CHAPTER IV
following statement from Scripture is addressed to everyone except God alone:
'What do you have that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?1 (I Cor. 4:7)
CHAPTER IV
I believe that in the treatise On Freedom of Choice I explained how a free will which has received the gift of uprightness is not compelled by any neces sity to forsake uprightness, but how it yields willingly and not without con sent when it is assailed by the difficulties of temptation. Now, because grace helps the will in such a multitude of ways, I shall not be able to enumerate all of them. But it will be worthwhile for me to say something about the ways in which the received grace helps free choice to keep uprightness after the will has received it.
It is obvious that no one can keep this received uprightness without will ing to do so. But a person cannot will uprightness unless he possesses it.
And the only way he can possess it is by grace. Now just as no one receives uprightness unless grace precedes it and enables him, so no one keeps upright ness unless the same grace follows it and helps him. Even though the keeping of uprightness, when it is kept, is a work of free choice, this keeping must not be attributed to free choice so much as to grace; for free choice possesses uprightness only through prevenient grace and keeps it only through subsequent grace.
Grace so follows it own gift that it fails to bestow this gift of upright ness, whether it be great or small, only when free choice by willing something else deserts the uprightness it has received. For uprightness is never sepa rated from the will except when the will chooses something else that is incom patible with uprightness--as happens, for instance, when someone who receives
the uprightness of willing sobriety throws it away by immoderately willing the pleasures of drinking. When a man does something like this, he does it of his own will; so through his own fault he loses the grace which he has received.
When free choice is assailed by a temptation to forsake the uprightness it has received, grace still helps the will by reducing or completely nullifying the power of the temptation besetting it, or by increasing the will's desire for uprightness. Furthermore, since all things are subject to the governance of God, then everything that happens to man which helps free choice to receive or to keep the uprightness we are talking about ought to be imputed entirely to grace.
I have said that all justice is uprightness of will kept for its own sake.
It follows from this that everyone who has this uprightness has justice; and since everyone who has justice is just, everyone who has uprightness is just.
Nevertheless I do not believe that eternal life has been promised to all who are just but only to those who are just without being at all unjust. For it is the latter who are properly and absolutely said to be just and upright in heart. There are some people who are just in one respect and unjust in another such as the man who is both chaste and envious. The happiness of the just is not given to people like this. For as true happiness exists without any defi ciency, so it is given only to the person who is just without being unjust in any way. The happiness promised to the just will be similar to that enjoyed by the angels of God. Thus, since there is no injustice in the good angels, no one who has any injustice will be admitted to their company. It is not the purpose of our present discourse to show how a man can become free of injustice but we know that by the grace of God and through holy endeavors, this is pos sible for the Christian.