Source:
R. J. Matava, “A
Sketch of the Controversy de auxiliis,” Journal of Jesuit Studies
7 (2020): 417-446
Abstract
In the 16th century, the
Dominicans and the Jesuits engaged in a polarized theological debate about how
God can move the human will in a way that neither compromises human free choice
nor makes God the author of moral evil. This debate, called the “controversy de
auxiliis,” was never resolved. In 1607, Pope Paul v decreed that neither side
was heretical and forbade further publishing on the issue without his explicit
permission. This article explains the main theological points of the various
Dominican and Jesuit actors, the human factors that contributed to the debate,
and the reasons why this is still an important issue today. It concludes that
both positions were based on important theological insights that would need to
be taken into account if any resolution were to be found, that a resolution of
this debate would benefit the Church in a number of ways, and that Jesuit and
Dominican tribalism and polemics have contributed to keeping this issue
unresolved. (p. 417)
Conclusion
While the polemics that
characterized the de auxiliis debate can misleadingly suggest
that the Dominican and Jesuit positions were the only two games in town and
that these two positions were monolithic in their uniformity, they were not.
There were outlying theologians in both orders, and theologians from outside
these two orders also weighed in. However, by-and-large, the Dominicans and the
Jesuits remained aligned against each other along party lines with remarkable
uniformity up until the early twentieth century.
There is a hackneyed portrayal of
the controversy as a sterile, intramural debate that expended the efforts of
the brightest theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on a
pointless exercise in hairsplitting, thereby disrupting the peace and unity of
the church at a time when it was already bruised and bleeding from the
Protestant schism. While this portrayal has some limited basis in reality, the
portrayal is misleading insofar as it suggests that the debate was much ado
about nothing. In fact, the de auxiliis question continued to
haunt the church for centuries—as long as theologians were willing to think
about it—and the question was never adequately answered. The Dominicans and
Jesuits were fixated upon a substantive issue—a genuine theological mystery at
the heart of the Christian faith—one which deserves the kind of sustained
reflection and clear formulation that has been given to such mysteries as the
Trinity and the Incarnation. It also ignores the fact that the Dominican and
Jesuit positions were serious attempts at giving clear and plausible expression
to this mystery, attempts that, from both sides, were intended to further the
peace and unity of the church while upholding the integrity of the deposit of
faith.
In fact, while neither school
articulated a position that was ultimately adequate, both sides had insight
into certain fundamental truths. The Dominicans were right in their
uncompromising defense of the truth that God is the first cause of all that
exists, including the free acts of creatures, and that God has the initiative
in salvation. The Jesuits were right to insist that the human person has the
capacity for genuine self-determination and that this capacity would be
undermined if choices were determined by exogenous created antecedents.
But that both sides had genuine
insight into the issue does not mean that a via media is
tenable. For common suppositions led both sides into an insoluble dilemma.
Chief among these was the highly intuitive but mistaken idea that God’s
efficient causality is literally a force or influx (somewhat like physical
energy), a tertium quid bridging between cause and effect. On
such an understanding, God is either determining or determined, as
Garrigou-Lagrange pointed out: for the Dominicans, God is determining. For the
Jesuits, God is determined.
This extremely tempting
conceptual mistake about efficient causality, taken with each side’s true grasp
of one pole of the mystery, converged with several other human and,
broadly-speaking, methodological factors to make the controversy de
auxiliis virtually unavoidable. The dispute between the Dominicans and
Jesuits was as complicated humanly as it was conceptually, although the sheer
conceptual complexity of the debate tends to eclipse its moral, psychological,
and spiritual dimensions.
From a methodological standpoint,
neither position took a sufficiently dialectical approach to the mystery, in
the broad, medieval sense of determining a position in light of back-and-forth
consideration of counterarguments, as in the format for settling disputed
questions. It is not that the Dominicans and Jesuits did not consider one
another’s views or even other counterpositions. It is clear from the structure
of their writings (which included dubia and so forth, as was
customary) that they did. Rather, there was a dispositional shortcoming on the
part of the disputants: in general, neither side was sufficiently self-critical
to take the respective counterarguments seriously enough to make significant
modifications to its own position. While this posture affected both the
Dominicans and Jesuits, it seems to have affected the Dominicans more because
they were defending an established position that, in its main lines, had been
previously held, and one that, in its specific points of detail, had been
developing since the fourteenth century. Whereas the Jesuits were advancing a
new theory, they were forced to confront counter-positions from the very start.
This led to another complicating
factor—the Dominican and Jesuit positions were polemical. They were positions
formulated against someone in the heat of controversy. As a result, the two
positions do not display the kind of balance that is necessary to do justice to
the mystery as a whole. While this factor affected both schools, it was a more
characteristic flaw of the Jesuits than the Dominicans, for the Jesuits
developed their view in order to address the problem of Luther and Calvin’s
teachings on the bondage of the will and the soteriology resultant from these
teachings. While this problem affected the Dominicans less in respect to the
main lines of their theory, it does seem to have driven the development,
clarification, and hardening of the more distinctive features of their account
by the 1590s. The rise of the Molinist threat caused the Dominicans to double
down on their basic position and this caused declination from a more balanced
Thomistic view. The outcome was that sound basic principles were run far
forward without stopping to look back and check course. This resulted in a
pure, logically tight position to be sure, but a distorted one.
A related factor that contributed
to the impasse is party loyalty. Members of both Dominican and Jesuit schools
were highly committed to the official position of their religious order. I do
not mean to suggest that these loyalties were irrational or that they made the
protagonists’ quest for truth disingenuous. If one were to ask a protagonist
from either side the reasons for his position, he would surely have said that
he held his position primarily because he thought it to be true, not because it
was the position of his order. However, a spirit of partisanship undeniably
characterized each side’s quest for truth, and to an extent that foreclosed
avenues for transcending the conceptual limitations of tightly formed but
insufficiently dialectical positions that were forged in the heat of
controversy. What was necessary was a sharper distinction between the deposit
of faith and apostolic Tradition on the one hand, and a scholastic tradition
with its received doctrines on the other. The tendency to conflate theological
opinion with what is of the faith has for centuries contributed to the
intractability of de auxiliis dispute.
In addition to grasping the
fundamental truth about one pole of the mystery, protagonists from each side
also grasped the truth about what were the principal deficiencies of their
opponents’ position, despite the fact that they did not overcome the factors
which led them to an impasse. This apprehension of each side’s respective
deficiencies is not an insignificant contribution to a resolution of the
debate. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clearer today than it could have
been to thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that both of the
principal positions advanced in the controversy were erroneous, despite the
real but limited traction they gained in accounting for the relationship
between God and human action. The mistakes that were made in the controversy
are mistakes that are almost impossible to avoid, especially in a fallen world
where even holy and bright thinkers contend not only against their creaturely
limitations of intellect, but also against the effects of sin. They are the kind
of mistakes that are most visible (and therefore most avoidable) in
hindsight—once they have been made and their implications seen. The blunders of
the controversy, as vexing and painful as they were, could contribute to the
conflict’s resolution not only conceptually, but also insofar as they might
serve as a chastening reminder of how easily minds greater than our own can err
in thinking about so difficult a matter as the relationship of God and
secondary causes. A resolution of the conflict depends not only on right
thinking, but on right ways of thinking, especially intellectual humility and
an abandonment of what Newman calls “love of system.”
What is needed today is a fresh
re-thinking of the controversy that gets beyond the mistaken suppositions and
polemics of the original debate, but which draws upon its lessons. I would
propose that a reframing of the controversy must begin from a consideration of
God’s simplicity and creative causality and explain the implications of these
doctrines for conceptualizing God’s causation of change in the world. (pp.
443-47)
