Grace and Free Will in Spiritual Growth

In the 2000-year history of theology, some of our greatest thinkers have struggled to define the precise relationship between grace and free will in the lives of individual Christians. Are we free to choose the good? Do we need grace even to make this basic choice? And if we need grace even at the very beginning of our decision-making process, does that mean we are predestined from all eternity to either heaven or hell, at the pleasure of a capricious God, who withholds grace from one person and grants it to another? On the other hand, if we give primacy to human freedom, does this diminish the immensity of the gift of salvation, and lessen the sovereignty of God? 

This debate is not merely academic. The answers given to these questions have immense consequences in the lives of individual believers and through them on the health of society. From the very beginning, the theologians who worked on this question were active in the world; they were preachers, pastors, and spiritual directors as well as theologians. Their pastoral and personal experiences as well as their consultations with Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and logic informed their thought. To illustrate this point, we shall look at this question through the lens of three thinkers from the late Roman Empire, Pelagius, Augustine, and John Cassian, and see where their debate takes us.

Pelagius’s Doctrine

From the beginning the monastic tradition stressed the role of human effort in the process of growth in holiness. This is understandable. Monks have deliberately taken on a difficult task; learning to live together in harmony even with a community of like-minded men or women is hard work! However, toward the end of the fourth century a monk named Pelagius took the role of human effort in the process of sanctification too far.

Pelagius came to Rome from the Island of Britain around the year 380, and quickly became renowned for his teachings. He became the spiritual director of a large number of Roman Christians, but Pelagius was not happy with what he saw in Rome. What he saw was widespread immorality among the Christian community, and what he thought was an excessive reliance on the grace and mercy of God for forgiveness. Pelagius responded by forging a new doctrine regarding the relationship of grace and free will. He held that human beings could choose and do the good without any special divine grace at all. Here is a sample of what he taught, taken from a letter written in 413 to a man named Demetrias: “Whenever I give moral instruction, I first try to demonstrate the inherent power and quality of human nature. I try to show the wonderful virtues which all human beings can acquire.”¹

Augustine’s Response

Pelagius’s doctrine seemed reasonable and good to many people. After all, we do have free will. We should be able to choose the good using the gifts God gave every human being, shouldn’t we? But Saint Augustine was deeply troubled by Pelagius’s teachings. Augustine had his own powerful experience of God’s grace that informed his every thought. In his experience, human beings are not capable of willing, much less doing, the good without supernatural help. If, Augustine reasoned, we can perform good works without the aid of grace, what need do we have of a Savior? Why did Christ die for us, if we can be freed from the power of sin by our own efforts?²

Pelagius was, by Augustine’s admission, a man of strong and active mind, and he did not give up easily. Augustine and Pelagius debated back and forth for several years, until, in 418, at the Council of Carthage, Pelagius’s views were definitively rejected. Even after this Council, Pelagius and his followers did not give up, and it became necessary for Augustine to write on the subject again and again, and it is from these later writings that Augustine expounded upon his rich and beautiful theology of grace, which he derived from Ephesians 2:8–10: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast. For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”

Augustine reminds us of our total dependence upon God, not just for our lives, but for any good thing that we do. We were created good by a good and loving Father, but all of us have been wounded by Original Sin. Faith allows us the possibility of healing, but even faith is a gift from God. Grace gives us the strength do certain good works, but the power to do those works is not inherent in us, but always must be understood as a gift from God.

The net result of all these considerations is a deep and sincere humility before God. The good works that we were created to do are only possible through God’s grace. Thus, from the moment we were born, through every waking moment of every day of our lives, to the moment we die and even beyond, we are totally and utterly dependent upon God, who gave us Jesus Christ to save us from the power of sin and death and make it possible for us to become a new creation. If that thought does not engender in us a sense of humility, nothing will!

John Cassian’s Objection

The great monastic teacher, John Cassian, partly responding to Saint Augustine on the question of grace and free will, wrote that “if he [God] finds that we are unwilling or have grown cold, He stirs our hearts with salutary exhortations, by which a good will is either renewed or formed within us . . .” but later added this note of caution: “We should not hold that God made man such that he can never will or be capable of what is good: or else He has not granted him a free will.”³ Cassian accepted Augustine’s teaching on grace, and rejected the heresy of Pelagius, but emphasized the role of free will in man’s cooperation with grace.  

Cassian’s background can perhaps explain his emphasis on the role of human striving in spiritual growth. He spent years traveling in Egypt, studying under the spiritual masters of the Egyptian monastic movement. Their tradition emphasized a threefold path to spiritual growth that included the purgative, the illuminative and the contemplative ways or stages. 

The purgative stage, which is necessary for further spiritual growth, involves cleansing the soul of unnecessary attachments to the things of this world that keep us from a wholehearted devotion to God. As Saint Paul explained, “Put to death all the deeds of the flesh and you will live.” (Romans 8:13) The desert Fathers understood the deeds of the flesh to be those habits, attitudes, and compulsions (today some would say addictions) that take up so much of our lives. Some of these aspects of our daily lives do not at first glance seem harmful, but ultimately, they prevent us from drawing closer to the Lord because of the inordinate grip they have on our thoughts and actions. Think how many times we check our cell phones for emails, text messages, etc., when a few short years ago we all lived happily without such devices. Is the cell phone bad? Of course not, but if we become obsessed with it, to the detriment of our relationship with God and those God has put in our lives, the obsessive attachment must be broken before real spiritual growth can occur.

The Desert Fathers did not have cell phones, but they knew about unhealthy attachments, and they knew how hard it is to break those attachments. Many of them spent years of their lives struggling against greed, pride, anger, resentment, and obsessive sexual thoughts before finally achieving mastery over these aspects of their self. They did not think they had been able to achieve this mastery without grace, but they did believe the healing never would have happened without a specific act of the will. The important question then became: did that act of the will originate inside the individual, or was it in itself a product of grace? And if it was a product of grace, does that mean that human beings are not really free, but predestined from all eternity to either receive the grace they needed for salvation, or fail to receive that grace? And if the answer to this question is yes, does that mean God has predestined some human beings for heaven and others for hell?

Some Fathers shrank from the thought that God would predestine some human beings to hell. They held an intermediate position between Pelagius and Augustine. In the history of theology, this position has come to us under the heading of Semi-Pelagianism. This position holds that salvation begins with an act of the will and that after that initial act of the will the necessary grace is granted to a person. This position is a heresy, because, as Saint Paul points out, even the initial desire to love and serve God is a product of grace.⁴ Cassian has been accused of holding this heretical position, but the reality is more complex. The truth is that in the relationship between divine grace and human freedom there exists a zone of mystery. On the one hand, grace really is paramount, but on the other hand it is also true that we are genuinely free. The Calvinist doctrine of Irresistible Grace is ultimately false. We can always choose to reject grace, and if we can reject grace, then it is also true that the acceptance of grace is somehow within the realm of human freedom, despite God’s absolute sovereignty.

Understanding the True Relationship between Grace and Human Effort

The battle against temptations and obsessive thoughts never really ends in the life of a Christian. Satan will always send temptations our way. But when we have put real effort into resisting those temptations that are most troublesome in our own life, at the same time relying on grace, we find temptation easier to resist. When we are able to spend less time struggling, and more time communicating with the Lord and receiving His boundless love, we can begin to make real progress in the spiritual life.

It’s important also to remember that the essential insight of Saint Augustine is still true. Even in the midst of our struggle, we must continue to rely on grace, making frequent use of the sources of that grace. The Sacraments of the Holy Eucharist and Confession are extremely important when we are struggling to remove unhealthy attachments from our lives.

This is an extremely important point in spiritual direction and other areas of pastoral care. The removal of unhealthy attachments is the first step in spiritual growth, as we have seen earlier. Only this process of purification can make it possible for us to grow in love. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange explains the necessity of grace in this process: “It is our duty to love God . . . by observing His commandments. But even this natural duty we are unable to fulfil without the help of God’s grace, so weakened are our wills in consequence of original sin. . . . This beginning of eternal life, as we have called it, is a complete spiritual organism, which has to grow and develop until we enter eternal life. The root principle of this undying organism is sanctifying grace.”⁵

In the Catholic understanding of justification, more than the imputed righteousness posited by Martin Luther is necessary. Actual growth in virtue is required. This growth on the one hand requires a deliberate assent of the will on our part, but on the other hand is impossible without grace. Perhaps Saint Augustine put it best himself: “we have now proved by our former testimonies from Holy Scripture that there is in man a free determination of will for living rightly and acting rightly; so now let us see what are the divine testimonies concerning the grace of God, without which we are not able to do any good thing.”⁶

Grace, coming from God Himself, always takes primacy. We must acknowledge that even our good will is a gift from God. The astonishing truth is that God, in His graciousness, has opened up to us the possibility of cooperation in our own salvation, a process that God initiates, accompanies, and brings to completion through grace.  Through this amazing privilege God transforms us interiorly and makes us cooperators with Himself.

Seen in this light, the striving, the act of the will, is still important, because even in failure we learn and grow. We learn humility, compassion for our fellow strivers, and, most importantly, our utter dependence on God’s grace and mercy. And in the end the work of God will be completed in us, and we will be made capable of the good works for which we were created.