For Thomists: reprobation, guilt and the impossibility of avoiding sin

[Neithan]

In light of the Catholic dogma that:

In the condition of fallen nature it is morally impossible for man without restoring grace (gratia sanans) to fulfil the entire moral law and to overcome all serious temptations for any considerable period of time. (Sent. certa.)

I find Aquinas’ reply to the third objection in his article on reprobation troubling:

Objection 3. Further, to no one ought anything be imputed which he cannot avoid. But if God reprobates anyone, that one must perish. For it is said (Ecclesiastes 7:14): “Consider the works of God, that no man can correct whom He hath despised.” Therefore it could not be imputed to any man, were he to perish. But this is false. Therefore God does not reprobate anyone.

Reply to Objection 3. Reprobation by God does not take anything away from the power of the person reprobated. Hence, when it is said that the reprobated cannot obtain grace, this must not be understood as implying absolute impossibility: but only conditional impossibility: as was said above (19, 3), that the predestined must necessarily be saved; yet a conditional necessity, which does not do away with the liberty of choice. Whence, although anyone reprobated by God cannot acquire grace, nevertheless that he falls into this or that particular sin comes from the use of his free-will. Hence it is rightly imputed to him as guilt.

St. Thomas says that reprobation “does not take anything away from the power of the person reprobated”; but we are told that God has not endowed our nature with sufficient power to fulfill the moral law.

For the reprobate, this would appear to make free-will moot, because in any “considerable period of time” there will be “serious temptations” that are “morally impossible” for the reprobate to overcome without grace, which is not given to him/her.

Basically, my question would be: how could God justly condemn a person for failing to keep a law he/she cannot possibly keep?

It would seem that St. Thomas’ reply would be something along the lines of admitting the impossibility of someone to avoid sin without grace on the condition that God does not offer it, however, he/she is still guilty of a particular sin because it was chosen as opposed to some other sin. Is that right?
But to this I would have to object that if a person succeeds in resisting serious temptations for some time there will eventually come a point where they can no longer resist, and therefore a particular sin to which they were tempted would be impossible to avoid.
How can God justly impute guilt when the reprobate’s will at some point in time was weakened so far as being incapable of fleeing or resisting the temptation to sin? In other words, their will was no longer free?

I know there are some knowledgable Thomists out there in these forums - and any help with this would be very greatly appreciated!

 

[Evoken]

When St. Thomas speaks about reprobation what he has in mind is the gift of eternal glory only. Reprobation as he says, does not takes anything away from the reprobate, such as their free will, the allocation of sufficient graces which make it possible to fulfill God’s commands and even the allocation of efficacious graces.

A common misunderstanding when it comes to this is the idea that efficacious grace is granted just to the elect and not to the reprobate. This is not the case. Just because someone is reprobated it does not means that this person is deprived of grace absolutely. Like the parable of the sower illustrates, some do come to genuine faith and later fall away. So the reprobate can be genuine believers and cooperate with grace for some time. God simply has not granted to them the gift of eternal life, so they will not obtain it. In that sense is which reprobation takes place, as St. Thomas says in the same article: “as He does not wish this particular good–namely, eternal life–He is said to hate or reprobated them.”

Evo

 

[Neithan]

Thank you very much! That is enlightening.

So just to clarify my understanding, what would [hypothetically] happen to a reprobate who dies without ever having committed a grave sin? I assume this is theoretically possible given that everyone has sufficient - and I understand this to mean actual rather than habitual - grace given to their free-will to enable them to avoid serious temptations.

In other words, what happens to a soul that dies in original sin having only venial guilt?
Would they go to a hell devoid of any serious torment, kinda like Dante’s Virgil?