require of them any personal act for justification. Their parents, without any act of will of theirs, give them natural life; baptism, without any act of will of theirs, gives them the life of grace.

3. God's grace always comes beforehand to prompt me. How does he knock at the door of my heart? If I am in a state of sin, he starts by trying to move me to an act of faith: I begin to grasp the extent of the gulf between the misery of my state and the holiness of God. That is why we say that faith is the root of justification. Then comes the fear of God: if I were to die now, I would be separated from him for ever. This is not mere servile fear, for there is already in it a beginning of hope. Further, in this hope, there is not yet charity, but already a beginning of love. If I do not disrupt these successive movements of God—as the hail destroys the fruit in the flower—one grace calls up another, then another, and so on.

You have probably heard the axiom: 'To anyone who does what lies in him God does not refuse grace'. If you take it as meaning 'to anyone who does what lies in him with his natural powers alone', you will be misinterpreting it: nature can never be proportional to grace; that is quite out of the question. However you use nature, it will yield only natural results. You may give a horse oats, and he will run faster, but you will not enable him to produce a work of art or solve a mathematical problem; those things are of another order. But if you take the formula as meaning 'to anyone who does what lies in him by the action of antecedent grace (which is always knocking at the door of my heart, which is as much at my disposition as the oxygen I breathe) God does not deny further grace', then the axiom is correct. He moves me again and again, and if I do not break the sequence, leads me to the final outpouring of justification.

This is the great doctrine of St Augustine, which was settled at the Council of Orange; a whole congeries of propositions, woven from texts of St Paul, provide the answer to the men known as Semi-pelagians, and summarize the Church's teaching on grace. They were approved by Boniface II in 529. The Semi-pelagians said that the beginning of good acts comes solely from me, and God, seeing I have made a beginning, gives me the power to complete them. No! says the Church, if it is really an act good in relation to the heavenly life, it is God who gave you the beginning, and who gives also the middle and end. God is the first cause making your free will bear fruit, and you are the secondary cause. The only thing you can do of yourself is refuse. These propositions deserve to be translated one day into fine prose. Here, for example, is one of them:

If anyone says that increase of faith comes from God, but denies that the very beginning of the act of faith and the first act of trust in God is already a gift of God, and the effect in us of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who converts our will from infidelity to faith, from impiety to piety, he contradicts the Apostle, who says: I have confidence that he who hath begun a good work in you will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. i. 6)—for unto you it is given [i.e., a grace] for Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him (Phil. i. 29); and again: What hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it? (I Cor. iv. 7).

When we reflect on St Paul's teaching, there often comes to mind a Gospel text that says the same thing but more simply; we had noticed it, but St Paul was to make us aware of all its implications: 'Without me you can do nothing' (John xv. 5). And this 'nothing' consists in refusing; and by so acting you do 'nothing' positive at all.

4. So, then, grace is there with its antecedent motion and urges us on, step by step, to justification. But what precisely is justification? It is the moment when, the sequence of graces being unbroken, all at once the flower gives its fruit; the love of God invading the soul sets it on the plane of grace and charity, sanctifies it interiorly, and there results the indwelling of the Trinity. Justification, then, happens instantaneously, although including at one and the same time several aspects: God moves the soul to make an act of love of God and of renunciation of sin, and at the same instant remits its guilt and purifies it.

5. Justification is an act of unfathomable depth. St Thomas, following St Augustine, asks if 'justification is the greatest of God's works'. In this connection, he cites one of the Collects in the Missal: 'O God, who showeth supremely thy omnipotence in pardoning [giving over and above what he is bound to] and showing mercy . . .' (10th Sunday after Pentecost). He gives this answer: creation, in one way, is a greater work than the justification of a soul, since it consists in making something out of nothing; but, if we consider the plane on which an action reaches its culmination, then the justification of a soul is a greater work than the creation of the universe, for the term of creation is the good of a transitory nature, while the term of justification is the eternal good of participation in the divinity—it is set on a higher plane. This heaven and this earth will pass away, but the justification of the elect will not pass away.

6. Is the justification of a soul to be called a miracle? St Thomas distinguishes various aspects:

a. life, he says, is given, naturally and normally, to an infant in its mother's womb. A corpse, on the other hand, is not fitted to receive life, and so the resurrection of a dead person is a miracle. Now, since the soul is spiritual, the image of God, although it certainly cannot claim it has a right to grace, yet it has the wholly passive capacity of receiving it. As distinct from resurrection, which goes against the laws of life, the grace of justification comes to a soul, not as contrary to, but as superior to its nature. In this aspect, justification is not a miracle in the sense in which the raising of Lazarus was.

b. Considering a second aspect, St Thomas asks: if we call miraculous what is done against the customary order of things, is justification a miracle? He answers: No, because it happens so frequently. It is in the ordinary course of divine goodness to justify men; it does so progressively, arousing in them successively sentiments of faith, fear, hope and a beginning of love, leading them by stages to their healing.

c. Yet, in certain cases, justification may be a miracle, when God all at once overwhelms a soul, as he did St Paul. Or it may be as in the case of the good thief, when a sudden light illuminated this common law criminal and he said, 'Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom', and he received the answer: 'This day, thou shalt be with me in Paradise'. Conversions such as these are miraculous chiefiy by reason of their suddenness; they pass over the stages normally leading to justification. Other conversions, such as that of the sinful woman related by St Luke (vii. 47), appear miraculous because they seem to blot out instantaneously not only all past sins, but also the temporal punishment due to sin, even, as it seems to have been with Charles de Foucauld, the remembrance and the traces of past sins.

My opinion is that miraculous conversions of the first kind are very numerous and that, thanks to the merits and prayers of saints and friends of God, many great sinners are converted at the last moment. Those members of the Church who pray fervently for the salvation of the world are destined to be saviours of others, in Christ. They bring forth members of the Mystical Body: 'Whosoever shall do the will of my Father that is in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother' (Mt. xii. 50).

Persons who have lived far from God may, at the very last moment, turn to God without anyone knowing it. They may even seem to have rejected grace. I am reminded of a story by Lucien Marsaux. A girl living with her father, who had lost his faith, prayed constantly for his conversion. The moment of his death came, and she ventured to ask him, 'Shall I send for a priest?' At these words, the father's soul was filled with light; this was what he had secretly desired; he wished to say yes, but his movements failed him, he made a gesture of refusal, and died. (It may well happen that the external sign goes counter to the real intention. In Claudel's play, "l'Otage," Sygne de Coufontaine throws herself between Turelure and her former fiance; the bullet strikes her and she falls. The priest asks her, 'Do you forgive him?' But she had done so much violence to herself in marrying Turelure, had had to suppress her feelings so strongly, that the only gesture she could make spontaneously was one of refusal; and so she made it. At least, in the first version. Interiorly, she had not refused to forgive, she had too much generosity; but there may well be a kind of cleavage between the soul and the body with which it is clothed.)

7. There are one or two further remarks to be made here on sin and grace.

First of all, a person in the state of grace may well be able to avoid all mortal sin, but not all venial sins (except towards the end of his life, if grace is very powerful in him). For the Christian has to live on a plane at which seemingly opposed virtues are reconciled to each other. He has to be, at one and the same time, prudent as the serpent and simple as the dove. This reconciliation is difficult; in his concentration on one virtue, he is in danger of momentarily neglecting its complement, and committing a venial sin. So he prays God each day to forgive his daily faults (Mt. vi. 12). He is mindful of the words of St John: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves' (I John i. 8).

Likewise, a man irl the state of mortal sin cannot long remain without committing fresh mortal sins. He is drawn into them, when occasion arises, by the weight of sin in his heart. So, if anyone commits a mortal sin, let him not remain in that state, but rise to his feet again as soon as possible, and begin once more to live according to the impulse of grace, according to the 'weight of grace' within him.

A second remark concerns the effects of venial sin. We begin with a comparison to show the difference between mortal and venial sin. If I pour acid on an oil-painting, the painting is ruined; such is mortal sin. But if I throw dust on it, it can be removed with a sponge and the picture reappears in all its splendour; such is venial sin. Venial sin does not destroy sanctifying grace, it prevents it from spreading its light.

Sanctifying grace inclines me towards God; I would not for anything desire to renounce this basic attitude but, through negligence, I ignore one or other of his invitations to perform a good act in matters of lesser importance, somewhat like a sick man, who, though anxious all the time to be cured, departs occasionally from the prescribed regime. Are we, then, to say that venial sin does, at least, diminish sanctifying grace? No. Soiling a lamp-glass does not diminish the light itself, but only its brilliance. Yet deliberate and constant venial sin, as opposed to unpremeditated sin, does give rise to a state of tepidity; it digs, as it were, a ditch round the soul and, when the storm of temptations arises, the soul is in danger of being drawn into mortal sin, which would immediately destroy all its beauty.

Finally, what happens to the soul which, after losing grace, regains it by an act of love and contrition? Does it return to the level of grace it had before? It may, or it may not, according to the intensity of its sorrow. Suppose it had previously a level of ten talents; it may return to God with a love of five talents, or ten, or even twenty. That is the teaching of St