(continued)
Putting merit into our relationship with God introduces many complexities, which I believe leads the Catholic Church into distinguishing among strict, condign and congruous merit. Even then look at some questions that arise from merit when looking at indulgences.
Indulgences are supposed to draw on the treasury of merits which includes the excess merits of the saints. How can merit be applied on behalf of another unless you are looking at strict merit. Also referring to excess merits suggests some minimum, without which how can there be an excess. Then what is the minimum?
OK, here I think you really have gone too far, as you stated in the first page of your post. Discussing God and/or the bible introduces many complexities no matter who you are or which church to which you belong. You didn’t say this was a bad thing. Do you think it’s not appropriate for the Church that God founded to teach the differing forms of merit (which are also used in areas completely absent of the concept of God)?
Nature of merit:
…the property of merit can be found only in works that are positively good, whilst bad works, whether they benefit or injure a third party, contain nothing but demerit (
demeritum) and consequently deserve punishment. Thus the good workman certainly deserves the reward of his labour, and the thief deserves the punishment of his crime.
From this it naturally follows that merit and reward, demerit and punishment, bear to each other the relation of deed and return; they are correlative terms of which one postulates the other. Reward is due to merit, and the reward is in proportion to the merit. This leads to the third condition, viz., that merit supposes two distinct persons, the one who acquires the merit and the other who rewards it; for the idea of self-reward is just as contradictory as that of self-punishment.
Lastly, the relation between merit and reward furnishes the intrinsic reason why in the matter of service and its remuneration the guiding norm can be only the virtue of justice, and not disinterested kindness or pure mercy; for it would destroy the very notion of reward to conceive of it as a free gift of bounty (cf. Romans 11:6). If, however, salutary acts can in virtue of the Divine justice give the right to an eternal reward, this is possible only because they themselves have their root in gratuitous grace, and consequently are of their very nature dependent ultimately on grace, as the Council of Trent emphatically declares (Sess. VI, cap. xvi, in Denzinger, 10th ed., Freiburg, 1908, n. 810): “the Lord . . . whose bounty towards all men is so great, that He will have the things, which are His own gifts, be their merits.”
Ethics and theology clearly distinguish two kinds of merit:
•Condign merit or merit in the strict sense of the word (
meritum adœquatum sive de condigno), and
•congruous or quasi-merit (
meritum inadœquatum sive de congruo).
Condign merit supposes an equality between service and return; it is measured by commutative justice (
justitia commutativa), and thus gives a real claim to a reward.
Congruous merit, owing to its inadequacy and the lack of intrinsic proportion between the service and the recompense, claims a reward
only on the ground of equity.
The essential difference between
meritum de condigno and
meritum de congruo is based on the fact that, besides those works which claim a remuneration under pain of violating strict justice (as in contracts between employer and employee, in buying and selling, etc.), there are also other meritorious works which at most are entitled to reward or honour for reasons of equity (
ex œquitate) or mere distributive justice (
ex iustitia distributiva), as in the case of gratuities and military decorations.
From an ethical point of view the difference practically amounts to this that, if the reward due to condign merit be withheld, there is a violation of right and justice and the consequent obligation in conscience to make restitution, while, in the case of congruous merit, to withhold the reward involves no violation of right and no obligation to restore, it being merely an offence against what is fitting or a matter of personal discrimination (acceptio personarum). Hence the reward of congruous merit always depends in great measure on the kindness and liberality of the giver, though not purely and simply on his good will.
In applying these notions of merit to man’s relation to God it is especially necessary to keep in mind the fundamental truth that the virtue of justice cannot be brought forward as the basis of a real title for a Divine reward either in the natural or in the supernatural order. The simple reason is that God, being self-existent, absolutely independent, and sovereign, can be in no respect bound in justice with regard to his creatures.
Properly speaking, man possesses nothing of his own; all that he has and all that he does is a gift of God, and, since God is infinitely self-sufficient, there is no advantage or benefit which man can by his services confer upon Him.
Hence on the part of God there can only be question of a gratuitous promise of reward for certain good works. For such works He owes the promised reward, not in justice or equity, but solely because
He has freely bound himself, i.e., because of His own attributes of veracity and fidelity. It is on this ground alone that we can speak of Divine justice at all, and apply the principle:
Do ut des (cf. St. Augustine, Serm. clviii, c. ii, in P.L., XXXVIII, 863).
newadvent.org/cathen/10202b.htm
[all italics, underlines, and bolding are added]
-----continued in next post (didn’t I say this would happen?)-----
