Theological Theses · §2368 · Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu

Andres de Vega: man wholly passive, with the Nominalists

Thesis XLIX. Andres de Vega, however, a man of no small note among the doctors who attended the Council of Trent, assigns to operating grace the same things as the doctors just named, namely the holy thought and the first movement of the will by which a person is suddenly moved toward good. But he holds that God is said to work these in us without us for a different reason.

His reason is that in producing that movement and that holy thought God alone acts physically, while the man is entirely passive: in it he not only does not act freely, but does not even produce any action physically.

What led this doctor to that view is that, with the scholastics called Nominalists, he thought that God, as sole efficient cause, could produce in a man an act of understanding or of willing while the intellect and will were wholly passive and did nothing at all, even though the man shaped by that quality is said to understand and to will.

Though these are expressed grammatically as a man's actions, in that case they are not really actions or products of the mind and will, but only qualities that by their formal effect make the man understanding and willing. On this see Vasquez, chapter 3 of the disputation just cited.

Latin

XLIX. Caeterum Andreas Vega, inter Doctores illos qui Concilio Tridentino interfuerunt non parum celebris, eadem quidem, quae jam dicti Doctores, ad gratiam operantem refert, nempe sanctam cogitationem & primum motum voluntatis, quo homo subito movetur ad bonum. Sed censet alia de causa Deum dici ista in nobis sine nobis operari. Nimirum quia ad istius motus, & sanctae istius cogitationis productionem, Deus solus physice operatur, homo autem passive omnino se habet; In eo siquidem hominem non solum non agere libere, sed nequidem physice actionem ullam elicere. Quod autem istum Doctorem impulit ut ita sentiret, illud est, quod cum Scholasticis illis, qui Mominales appellantur, existimavit in homine a solo Deo efficiente posse produci intellectionem, & volitionem aliquam, intellectu & voluntate omnino patiente, nec agente ullo modo, etiamsi illa qualitate homo informatus intelligere & velle dicatur: quia licet ista grammatice ut actiones hominis exprimantur, non sunt tamen revera, in eo casu, actiones & productiones mentis & voluntatis, sed solum qualitates, quae suo effectu formali reddunt hominem intelligentem & volentem, qua de re videndus Vasquez disputationis modo citatae cap. 3.

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