CRITICAL ESTIMATE OF SYNCRETISM.—The outstanding characteristic of Syncretism is its insistence on prayer as a highly important, not to say the most important, factor in the work of salvation.
a) In this the Syncretistic school is undoubtedly right. Sacred Scripture and Tradition both strongly emphasize the importance and necessity of prayer, so much so that one naturally expects to find prayer playing an essential and indispensable rôle in every complete and orthodox system of grace. “The present economy of grace is essentially and intrinsically an economy of prayer,” is a theological axiom which cannot be too strongly insisted upon. To have brought out this great truth forcibly and luminously is the merit of Syncretism.
b) We do not mean to intimate, however, that the Syncretistic theory has solved the problem of the relation between free-will and grace. On the contrary, by adopting two such heterogeneous concepts as _gratia efficax ab intrinseco_ and _gratia efficax ab extrinseco_ it has actually increased the difficulties found in the other systems. For now we are put before the dilemma:—the Thomistic _gratia efficax_ either supposes free-will or it does not: if it does, there is no reason to limit this grace to the more difficult works of salvation; if it does not, then the _gratia efficax_ can be of no assistance in the performance of more difficult works, because these too, to be meritorious, require the coöperation of free-will.
The Syncretists try to evade this dilemma by contending that prayer, as the connecting link, communicates its own liberty and meritoriousness to the salutary acts performed through its agency, in other words, that these acts are the effect of prayer (_effectus orationis_). But aside from the fact that prayer itself is quite often a difficult act, the more arduous works of salvation would in the Syncretist hypothesis be stripped of their meritoriousness and degraded to the level of a _voluntarium in causa_, which is an untenable assumption.(778) Finally, there is something illogical and unsatisfactory in admitting on equal terms, as it were, two such incompatible notions as the Thomistic _cognitio Dei in decretis praedeterminantibus_ and the Molinistic _scientia media_.