The Nature of Man in Roman Catholic Teaching
Made in the image of God · stripped of a supernatural gift · wounded but not dead · free, when grace moves him, to cooperate in his own salvation.
Rome has never taught that man is unfallen. The Council of Trent confessed that in Adam “all men had lost their innocence” and were “the servants of sin,” unable to rise by nature or by the law. Yet in the same sentence it measured the damage: “free will, attenuated and bent down as it was in its powers, was by no means extinguished.”1 That sentence holds the whole of Rome’s doctrine of man in small compass. Man is fallen, but not dead; wounded, but not ruined; weakened in will, but still able, when grace moves him, to cooperate in his own salvation. On that estimate of human nature rest Rome’s teaching on baptism, justification, merit, and purgatory. For the Reformation’s answer in the wider frame of a biblical worldview, see The Nature of Man.
Man as Created
The Catechism begins where Scripture begins. “Of all visible creatures only man is ‘able to know and love his creator,’” and he alone is called “to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life” (§356). Being in the image of God, the human person “is not just something, but someone,” capable “of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself” (§357). Man is “a being at once corporeal and spiritual” (§362), and, in the language of Aristotle and Aquinas, the soul is “the ‘form’ of the body” (§365). “Every spiritual soul is created immediately by God” and is immortal (§366). Pius XII allowed Catholic scholars to discuss the evolution of the human body, “for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God,” but he forbade polygenism, because original sin “proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam.”2
To this created nature Rome adds a further endowment. Adam and Eve were “constituted in an original ‘state of holiness and justice,’” a grace that was “to share in . . . divine life” (§375). In this state of “original justice” there was harmony within the person, between man and woman, and between man and creation (§376). Thomas Aquinas explained that this rectitude consisted in reason being subject to God, the lower powers to reason, and the body to the soul, and he concluded that it “was not a merely natural gift, but a supernatural endowment of grace.”3 Medieval theology called it the donum superadditum, the gift added above nature. Rome has guarded the distinction ever since. In 1567 Pius V condemned the Louvain theologian Michael Baius for teaching that “the integrity of the first creation was not an exaltation undue to human nature, but its natural condition.”4 Man is thus pictured in two stories: a natural foundation of body, reason, and will, and a supernatural upper story of grace.
His State at Birth
When Adam sinned, the upper story fell. “Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness” (§399), “the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered,” and death enters human history (§400). Trent anathematized anyone who denies that “the entire Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed as respects the body and soul, for the worse,” or who says that Adam transmitted to his posterity only death and bodily pains, “but not sin also, which is the death of the soul.”5
Every child therefore comes into the world in the condition Adam passed on. “Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism” (§1250). But Rome defines that condition with care. Original sin is called “sin” only “in an analogical sense: it is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’ — a state and not an act” (§404). The Catechism continues:
Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin — an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence.”
Three things follow. First, the newborn lacks the supernatural gift but keeps his nature, which is “wounded” rather than “totally corrupted.” Second, the remedy is sacramental: baptism “erases original sin and turns a man back towards God” (§405). Third, what remains after baptism is not counted as sin. Trent granted that concupiscence remains in the baptized and that the apostle “sometimes calls” it sin, but declared that “the Catholic Church has never understood” it “to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again, but because it is of sin, and inclines to sin.”6 The Catechism calls it “the tinder for sin” (§1264), which, “without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins” (§2515). One human being alone is said to have been born free of the stain: Mary, “preserved immune from all stain of original sin” from the first moment of her conception (§491; see Mary).
Gregg Allison sums up the point at issue: Catholic theology “does not embrace total depravity and total inability,” and evangelicals who hold them “disagree with the Catholic view that, in some sense, human reason/will is sufficiently free so that, when moved by the grace of God, it is capable of cooperating with it.”7
Abilities and Inabilities
Because nature is wounded rather than dead, Rome assigns fallen man a real but limited range of powers.
What fallen man is able to do
Know God by reason. “Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason” (§36, quoting the First Vatican Council, 1870).
Know the moral law. The natural law “expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie” (§1954). It is “present in the heart of each man and established by reason” (§1956).
Choose freely. “By virtue of his soul and his spiritual powers of intellect and will, man is endowed with freedom, an ‘outstanding manifestation of the divine image’” (§1705, quoting the Second Vatican Council). Man “is created with free will and is master over his acts” (§1730), and this freedom “is the basis of praise or blame, merit or reproach” (§1732). He “still desires the good, but his nature bears the wound of original sin” (§1707).
Do natural good. Aquinas taught that “because human nature is not altogether corrupted by sin,” fallen man “can, by virtue of its natural endowments, work some particular good, as to build dwellings, plant vineyards, and the like.”8 Trent went further, anathematizing anyone who says “that all works which are done before justification, in what manner soever they be done, are truly sins.”9
Cooperate with grace, or refuse it. When God calls, the sinner is “disposed to turn” himself to justification “by freely assenting to, and co-operating with that said grace,” for “neither is man himself utterly inactive while he receives that inspiration, inasmuch as he is also able to reject it.” Trent anathematized anyone who says that the will, moved by God, “nowise co-operates” or “is merely in a passive state.”10 Once in grace, the baptized “can then merit for ourselves and for others the graces needed for our sanctification . . . and for the attainment of eternal life” (§2010).
What fallen man is unable to do
Know divine truth with ease. Reason meets “many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone” (§37), and “the precepts of natural law are not perceived by everyone clearly and immediately,” so that “sinful man needs grace and revelation” (§1960).
Move himself to justice. Fallen man is “not able, without the grace of God, by his own free will to move himself unto justice in His sight.” Trent condemned anyone who says that man can believe, hope, love, or repent “as he ought” without “the preventing inspiration of the Holy Ghost.”11
Merit the first grace. “No one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion” (§2010). Eternal life “surpasses the power of human intellect and will” (§1998).
Live without inner conflict. Man “is now inclined to evil and subject to error” and “is divided in himself” (§1707). Aquinas named four “wounds” of nature that follow the loss of original justice: ignorance in the reason, malice in the will, weakness in the irascible appetite, and concupiscence in the concupiscible.12
The line between ability and inability is drawn with precision. Grace must go first, but man is never merely passive; he cannot begin, but he can assent, cooperate, refuse, and, once justified, merit. “Justification establishes cooperation between God’s grace and man’s freedom” (§1993).
Development of the Doctrine
The Catechism itself traces the history in two strokes. The doctrine of original sin “was articulated more precisely in the fifth century, especially under the impulse of St. Augustine’s reflections against Pelagianism, and in the sixteenth century, in opposition to the Protestant Reformation.” Pelagius had held that man could live a good life “by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God’s grace”; “the first Protestant reformers, on the contrary, taught that original sin has radically perverted man and destroyed his freedom” (§406). Rome thus presents its doctrine as the middle way between two errors. The history shows how that middle was located.
Augustine and Pelagius (411–431). Against Pelagius, who denied that Adam’s sin corrupted his posterity, Augustine taught the bondage of the fallen will and the necessity of grace for every good act. The Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism in 418 (see Pelagius).
Semi-Pelagianism and Orange (529). Monks in southern Gaul, among them John Cassian, allowed that man might take the first step toward God and be met by grace. The Second Council of Orange answered in strongly Augustinian terms: “No man has anything of his own but untruth and sin,” and “the sin of the first man has so impaired and weakened free will that no one thereafter can either love God as he ought or believe in God or do good for God’s sake, unless the grace of divine mercy has preceded him.” Yet Orange tied the recovery of the will to the font: “after grace has been received through baptism, all baptized persons have the ability and responsibility, if they desire to labor faithfully, to perform with the aid and cooperation of Christ what is of essential importance in regard to the salvation of their soul.”13
Scholasticism (1100–1300). The schoolmen joined Augustine’s theology to Aristotle’s philosophy. Aquinas taught that original justice was a supernatural gift and that its loss left nature wounded but intact in its essential powers. Allison, following Leonardo De Chirico, contrasts the two traditions: “whereas the Augustinian tradition has stressed the concept of natura vitiata . . . the Thomistic tradition has instead insisted on the inner resources of nature’s capacitas dei.” On this question, he concludes, Catholic theology follows Thomas.14
Nominalism (1300–1500). The late medieval “modern way” of William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel went further still. By “doing one’s very best” (facere quod in se est), Timothy George explains, a sinner could earn a semi-merit, for “by his ordained power God had committed himself to bestow grace on everyone who does the best one can.” This was the theology in which Luther was trained, and from which he broke when “he came to see that what preceded grace was not a disposition but indisposition and active rebellion.”15
Trent (1546–1547). Facing Luther’s Bondage of the Will (1525) and the wider Reformation’s teaching on sin and grace, the council defined original sin in its fifth session (June 17, 1546) and the powers of the will in its sixth (January 13, 1547). It rejected Pelagius in its first canons on justification, and it rejected the Reformers in the fifth: “If any one shall say, that, since Adam’s sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing with a name only, yea, a title without a reality, a figment, in fine, brought into the Church by Satan; let him be anathema.”16
Against Augustinians within (1567–1713). After Trent, Rome condemned the strongest Augustinians in its own communion. Pius V censured Baius in 1567, including the proposition that “free-will, without the aid of God’s grace, avails only to commit sin.” In 1653 Innocent X condemned five propositions drawn from Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus, among them that “inward grace in the state of fallen nature is never resisted.”17 Clement XI completed the work against the Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel in the bull Unigenitus (1713).
The modern Church (1870–present). The First Vatican Council (1870) defined that God can be known with certainty by natural reason, and Pius XII’s Humani generis (1950) guarded the unity of the race in Adam. The Second Vatican Council placed new emphasis on human dignity and freedom, which the Catechism calls “an ‘outstanding manifestation of the divine image’” (§1705).
Influencing Factors
Several convictions shaped Rome’s estimate of human nature and hold it in place.
The continuity of nature and grace. Allison identifies the first axiom of the Catholic system as the interdependence of nature and grace: “Nature and grace are the two constitutive elements of the Catholic system, with sin as a serious yet not devastating secondary element. Nature, while wounded by sin, retains a capacity for grace, and grace elevates or perfects nature.”18 If grace perfects nature, nature must remain to be perfected.
Greek philosophy. Rome locates the image of God chiefly in the soul with its “spiritual powers of intellect and will” (§1705), and describes the fall as reason losing its rule over the passions and the body (§400). Allison judges that this emphasis “seems to betray more of an attachment to Platonic/Gnostic philosophy than to Scripture.”19 Aquinas’s Aristotelian account of the soul gave the scheme its technical form; Luther answered in 1517 that “compared with the study of theology, the whole of Aristotle is as darkness is to the light.”20 (See Platonic Influence.)
The sacramental system. A nature that “still possesses a capacity to receive, transmit, and cooperate with grace”21 is the kind of nature the seven sacraments require. If baptism is to remove original sin entirely, what remains in the baptized cannot be “truly and properly sin”; and if grace is infused to be cooperated with, the will must have power to cooperate.
Merit and moral responsibility. Rome grounds praise and blame, “merit or reproach” (§1732), in the power to choose between good and evil. A will in bondage seemed to its theologians to destroy responsibility, the use of commands, and the reality of reward.
Reaction against the Reformers. Trent defined its doctrine of man against Luther and Calvin, and the Catechism still sets it against “the first Protestant reformers” (§406). The later condemnations of Baius and Jansen show that Rome would not allow even its own sons to recover Augustine’s fuller teaching.
Tradition over text. Where Paul called indwelling desire “sin” (Romans 7:17–20), Trent declared that the Church “has never understood” it so (see The Nature of Man). The reading of the Church, not the plain sense of the apostle, decided the doctrine.
A Biblical Response
Scripture does not describe fallen man as wounded but as dead. “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). “The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:7). “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God . . . neither can he know them” (1 Corinthians 2:14). “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). The corruption reaches the heart itself: “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5); “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9); and it is present from conception: “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). The image of God is not an upper story laid on the man but the man himself, “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and it is the whole man that Christ renews “in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10).
Calvin saw how far the schools had drifted. In the medieval writers, he observed, “the common dogma came to be, that man was corrupted only in the sensual part of his nature, that reason remained entire, and will was scarcely impaired.”22 The Reformed and Baptist confessions answered with Scripture’s own estimate:
Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.
Westminster Confession, 9.3; also Second London Confession, 9.3
This is not a denial that fallen men make choices. As Michael Reeves and Tim Chester explain Luther’s point, “the problem of our sin goes as deep in us as it possibly can: all the way down into our hearts, shaping what we want and love.”23 The sinner wills freely what his heart loves, and his heart does not love God. Such a man does not need help to finish what he has begun; he needs to be raised. “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved)” (Ephesians 2:4–5). “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). The lower Rome sets the fall, the more of salvation it must leave to man; the deeper Scripture sets it, the more of salvation belongs to God alone (see Sola Gratia).
Rome and Scripture Compared
The differences between Roman Catholic teaching on the nature of man and the Scriptures are set side by side, with Catechism and Trent references, in Table RCC14 — Nature of Man.
