On Good Works

Teasing out an apparent conflict from Trent: How Good Works contribute to the increase of our Justification without necessarily playing a directly causal role in effecting our Justification.

The Resolution of a Dilemma from Trent

In contrast to the usual protestant calumny against the catholic faith, i.e. that we think we will be saved by good works, or our own works, the teaching of the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent, written directly in response to protestantism, clearly affirms the opposite: we are justified only by and in the Justice and Merits of Jesus Christ and His Atonement. Take a look:

CANON I.-If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.

CANON II.-If any one saith, that the grace of God, through Jesus Christ, is given only for this, that man may be able more easily to live justly, and to merit eternal life, as if, by free will without grace, he were able to do both, though hardly indeed and with difficulty; let him be anathema.

CANON III.-If any one saith, that without the prevenient inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and without his help, man can believe, hope, love, or be penitent as he ought, so as that the grace of Justification may be bestowed upon him; let him be anathema.

CANON X.-If any one saith, that men are just without the justice of Christ, whereby He merited for us to be justified; or that it is by that justice itself that they are formally just; let him be anathema.

The very foundation of the teaching of this Council takes the Reformers critique and affirms it as Catholic. It says: we are not justified by good works, or by the working of free will apart from grace. Its a brilliant teaching here, not merely because its true, but because argumentatively it removes the ground from beneath the reformers feet. The heart of their critique of Catholicism is thereby demonstrated to be a straw man. Its partially amazing that nearly 500 years after the council of Trent these calumnies and this straw man are still so powerful in the minds of many protestants, particularly the evangelical variety. Why? If we look a little further in the development of this teaching, the matter becomes more complex, and liable to misunderstanding:

CANON XXIV.-If any one saith, that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works; but that the said works are merely the fruits and signs of Justification obtained, but not a cause of the increase thereof; let him be anathema.

CANON XXVI.-If any one saith, that the just ought not, for their good works done in God, to expect and hope for an eternal recompense from God, through His mercy and the merit of Jesus Christ, if so be that they persevere to the end in well doing and in keeping the divine commandments; let him be anathema.

Here is part of the reason why the straw man still exists, we see the corresponding view in these canons, that if Christ alone by his Merits saves, our good works are consequential as regards our justification. Our works merit rewards and punishments and even eternal punishment in some cases. But the claim that is perhaps the most interesting is about our justification itself, the claim is that good works preserve and increase our justification in Canon 24. And this is what I want to focus on, this is what is liable to misinterpretation, and also seems to lead to the viability of the protestant critique, that its a sort of zero sum game and our salvation is partially the work of Jesus and partially our own work. Or the idea that the more we do the less He does. They ask: How can our redemption be solely caused by Christ´s work, justice, and merit, and our good works increase this justification? How does this not reverse the previous set of canons claiming we are justified by Christ alone? Catholics are partially responsible for this confusion as they often fail to clearly reconcile these two truths: that our Justification is through Christ alone, and that our good works contribute to this Justification. What follows is one proof—there are other possibilities— that (A) good works tend to increase one´s awareness of and contrition for sin, and (B) this contrition is the primary vehicle that connects us with the means of our justification, the Blood of Jesus Christ.

Resolution of this Dilemma

In short, what I want to argue for is that (1) Objectively God is the primary cause of Our good actions. We can be said to cause them only in a derivative and cooperative, but real, sense. (2) Objectively, we are the sole cause of our evil actions. Growing in righteousness is growing in knowledge of what is objective, and good, and making that the dominant force in Our lives. But Subjectively, concerning my own interior point of view, it’s no secret I have to be active to do Good, to know it, to desire it, to plan for it, to choose it, to do it. (3) And these sorts of causality, objective and subjective can co-exist.

Consider a marathon runner. Objectively, his time is due to many objective factors external to him: e.g. the nature of the race, it is a competition with competitors, with water stands, toiletts, and even a particular race course and weather conditions. But subjectively, the runner who aims to win the race is going to will himself to victory in a real sense, he has to desire it,  he is going to have to decide to endure some pain rather than slow down if his leg cramps. He may decide to go above his desired pace to compete with a runner. And some of these desires and decisions are, while contingent on the objective conditions of the race, also the result of his own subjective operation.

Good action is similar. There are always things I need to desire, to choose, to be doing, and things that require effort, and the worse of a person I am, the more effort it is going to seem to require to do good. Just like the worse or less experienced runner you are, the more difficult it will be to really push yourself subjectively to your objective physical limit in a race. Yet, for the expert performer, meeting ones objective limit with subjective effort is much easier and routine. But this leaves a paradox. (4) Our subjective awareness of our own effort is inversely proportional to our objective ability and level of training. (5) Objectively speaking, it’s really impossible to determine whose subjectivity is more causal or active, the novice or the expert performer, but we can say it is truly causal in both cases. it will not only seem to be a greater factor to the novice performer than the expert performer, but that it will likely be so with the novice performer that there is a greater variation in performance under the same conditions.

But concerning the causality of the race, objective factors like competitors, a racetrack, a timer are real causes for the race time, just as the subjective will of the runner are also causes. A common sophistic critique the reformers levy against catholicism is to say that any admission of free will, effort, or good works in the work of mans justification is “adding” something to God’s work. I’ve often heard Calvinists condescendingly tell me “We don’t add anything to Christ’s redemption of us.” This is sophistry. Consider the runner. He doesn’t add anything to the stature of the race (it’s length, its prestige, its course)  by deciding to run it or desiring to win it, but if he refuses to participate all-together he only subtracts himself. This sophistry of the reformers is a temptation not to run at all, in order to preserve the sanctity and grandeur of the race. 

But this dynamic carries over into the moral life. For instance, I am not patient, thus patience for me requires a lot of attention and effort when I am tried in a circumstance. But objectively, if I am patient in a trying circumstance, I did something good and objectively God was the overwhelming cause of it, but subjectively, his causality seemed contingent upon my own effort. I could say, “In similar situations, I’ve snapped before, but this time I said a quick prayer and I was patient.” It’s easy to see here that my lack of effort subjectively can thwart God’s will for me to do good objectively. A fundamental presupposition of Catholic moral theology is that God always gives us the grace we need to obey. So whenever we fail, it is on us. And the better I am, the less subjective effort will be required to be good, the easier it is for God to act in and through me. Just like the runner, the less variance there will be in moral performance. The best physical performer presses his body to the limits, the best moral performance does not vary from law or virtuous action. In both cases, what is objective provides the limit, and what is subjective or mind and will are subservient and derivative of this reality.

A Critique of the Reformers on Justification

But if this is true, the reformers give exactly the wrong advice. They say, that the sinner must know his subjective efforts to find the grace of God are useless, they say there is nothing anyone can do to merit God’s grace, and God saves whom he wills. Some even say the belief in this inability to do good or find God by striving or effort is the only thing that can provoke God to act. But this is the exact opposite of what the novice needs to hear. Because (6) Subjectively, moral or spiritual improvement for the sinner is going to require a lot of effort, for the just it requires much less or very little. Objectively, if they advance perfectly they are doing nothing on their own, but it won’t feel like it subjectively at first. A coach would never tell the beginner marathon runner, your knowledge of your inability to improve by your own efforts is the key to improving your time. Yet, it would be silly to tell an expert performer that they could greatly improve their time by trying harder. An expert performer is already trying as hard as they can. But it would be a great disservice to the novice to give them the psychological truth and mindset of the expert performer (e.g. your time reaches its limit by natural ability, not effort), and tell them not to deviate from it. Because the novice performer can only figure out the limit of their natural ability with a lot of effort, thus they need the opposite mindset, (e.g. who knows how good I could get if I really trained hard like a pro?)

Our mindset as Christians should always be to hope for perfection, and trust that God will make us Saints so long as we don’t do anything to obstruct it. Not desiring Sainthood is like refusing to run the race, it’s something our subjective causality can do to obstruct God’s will. Concerning moral training, alcoholics anonymous is a great proof of the Catholic mindset. AA teaches addicts that they can only get better when they acknowledge a higher power and ask for its help, but it also counsels them to take practical, very difficult, but prudent steps to defeating the addiction. But they advise good natural theology, without specifically Christian supernatural theology. The reformation claim is to claim grace is nothing like moral nature, they’d say what the sinner (or alcoholic) needs to know are his inability to do good apart from God and hope for his grace. They deny that any active steps could lead to breaking the addiction, only God’s supernatural action can do that. But I’d tell the sinner the opposite: what the sinner needs to do is seek God with all of their might, to strive after him subjectively with all their effort, with all their attention and planning and mortification of sin, and if they do this in faith that God is good He will already be objectively acting in and through these subjective acts of free will and effort to assist them and to redeem them. I would say this in the full confidence that when such a sinner did truly meet the living God in faith they would confess their conversion was due entirely to His gracious action, not their own effort. But let’s go a step further. 

The Reformers argue that acknowledging one’s inability and total depravity is ordered to being regenerated and saved by faith. Thus, it would seem that the worse someone sinned, and the more habitual that sin actually is, the more likely it would be that they would realize this doctrine is true and be saved. Or inversely, the less someone carried out ostensibly good actions or possessed natural virtue, the more likely they would be to realize their true depraved moral state and repent. St Thomas says the opposite: natural goodness increases obediential potency to supernatural grace. The crux of this matter is whether our objective goodness or badness, concerning the things we do or virtues we possess is positively or negatively ordered to knowing subjectively the objective goodness or badness of our condition. At the heart of the reformation critique is the rejection of a deception: that the more objectively good someone is (who isn’t Christian) the less able this person will be to discern the truth about the human condition. In truth the opposite is true: (7) objective participation in the good, with good works or good actions, such as to acquire virtue, usually convicts one of their sinful subjective nature. Consider the marathon runner. An expert performer would be more likely to attribute a failed performance on their own fault “I didn’t train hard enough, etc.” And a novice performer would be more likely to attribute a failed performance on the conditions “it was too cold, the course was steeper than I expected, etc.” This is much more obviously true with morality. Good people tend to blame themselves and themselves only for bad moral performance.  And bad people tend to blame external factors for bad moral performance, rather than take responsibility for what they subjectively could have done differently. This is a natural, not a supernatural truth. This dynamic is not substantively different outside of Christianity, nor can mastering this dynamic alone save someone. But it is still true and still operative in the supernatural life of the regenerate as in the unregenerate. Grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it.

Thus, habitual sinners are less likely to admit their sin, or to see it clearly. Thus, good moral performance tends toward an understanding of the sinful state of the subjective will and bad moral performance tends toward an overestimation of our own personal goodness apart from God’s grace. Similarly, when good people perform the good they usually do not attribute it to their subjectivity. Even when heroes carry out heroic acts, they usually say, “it’s what I thought anyone would have done in that situation.” They never say “yes I am truly exceptional, etc.” Why? Because people only act heroically in accordance with objective law, not for subjective pride. I risked my life to save the drowning child for the subjective reason that it was required of me, not with the intent to be the hero or exceptional. In contrast, when bad people carry out good acts, they usually take undue credit for them and latch on to them as what defines them individually as a “good person.” How common is it, when a person lacking in virtue is accused of something, for them to point out all their good deeds and noble motives rather than to take responsibility? Again, I am speaking from my own experience here, but the worst people I have known fixate on and take pride in their few good deeds and qualities as being exceptional, and either forget or excuse their bad habits or actions as being due to fluke or unfortunate circumstance. The best people I know, do the opposite. They objectively attribute to God all the good they do, and they subjectively associate themselves with all the evil they have done, they fixate on these things, take responsibility for them and work to rid themselves of these things with God’s help. 

The reformers offer a moral universe totally contrary to the moral and spiritual universe of the righteous. It is only in the spiritual world of the damned that a good deed would be ordered toward my pride rather than acknowledging God’s glory. By fixing this point of view they enslave the sinner within this mindset. The sinner, unregenerate and regenerate, should be told to do good works, and never to take pride in them. If they do this, they will quickly grow in knowledge of their own wretchedness. Thus (8) the Saint or someone approaching perfection is the person who is objectively almost entirely contained in God or the Good, but also the person who intimately knows their subjective self or independent will to be the most wretched at the same time. And these two aspects are two sides of the same coin. This is the teaching from the council of trent that good works contribute to our justification. This is the reason they are willing to endure such intense trials and martyrdom without so much as falling back on their own will through weakness. They hate themselves and consider themselves most wretched of all.

This is quite different from the sinner who knows he is wretched but will not endure any hardship to persist in what is good. He cannot be said to know his depravity in the same way as the Saint. The difference is in practical knowledge, it is in the will and in one’s desires. Thus total depravity is a dogma that only Saints come close to understanding, and even here they do not utter it because they affirm objectively the image of God and free will and traces of natural goodness even in the worst sinner. But, subjectively, concerning themselves only, they often affirm something like total depravity. So once again, the reformers take the individual practical psychology of the expert performer (the regenerate Saint), and make it the universal theoretical objective standard for all humans. But for a hardened sinner to confess his total depravity as a dogma, does not mean he is familiar with his depravity as a practical reality. In fact, for the hardened sinner, this dogma precludes his ever knowing his true sinfulness. Because what is required of him is faith, hope and his efforts to perform good deeds, the last of which is forbidden by the reformers by the dogma of total depravity and the bondage of the will.  And this is a colossal mistake, that destroys the ladder that made the Saint possible. But on the other end, a catholic spirituality that learns to take pride in good works, as the reformers critique, one that translates good objective deeds into a subjective self satisfaction, pride, and complacency, rather than an increasing humility and knowledge of our depravity, this sort of spirituality similarly cuts one off from Our Salvation, Jesus Christ. Why? Subjectively speaking only sinners will be saved, not those who think themselves righteous, and a perversion of the catholic teaching about justification at Trent leads to people understanding themselves subjectively as righteous because they did objective Good. Thus we see a possible if not the only possible reconciliation of these two aspects of the teaching of the council of Trent—a teaching that (1) Christ alone saves, and (2) our good works contribute to this salvation—is that our good works, like leaves on a tree, work to produce the flowers of our salvation: i.e. our contrition for sin. Contrition attracts Christ with His Blood to wash us clean of sin and its stain. St Catherine of Sienna says only those who love God for God´s sake will be saved. Thus, if good works are the leaves, and contrition for sin is the flower, one could say we are saved by this fruit: the works of love generated from the visitation of His Precious Body and Blood upon us and our sin. But plain old good works are like the green leaves, necessary, not sufficient. They sustain and increase the life of the plant without being the summit or end of the life of the plant. This is the Catholic teaching: Do good works to know how bad you are, as this self-knowledge is material to your salvation. To say leaves are irrelevant to the life of the plant is to confess one´s ignorance of the spiritual organism as well as means by which sunlight can strengthen and nourish this organism.

The Neccesity of Desiring Perfection

But what is this ladder that makes Sainthood possible? The subjective, interior desire of the objective Good, i.e. Perfection, eternal life in Heaven. And from this one grows in an interior, subjective knowledge of one’s depravity in light of God’s generosity, charity, and friendship towards us. This subjective disposition produces a very different sort of interior moral knowledge than the objective speculative knowledge of what sin is or that man is sinful. It generates humility and contrition. Again demons have the objective knowledge of their state, of God’s law, but are incapable of contrition or remorse. When asked by exorcists in the rite of exorcism, they often answer correctly, though it causes them pain to admit the truth: “we are miserable, and cannot do good.” What they cannot do, is express regret or remorse for their rebellion. They would do it again, they say. Because demons cannot know, will, or desire what is good in itself, they cannot relate to what is good in a simple, interior way, but only indirectly and from the outside. All demonic ideologies seduce people with this point of view: a sideways-on or instrumental view of morality and what is good (e.g. Nietsche and Foucault are exemplars) that assumes there is no unitary, substantive good one can will in a simple way. The deception is that people who admit this picture confess the utter foolishness of desiring any objective ultimate Good in a simple, interior way, and associate this interior orientation with deception, slavery and oppression. Luther’s separation of law and Gospel does this as well, where law can only be considered objectively as an instrument to elicit knowledge of one’s depravity, but not subjectively desired as an end. St Paul in Romans seems to argue for both concerning a Law of the Flesh and Spirit that perform both instrumental and teleological tasks respectively. Yes, Demons are totally depraved, but only because this sort of interior relationship or friendship with God is impossible. They can only draw their victims into their mindset. They can even encourage people they are leading to do good things but only for the purpose of deceiving them, of bolstering their pride or arrogance. The very moment they subjectively chose to perform some good action for the glory and honor of God, or the very moment they ask God to elicit in their hearts desires for what is good, this interior path would open up by God’s grace and in God’s being. We know this is not possible for a demonic intellect, but for humans with bodies in time, it is always possible with God´s grace. Thus, desiring perfection or Sainthood, or even asking to desire perfection or Sainthood, whatever trials that might entail, is a sign that one is living in a state of grace. This movement requires supernatural faith, hope, and charity. To fail to do so is to be deficient in these virtues. 

Everyone in heaven will have desired this, God will not perfect us without our consent. And everyone in hell will have refused to desire this. Because Calvinism denies the objective possibility of perfection in this life, adherents of this heresy are cut off from subjectively desiring their objective perfection. It’s no surprise the reality and dogma of objective, non-divine, human perfection (The Blessed Virgin!) is so repugnant to Calvinists. Life in Mary is simply life oriented toward and liberated by her perfect potency to divine Act, perfect God-bearing desire of God’s objectivity incarnate, by and through her constant prayer for us.  Without her example, it’s unclear to what extent non-divine humans can relate to Divine Human and how exactly this might occur. Of course, outside of Sacramental life in the Church, perfection or significant advancement in what is good is objectively impossible, so there’s a certain truth to the objective attitude offered to the deceived. But the sad reality is that there are probably many ostensibly pius Catholic people in hell, who could have easily grown up in grace and friendship with God had they ever been instructed that they should perform this simple act of will which God requires of His Friends. People who prayed a lot of rosaries and communicated at daily mass but refused to offer themselves to God in return by desiring and abandoning themselves to His desires. Even if they even asked to have this desire for perfection we must believe God would have given this to them. But it’s an insult to the Incarnation, Suffering and Death, and Sacraments of Our Lord not to desire and expect Him to make us perfect. This desire is like the frame or the tuning of the human spiritual instrument, without which the basic movements of the spiritual life (fear, humility, contrition, gratitude, adoption) do not sound at all or cannot sound harmoniously. But the necessity of this movement is so little talked about and actively spoken against even by traditionalist Priests. St Therese’s little way is a little way unto perfect good, not a perfect way unto a little good. It is a little way of martyrdom, not a little martyrdom of The Way. In my own life and in catholic preaching I hear, it often seems like these are easily confused. To the Saints and to Our Lord, these paths are seen for what they are: an eternity apart.