True Catholic mysticism also laid great stress on free-will, and if some mystical writers, led astray by semi-pantheistic or quietistic ideas, erred from the right path, at any rate their views were never sanctioned by the Church. Some mystics also were not rightly understood and the denial of free-will was attributed to them, whereas all there is to censure in them is their vague mode of expression. This is the case with the “Theologia Deutsch,” which Luther esteemed so highly but did not rightly comprehend. What the Frankfurt knight of the Teutonic Order says in this work, viz.: “When a man is in the state of grace and agreeable to God, he wills and yet it is not he who wills, but God, and there the will is not its own,” may sound equivocal, though it really is perfectly harmless, for the words which follow show that he does not deny man’s will, and that when he says that God Himself wills in man he is merely emphasising the harmony between the human and the Divine will: “And there nothing else is willed but what God wills, for there God wills and not man, the will being united to the Eternal Will.”[621] The will which thus acts in union with the Eternal Will is the free-will of man on earth.
If Luther, instead of endeavouring to find support for his opinions on such misunderstood passages, had examined with an open mind the teaching of the Church as expressed by Augustine, the greatest teacher on grace, he would have found, that Augustine holds fast to the liberty of the will notwithstanding that in his defence of grace he had to lay greater stress on the latter than on free-will. This Doctor of the Church brilliantly refutes the assertion of the Pelagians, that the Catholic doctrine did not allow to free-will its full rights. “We also, teach freedom of choice (‘_liberum in hominibus esse arbitrium_’),” he says, for instance. “On this point at least there is no difference between us and you. It is not on account of this doctrine that you are Pelagians, but because you exclude from free-will the co-operation of grace in the performance of good works.”[622]
The Catholic doctrine represented all good-doing on man’s part--by which he rendered himself pleasing to God, attained to the state of justification and the right to an eternal reward--as an act organically one, effected equally by God’s Grace and by man’s free co-operation. Even in the preparation for the state of grace both elements were held to be essential, actual grace, and human effort supported and carried on by such grace. Concerning such preparation, theology taught that man thereby made himself in some way worthy of justification and of heaven, that he merited both, though not indeed in the strict sense, rather that, so to speak, he rendered himself deserving of justification as an unmerited reward, bestowed through the bountiful goodness of God (i.e. not “_de condigno_” but “_de congruo_”). Further examination of the scholastic teaching on this point would here be out of place, nor can we discuss the principle to which the Church ever adhered so firmly, viz. that God gives His grace to all without exception, because He wills to make all without exception eternally happy, according to the assurance of Holy Scripture: “God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” But as regards man’s free-will or want of free-will under the action of grace, which is the background of the present phase of Luther’s history, according to the Church and her Doctors man’s freedom of choice, far from being deranged by the action of God’s grace, is, on the contrary, thereby assisted to arrive at a wholesome and unfettered decision. “Free-will,” says Augustine, in his striking and thoughtful way, “is not destroyed because it is assisted by grace; it is assisted because it has not been destroyed.”[623]