"non . . . deus inpossibilia iubet, sed iubendo admonet et facere quod possis et petere quod non possis."
St. Augustine, De natura et gratia (415) xliii.50, trans. Roland J. Teske, WSA I/23, 250. =CSEL 60, 270 ll. 20-22. Cf. Council of Trent VI.11 (ed. Tanner, vol. 2, p. 675): "God does not command the impossible, but by commanding he instructs you both to do what you can and to pray for what you cannot, and he gives his aid to enable you; for his commandments are not heavy, his yoke is sweet and his burden light."
Yet if (for example) Pascal was right about "the [supposedly] Augustinian doctrine of the double abandonment [(double délaissement)] of the just by God" (who may withhold first the grace to pray and then, as a consequence of the failure to pray, the grace to keep the commandments), then we are as dependent on an inscrutable grace for the ability to ask (pray) as on an inscrutable grace for the ability to act (keep the commandments). See Martine Pécharman, "Les écrits sur la grâce, ou de la bonne manière d’être Augustinien," Seventeenth-century French studies 35, no. 2 (December 2013): 110-115 (106-115), which seems to imply (?) that Pascal was going beyond Trent in insisting upon this interpretation, but was nonetheless "doing the work of a theologian" (115) thereby. For Pascal, to insist that God sometimes does grant the just the grace to keep the commandments was to oppose the Manichaeans and Lutherans, but to insist that God is free to withhold the grace to pray was to oppose the Pelagians.
Yet if (for example) Pascal was right about "the [supposedly] Augustinian doctrine of the double abandonment [(double délaissement)] of the just by God" (who may withhold first the grace to pray and then, as a consequence of the failure to pray, the grace to keep the commandments), then we are as dependent on an inscrutable grace for the ability to ask (pray) as on an inscrutable grace for the ability to act (keep the commandments). See Martine Pécharman, "Les écrits sur la grâce, ou de la bonne manière d’être Augustinien," Seventeenth-century French studies 35, no. 2 (December 2013): 110-115 (106-115), which seems to imply (?) that Pascal was going beyond Trent in insisting upon this interpretation, but was nonetheless "doing the work of a theologian" (115) thereby. For Pascal, to insist that God sometimes does grant the just the grace to keep the commandments was to oppose the Manichaeans and Lutherans, but to insist that God is free to withhold the grace to pray was to oppose the Pelagians.
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