Preface of Thomas Bradwardine

PREFACE OF THOMAS DE ‖1 BRADWARDINE, CHANCELLOR OF LONDON, TO THE THREE BOOKS ON THE CAUSE OF GOD AGAINST PELAGIUS, AND ON THE POWER OF CAUSES.

By the petitions, and the repeated petitions, of many great men, heaped ‖2 upon me without cease, I am pressed to hand over to the lasting keeping of writing what I lately brought forth in passing speech, while campaigning in the scholastic camp, on the cause of God against Pelagius and on the power of causes. Yet beyond doubt, as the friends of God provoke and encourage me to plead in the cause of God, so the friends of Pelagius, more in number than these, call me back and frighten me off. For see (and I do not say it without being touched by grief of heart within): as once against the one prophet of God there were found eight hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the like, to whom a numberless people clung, so too today in this cause. How many, Lord, today fight with Pelagius for Free Choice against your gratuitous grace, and against Paul, the spiritual champion of grace? How many ‖3 today disdain your gratuitous grace, and fume that Free Choice alone suffices for salvation? Or, if they do make use of ‖4 grace, they either feign perfunctorily that it is necessary, or boast that they earn it by the strength of their own free choice, so that at least it appears in no way gratuitous but sold? How many, almighty God, impotent as they are, presuming on the power of their own choice, refuse the help of your cooperation in their works, saying with the wicked, "Depart from us"? 5 How many more, Lord, exalting the freedom of their choice, flee from your service? Or, if they confess at least with their lips that you cooperate with them, then like those proud and hateful citizens of yours of old they shrink from your reigning over them; nay, prouder than Lucifer, in no way content with equality with you, they most shamelessly strut to reign over you, King of Kings. For they do not fear to assert ‖6 that in a common action their will goes before as mistress and yours follows as handmaid; that they go before as lords and you follow like a servant; that they command like kings and you obey like a subject. Nay more, they attribute to their own will, in things contingently future, a liberty so entire 7 that even against the voice of the prophet they claim exemption from subjection to you; and your most free, most omnipotent and most immutable will, ‖8 once these things have passed over into the past,1 they labour to cast down from the high citadel of its ancient liberty and to subject to the irreparable servitude of a newfound necessity. O Lord my God, I cannot think of it without groaning: how many and how great the judges ‖92 who busily scheme to absolve and reconcile the Pelagians, condemned of old and banished from the bounds of the whole Church! How many swollen advocates shout on their behalf! How many disreputable proctors prosecute their case! How many more, Lord, lacking artificial arguments, turn to the inartificial,3 and, so as to raise up the Pelagian side at least by clamour, by horrible insults, abuse, laughter and gesture, strive to beat yours down! And how many, how innumerable, favour them! For almost the whole world has gone off after Pelagius into error. Arise therefore, Lord, judge your own cause;4 and him who upholds you, uphold, protect, strengthen, console. For you know that trusting nowhere in my own strength but in yours, so small a man takes up so great a cause.

10 But while I was long beseeching such things and anxiously praying, behold, lately, in the silence of a certain night, after I had poured out my heart before the Lord, in sleep I learned and found that it is he who after the storm makes calm, 11 and after weeping pours in exultation, and is truly near to all who call upon him. For I seemed to see myself, in daylight shed all around, lifted ‖12 high above the earth into the air, and so, ascending from the East toward the regions of the West, going forward unafraid; and that Pelagius, coming from the opposite side, seized my left hand and, locking his fingers in mine, strove with all his violence to drag me down to the earth. Girt with confidence in my own strength, I resisted him stoutly, and such a wrestling, not a little anxious, went on for long. But as Pelagius continually prevailed and dragged me almost to the depths, 13 I received in myself the answer of despair; yet, resisting with all my might, I fled with my whole heart to the divine help, and at once Pelagius, his hand loosed, was thrust headlong, and ‖14 with broken neck fell upon the earth, and with closed eyes lay dead on his back. I, however, remained above the earth, ascending and advancing in the air as before, rejoicing more gladly and wondering. Hence, strengthened by the spirit of fortitude, I drew hope that over proud Pelagius, the pestilent prince of the Pelagians (and therefore over his whole army), Christ's little one would triumph: not I, however, but his grace with me, I yet labouring with it according to my strength. For the cause is not mine, nor the war mine, but God's, the Lord of knowledge, of hosts and of powers; I [under him] sustain his part. Whose faces, then, whose insults, whose furies or terrors should I tremble at, fortified by the safest protection of so great a Patron? Wherefore let whoever is the Lord's join himself to me; nay, not to me, but let us both be joined to the Lord; let us stand together: who is against us? For I know that one man, with whom the Lord is, shall pursue a thousand adversaries, and two shall put ten thousand to flight.

Moreover, as the ancient Pelagians, puffed up with the windy name of the secular sciences, despised the theological consistory and demanded a philosophical one, so too do the modern. For I have heard certain advocates of Pelagius, though far advanced in sacred letters, affirming that Pelagius could never be refuted by natural and ‖15 philosophical reason, but was barely argued against, somehow, by certain rather bare theological authorities, and above all by the authority of the Church, which did not please the satraps. Wherefore I resolved to reform them by philosophical reasons and authorities. And because, moreover, all Pelagians alike, old and new, labour to pervert the canonical Scriptures and the Catholic doctors to the ruin of their own perversity, I judged it the more honest course to bring out the solid understanding of those texts. And because, coming in an immoderate multitude, they try to overwhelm God's party, I determined to repress them with a great crowd of God's witnesses, lest I too should seem to stand alone against so many beasts, especially in a cause so doubtful and so sublime. And who could accomplish these things in few words? With how many volumes did the holy Fathers cut down the forest of Pelagian heresies! And how many poisonous shoots still sprout and grow, manifold, from the ancient roots! For as of old, so now. For first, when the heresiarch of these men, Lucifer, unwilling to be under God but wishing to be beside him, had been cast down by Michael, 16 there arose Cain, reckoning that the sinner is by no means justified freely by God through grace freely given, but through antecedent merit; 17 and when he had been laid low by divine vengeance there arose Nimrod, who, as Josephus relates, persuaded men by no means to ascribe to God that happiness came to them, but that it was supplied to them by their own virtue, and to place their hope in their own virtue, not in God. The multitude too was ready to obey his commands, reckoning obedience to God a heavy servitude. And so he called men away from the fear of God, made them proud, and led them to the injury and contempt of God and to tyranny. 18 When his sacrilegious presumption had been blunted through the patriarch Abraham, there arose those vain-talkers and big-talkers who judged that their lips and their speech were from themselves, and therefore disdained to have God for their lord. Their sons too, the Sadducees, 19 as Josephus witnesses, seem to affirm that good and evil are set before men's choice, and that each by his own will, without God, chooses this or that. When these had been rebuked through the prophet, there arose certain Hebrew, Greek and Roman Christians who said they had received the grace of faith by their own merits; and when these had been refuted through the Apostle, 20 there arose Pelagius the Briton, who stirred up proud wars against the grace of God and his help. When he had been condemned by the Catholic Fathers, Julian and Celestius renewed the same heresy; and when it had been extinguished by the orthodox Fathers, it was raised again by Cassian, whom Prosper prosperously chastised. But about the same time the same heresy began to sprout most widely in Britain. On account of which (as the venerable Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People 21 and Henry of Huntingdon in the History of the English relate), Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, bishop of Troyes, though demons stirred up a most savage storm at sea, crossed the Ocean and vigorously uprooted it by arguments not only verbal but real, that is, by open miracles. 22 But lo, after a little while the pestilent shoots of the heresy already cut down grew green again, as the same chroniclers wrote, which the same Germanus and Severus, ‖23 bishop of Trier, coming into Britain, took care to cut back a second time. Still, before and after, in the course of time, the diligence of the Roman see purged Ireland,5 infected with the remnants of this plague, by salutary letters, the same venerable Bede being witness. Of these also St Prosper makes mention; 24 and though this foolish fig-tree has been so often cut down, so often uprooted, so often burned, reduced to ash and trampled to nothing, how widely and densely does it still not cease to sprout, and to propagate its vicious offshoots the more dangerously, the more subtly than usual?

Being zealous therefore with zeal for the cause of God, I put my hand, knowingly, into a terrible flame. For I am not ignorant how the pestilent Pelagians, with seething mind, will bark in tumultuous clamour and strive with bared teeth to tear ‖25 this little paper; and these above all are wont to carp the more freely at other men's work who have published nothing of their own. But did not, as Josephus relates, the Chaldaeans and Mesopotamians rise up against Abraham for this very cause? Did not the ancient true prophets suffer very many things from the false prophets for the cause of God? 26 Did not certain unlearned men charge the most learned Paul with madness and deprave his glorious Epistles? Did not Julian, the pupil of Pelagius, yelp ‖27 with how many accusations at the most glorious Augustine, imitator of the Apostle and most strenuous defender of grace against the Pelagians ungrateful to grace, while he was yet living, and boast that he would winnow his books and lay bare and run through the impiety of his opinions? Did not other defenders of Pelagius in Gaul, after Augustine had passed from death to life, presume to censure his writings? Did not many in many ways trample 28 the best and holy teaching of Christ and of the Fathers, their deeds and words? And who, or what sort of man, am I? I know that I am not better than my fathers, so great, nor greater than my Lord. Yet with my whole heart I ever desire a just corrector, not the oil of the sinner: one who, rebuking mercifully, would pursue ‖29 not the person but the fault, not the man but the error. For this I would wish, and think I do, for myself and for others, God being witness.

Moreover, whoever wishes to treat this one cause thoroughly must, it seems, begin higher up and discourse studiously on the power of all causes; but, my own measure weighed, I am much deterred by the so inaccessible sublimity of the matter, its so impenetrable depth, its so impassable immensity, and its so inextricable difficulty. Is it not reckoned among the philosophers most difficult, 30 and therefore fitting the wise man alone, to know the causes of things? Wherefore the Poet says: 31 Happy he who could know the causes of things. Indeed, to search out the natural and proximate causes of beings holds no small difficulty and labour: how much more to transcend the whole universe of these causes by a flight of the mind weighed down by the corruption of the body; to penetrate as far as the impenetrable inner shrine of the supernatural causes, most high, inaccessible and invisible; to behold them keenly with the dim eye of a night-owl; and likewise to raise others like oneself and purge their eyes, that they too may likewise contemplate them. Does there not belong to this inquiry the scrutiny of the universe of causes, of the one first cause, of the production, conservation and every action of things, of the divine power, knowledge and will, of foreknowledge and providence, of predestination, election, reprobation and grace, of fate, chance and fortune, of free choice, merit and sin, of the necessity or contingency of future things, together with other ‖32 anxieties dependent on and emerging from them, so many and so great? ‖33 This inquiry, then, comprehends the more sealed mysteries of all Logic, Physics, Astronomy, Ethics and Metaphysics or divine science; here too is the most disputed problem of all nations and tongues, ranks, sexes and persons, from whose clamorous ventilation not even the simpleton restrains himself, nor the old woman. Let your discernment observe, I pray, how perfunctorily all those glorious philosophers 34 greeted this so wanton Muse, scarcely from the threshold. Wherefore Minerva herself,6 answering a certain pupil of hers who anxiously complained about these things, said: "You call me to a matter the greatest of all to seek out, for which scarcely anything, though exhausted, would suffice." Did not the prophets too, seeing most clearly the excellence of some of these secrets with sight thrown back, wonder at them like the bleary-eyed and the ignorant, and therefore complaining? Did not he whose like was not on the earth, not explaining one small article of divine providence but wondering at it querulously, say: "Bear with me, 35 that I too may speak, and after my words, if it seems good, laugh. Is my dispute against a man, that I should not rightly be grieved? Attend to me and be astonished, and lay your finger on your mouth; and I, when I remember, am afraid, and trembling shakes my flesh: why then do the wicked live, are they raised up and strengthened with riches?" Did not also he who was found according to God's heart, who rejoiced that he understood above all who taught him, even above the elders, being zealous over the prosperity of sinners, his feet almost moved and his steps well-nigh slipped, conclude that without cause he had justified his heart and in vain chastised himself; and at once reproving himself for this, because so he would condemn the sons of God, add that he had thought to know? But this was labour, until, entering the sanctuary of God, he there attained understanding. Did not also that beloved of the Lord,7 who excelled all in wisdom, complain very much that all things befall the just and the wicked alike, and assert this to be the worst of all things; 36 nay, judging it most vain that the just are shaken by adversities as though wicked and the wicked cherished with prosperity as though just, he professes that even the wise man can attain no reason of all the works of God. Did not also that prophet, sanctified in the womb, so sublime that he was called "exalted to the Lord,"8 37 wondering and complaining, say: "Just are you, Lord, if I dispute with you; yet I will speak just things to you: why does the way of the wicked prosper, why is it well with all who transgress and act wickedly?" Did not also the glorious Apostles, glorying in the first-fruits of the Spirit, likewise wonder at like things? Did not that most clear vessel of election, so great a secretary of God that, rapt even to the third heaven, he was made privy to the divine secrets, searching a certain bosom of this abyss, swallowed up by its depth, find himself compelled to cry out, 38 "O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how incomprehensible are his judgments and unsearchable his ways!"? Did not also that prince of the apostolic company, the key-bearer of heaven, 39 full of the Holy Spirit, affirm that Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote Epistles containing certain things hard to understand? But where, I ask, in all those Epistles is there a more hidden difficulty than in the pits of this matter? Moreover, how many and how famous schools of study, how many and how brilliant wits of philosophers and theologians, in so many past ages, have most laboriously ventilated this Chaos; and how much they accomplished, and how much they left for posterity to ventilate, who does not see? For very many things contained in it seem not only not most carefully ventilated, but not even threshed to the winnowing-fan. Here then is the infinite Chaos of Anaxagoras, here the inextricable Labyrinth of Daedalus, here the monstrous miracle of the Hydra: nay, a thing more monstrous than the Hydra. For in her, when one head was cut off, three straightway grew back; 40 but here, as experience and Pallas attest, when one doubt is cut off innumerable others are reborn. Who, then, will unfold in a short volume so many and so winding wrappings of things? Is not this also the place which is called by the wise the Fall of the Wise? 41 Is not this the peril of Charybdis and Scylla, to be dreaded by anyone? For how many, wishing to pass Charybdis, have struck on ragged Scylla? And how many, taking care to avoid Scylla, have fallen into the whirlpool of Charybdis? Who then would presume himself safe to sail through the middle? But I know what I shall do: I shall commit myself to that ship which cannot perish, the ship of Peter. For in it our sole author and master, Christ, sitting most safely, is read to have taught, mystically intimating to us that with that little ship of Peter, with the Roman Church, the authority and magisterium of all Christian doctrine would remain. To the judgment, therefore, of so authentic and so great a mistress I wholly subject myself and all my writings, written or to be written, and submit entirely; whose protection, where I shall have fought against the enemies of God; correction, where I shall have erred; approval, where I shall have judged rightly, I most urgently beg with all my prayers. Against all these difficulties, too, each and every one, that strong helper sweetly comforts me, with whom no word is impossible or difficult. For I know, Lord God, I know, that you do not despise, do not desert, do not abandon those who uphold you; but you uphold, teach, cherish, surround, strengthen and confirm them. Relying therefore on this confidence, about to campaign under your most unconquered standards, I take up your cause forthwith.

Those who deign to look into this little work should note, regarding the citations of the text of Aristotle, that where Averroes in commenting expounds it, the citation is taken according to his partitions and the sections of the commentaries; elsewhere, according to the chapter divisions customary with others.