More on the donum superadditum and the unBiblical Roman Doctrine of Grace

There are more than a few areas where Protestants and Roman Catholics differ at a very fundamental level. One of these is over the very meaning of the word "grace." And when we talk about something as fundamental as being "saved by grace," we really end up talking about two different things.

I noted yesterday at the top of my post (which unfortunately was ignored in the comments throughout the day) how 1 Clement (supposably a pope!) misunderstood the New Testament concept of grace. That's one area of study that I hope to follow through with here.

A second area of fundamental difference (closely related) is in the doctrine of man. In Protestant theology, man was very good when God created him. In Roman Catholic doctrine, natural man wasn't quite good enough, and so over time and apparantly upon reflection the Roman church, needed something more.

Ludwig Ott, in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (103 ff.) puts it this way:

Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace. (De Fide.)

The Council of Trent, in opposition to Pelagianism and to modern Rationalism, teaches: If anyone will not confess that when the first man Adam had transgressed the mandate of God in paradice he did not immediately lose the sanctity and justice in which he had been constituted ... [let him be anathema -- Council of Trent, session V (June 17, 1546) Decree on Original Sin, D. 788]

That's what the dogma is. What follows is sort of like the supporting cast, the theological underpinnings of the dogma:

The elevation to the state of grace is indicated by the intimacy between God and the progenitors of the human race in Paradise. A scriptural proof is provided by St. Paul's teaching on the Redemption. The Apostle teaches that Christ, the second Adam, restored what the first Adam had lost, the state of holiness and justice. But if he had lost it, he must previously have received it.

Ott gives the following Scriptural verses in support of this doctrine: Romans 5:12 ff, Ephesians 1:10, Ephesians 4:23 ff, 1 Corinthians 6:11, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15, Romans 5:10 ff (not sure why he didn't list this up with 5:12, except maybe that this is an illustration again of how Roman Catholics treat the Bible: it's not God's Word to us, but a series of "proof-texts" to be mined in support of Catholic dogma, wherever they can find it.), and Romans 8:14 ff.) Continuing with Ott (Latin omitted):

The Fathers find the supernatural endowment with grace indicated in 1:26 (supernatural identity of image and likeness with God); in Genesis 2:7 (supernatural life-principle), and in [the apocryphal] Ecclesiasticus 7:30 ("Only this have I found that God made man right").

St. Augustine declars that our renewal (Eph 4:23) consists in this that: "We have received justice from which man had fallen off through sin" (De Gen. ad Litt. VI 24, 35). St. John Damascene says: "The Creator has communicated His Divine Grace to man and thereby made him a participant in his community" (De fide orth. II 30).

As regards the time of man's elevation to the state of grace, most theologians, including St. Thomas and his school, are of the opinion that the first men were created in the state of sanctifying grace. Petrus Lombardus and the Franciscan school, on the other hand, teach that the first human beings on their creation received only the preternatural gifts of integrity, and were required to prepare themselves with the help of actual grace for the reception of sanctifying grace. The Council of Trent has deliberately left the question undecided.

So this is the doctrine of the donum superadditum. Ryan posted a comment fairly far down the other thread, a selection by Gordon Clark that goes into some detail about the origin of this doctrine, and I thought it would be helpful to reproduce some portion of it:

"The idea that God created man in his own image is so clearly stated in Genesis that the early church fathers could not miss it. It is also such an amazing idea that they could not refrain from discussing it. Some of the first attempts were, naturally, less than intelligible. For example, Gregory of Nyssa expatiates in flowery metaphors conveying awe of the subject, but which lack any explanatory clarity. Well, perhaps there is one clear point: The image has something to do with human intelligence. This is at least better than Justin Martyr’s identification of it with the bodily form. Augustine took the image to be the knowledge of the truth, and he took the likeness to be the love of virtue. In his Summa Theologica (Q. 93, Art. 9) after stating some views to be rejected, Thomas Aquinas in his usual form writes, “On the contrary, Augustine says, ‘Some consider that these two were mentioned not without reason, namely image and likeness, since if they meant the same, one would have sufficed.’ “This attempt to distinguish rather than to identify image and likeness was not one of Augustine’s happiest tentatives. If the Bible were written in the technical language of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one could well imagine that the two words bore different meanings. But in literary language such as the Bible uses, two such words can be synonymously used for the sake of emphasis. The Psalms are replete with this device: “I cried unto Thee, O Lord, and unto the Lord I made my supplication”; and “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, and whose sin is covered,” where there are two pairs of synonyms; and “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” There are many such.

Even so, it is not fatal to the doctrines of grace if a distinction, without faulty additions, is made between image and likeness. Since the New Testament refers to knowledge and righteousness, we could call the one the image and the other the likeness. Such a speculation, however, is rather fanciful and futile. One must therefore consider what distinction the Roman church imposed on the terms and how it fitted into a distortion of Biblical truth."

"In support of the distinction, Thomas had already (Q. 93,Art. 1) argued that where an image exists, there must be likeness; but a likeness does not necessarily mean an image. Now, the Roman church developed this, which so far is innocuous, into something that contradicts important parts of the Biblical message. Their present view is that the image itself is rationality, created because, when, and as man was created. But after man was created, God gave him an extra gift, a donum superadditum, the likeness, defined as original righteousness. Man therefore was not strictly created righteous. Adam was at first morally neutral. Perhaps he was not even neutral. Bellarmin speaks of the original Adam, composed of body and soul, as disordered and diseased, afflicted with a morbus or languor that needed a remedy. Yet Bellarmin does not quite say that this morbus is sin; it is rather something unfortunate and less than ideal. To remedy this defect God gave the additional gift of righteousness. Adam’s fall then resulted in the loss of original righteousness, but he fell only to the neutral moral level on which he was created. In this state, because of his free will, he is able-at least in some low degree-to please God.

Obviously this view has soteriological implications...One horrendous implication of all this is that although Christ’s death remains necessary to salvation, it is not sufficient. Human merit is indispensable.

However logically implicated this soteriology is, the present study should not stray too far from the image itself. Above, it was said that an assertion of a distinction between image and likeness, by itself, is not fatal. But it is not Biblical either. Scripture makes no distinction between image and likeness. Not only does the New Testament make nothing of such a distinction, even in Genesis the two words are used interchangeably. Genesis 1:27 uses the word image alone, and Genesis 5:1 uses likeness alone, though in each case the whole is intended. The likeness therefore is not an extra gadget attached to man after his creation, not a donum superadditum, like a suit of clothes that he could take off. It is rather the unitary person."

- Gordon Clark, "The Biblical Doctrine of Man" (pgs. 11-14)

My hope is that more of this will follow -- I do want to get into Torrance's study of how the definition of the word "Grace" changed over time -- and how the Roman church, at least, lost its original meaning in favor of later constructions. That will have to come later.

The donum superadditum and the doctrine of man: a foundational difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics

At the heart of the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, there are key differences understandings, both in terms of their understanding of the doctrine of God, but also of the doctrine of Man.

Over at Steven Wedgeworth's Wedgewords, Peter Escalante has, in the context of a discussion about civil authority, given a fairly succinct overview of one of the key differences. I'm not fully prepared to engage in a discussion of all of this -- it involves different concepts of man, and different consequences in terms of the doctrine of justification. But I've been following this excellent discussion, and I wanted to pass it along while it was still fresh in my mind.

It involves Rome's understanding of the donum superadditum with regard to the state that Adam was in before he fell. Briefly, Protestants say that man was "very good," and when he fell, it resulted in a spiritual death, and hence, God's imputation of righteousness and union with Christ is what's required to restore man back to his pristine, pre-fall state. Rome, on the other hand (thanks to Augustine's neopolatonism and some refinement by medieval theologians), holds that, not only was Adam "very good," but that he had some "super-added gift of grace" that he lost in the fall, and it is that "superadded grace" that needs to be restored. Hence the "infusion of grace" in Roman doctrine. [This accounts for the difference in which Calvin described man as "spiritually dead," and hence "totally inable" or "totally depraved," whereas Roman Catholics merely believe that man was "impaired" but with an otherwise full capacity to please God with his own grace-assisted works.]

Peter describes it this way:

For us, man originally had connatural beatitude, and when he fell, the reduced and superficial participation in that beatitude still possible to him, in an extrinsic way, was what we call temporal felicity or civic righteousness. But for RC, original felicity was a donum superadditum, and the status of original creation was thus left unclear, with at the very least a strong suggestion that much of what we think of as creation is in fact the effect of the Fall- an anti-Hebraic gnosticism which marred the thought of the ancient Greek church (and modern EO), and Rome too, though a more Biblical countertendency was present in the West and finally came into full victory with the Reformation. Given that the RC think of the New Covenant as the restoration of the donum superadditum, its relation to the temporal is ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. But for us, the New Covenant a) disables the heteronomous and unattainable Law which measured our alienation, and b) grants full citizenship in the Kingdom of God, simply by trust in Christ and union with Him. This means that the reality of original beatitude is poured into the forms of the creational order, and slowly transforms it spiritually, until all things shall be made new.

There are many, many concepts tied up in this one little paragraph, and it would (and will) take a long time to extract the meaning from them. But the one I want to focus on is that, right from the outset of their understanding of man, Protestants and Catholics differ.

John Fesko, in his "Justification," describes this situation with respect to the "donum superadditum":

It seems as though much of the debate over infused versus imputed righteousness hinges upon the presuppositions of each party. The typical Reformed understanding is that Adam was created upright, or righteous, and that God justified, or declared righteous, the initial creation as well as man in his declaration that everything was "very good" (Gen 1:31). We see the Westminster Larger Catechism echo this point when it states that God created man in "righteousness, and holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts, and the power to fulfill it" (q. 17). By way of contrast, the typical Roman Catholic understanding of Adam's original state holds to the necessity of infused righteousness. Roman Catholic theologians typically hold to the idea of the donum superadditum ("superadded gift"). Medieval Roman Catholic theologians, for example, argue that the donum superadditum was a part of the original constitution of man, that it represented his original capacity for righteousness. We see then, from the outset, that man in his fallen state required infused righteousness in the form of the donum superadditum. If man requires infused righteousness in the prefall state, then he would most assuredly require it in his sin-fallen but redeemed state. The original state of man, then, is an issue that must feature in any dialogues over the question of imputation (John Fesko "Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine" Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing Company, pg 372.)

Michael Horton, too, in his "Covenant and Salvation," expands on this concept greatly. "According to the federal theologians, Adam and Eve were never in a state of grace before the fall. Endowed in their creation with all of the requisite gifts for fulfilling God's eschatological purposes, there was nothing lacking requiring a gracious supplement" (194).

If anyone is interested, Horton develops this topic quite extensively, relying on Bavinck's account.

I've looked into this to some degree, and my hope is to discuss it in great detail once I've worked my way through the early church. But it is one of the key differences, and it is one of the distinctions that the Reformers made -- a (very likely unwitting) Roman misunderstanding and accretion that somehow became the law of the land at Trent.