Whether works of satisfaction can be undertaken voluntarily.
Whether works of satisfaction can be undertaken voluntarily.
§ 127. Bellarmine (ch. 4) argues that “laborious works can be undertaken voluntarily, by which the guilt of temporal punishment is expiated.” Here he provides examples of those who did penance in dust and ashes, who fasted, who put on sackcloth.
** Gretserus (Virgidem., p. 156): “Christ’s blood has expiated and washed away our sins but not without the intervention of instruments, among which are the external signs of religious profession: hair cloth, monastic garb, tonsure.” **
We respond. Those whose fasts, hair cloth, tears, etc., are described in Scripture either were the truly devout doing true and salutary penance—such as Job, David, Daniel, the Ninevites, Peter, etc.—or they were hypocrites, such as Ahab. With the external afflictions of the body they testified of the earnest contrition of their heart, and this contrition usually was sharpened and enlarged in calamities either public or private and in grief over temptations. But they did not undertake these afflictions to make satisfaction for their sins or for their punishments, since they themselves confessed and acknowledged that their sins were forgiven from free mercy for the sake of Christ the Mediator. “I will be unable to answer You one for a thousand” (Job 9:3). “If You decide to impute sins, who will bear it?” (Ps. 130:3). “Enter not into judgment with Your servant” (Ps. 143:[2]). “To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us, confusion of face” (Dan. 9:7). “Hear us for the Lord’s sake” (Dan. 9:17). Nor do they prescribe to God the limit or the means of liberation in the matter of temporal punishments. Rather, in the obedience of humble faith they resign this entire matter to God’s fatherly will, as the examples of the Ninevites and of David bear witness.
As far as hypocrites are concerned, they voluntarily assume their external humiliation and affliction and obtain the turning away or deferral of temporal punishments not through the measure of either merit or satisfaction but because an external reward repays external obedience. In the same way God ornaments works of the unreborn that are morally good with the rewards of this life so that human society may be preserved and external discipline commended. “They have their reward,” Christ says (Matt. 6:2). The Apolog. Confess. Wirtenb. (ch. De poen., p. 504) says: “The good works which the impenitent do” (without an acknowledgment of sin and without faith) “have their own praise and merits” (rewards) “before men and in these earthly benefits. But before God, instead of doing anything to expiate sins and earn God’s favor, much rather, if they were transferred there [to heaven], they would be considered as the sin of divination, as Scripture says [1 Sam. 15:23], or as the sin of idolatry.” Therefore if there is true and earnest contrition in a heart, the external indications of it will follow. On the other hand, if these afflictions are taken up voluntarily out of hypocrisy and for the purpose of satisfying God while the heart is not yet truly contrite and lacks faith in Christ the Mediator, then what judgment God passes on those becomes clear: “Is it such a fast that I have chosen, for a man to afflict his soul for a day? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush and to spread sackcloth and ashes?” (Isa. 58:5). Tauler (Conc. 4, f. 10) writes: “Some people are not satisfied with the myrrh that God gives them. Instead, they want to load still more of it upon themselves, and to make bad heads and sick delusions, and to suffer long and much, and to do the thing wrongly. They will have little grace from it, for they are building upon their own precepts, whether it be in penance or abstinence or in prayer or devotion. Thus God must wait on their idleness until they have done their part,” etc.
** In Zwinger (vol. 27, l. 3): “Count Fulco Andegavensis, intending to make satisfaction for a sin, put on the clothing of a condemned criminal and, accompanied by two counts, went to the Lord’s tomb. They traveled in such a way that he turned himself over to one of the counts to be tied around the neck with a rope and to be dragged, and to the other he gave switches with which to slash and to tear his back as he advanced, crying out: ‘O Lord, admit the wretched Fulco, a perjurer and an escaped slave.’ ” In 1498 Luther himself saw at Magdeburg a certain prince of Anhalt, the brother of Adolph, provost of Merseburg, clad in monastic hood and carrying the sack in which the mendicant monks would collect their bread (Jena German edition, vol. 6, fols. 9, 20).8 **
“They judge themselves” (1 Cor. 11:28) and “chastise the body” (1 Cor. 9:27): these expressions by no means indicate the voluntary undertaking of afflictions of the body in order to satisfy God for sins or for the punishment of sins, but rather to acknowledge and deplore sins with security cast aside, to mortify the root of sin, to repress the lusts of the flesh, to restrain corrupt desires, to reduce the body into slavery, etc. For elsewhere the apostle disapproves of it “if due honor not be rendered to the body” (Col. 2:23). Bellarmine says, “We disapprove of it only if it is done out of superstition.” But we add the rest of the argument correctly when we say that it is superstitious either to surpass moderation or to undertake these activities for the sake of satisfaction, since both lack God’s command.