Bellarmine: God alone is the moral cause of the first willing
Thesis LI. This is Bellarmine's view. He argues that God can rightly be said to work in us without us that first deliberate act of willing by which we turn to God, even though our will produces it freely and not merely physically.
'If we consider the efficient cause of this act,' he says, 'it is not only God through special help but also the will through free choice, and in this sense God does not work it without us. But if we consider its moral cause, that is, the cause that persuades, urges and advises, that cause is God alone.
For the will does not drive itself by persuading and urging itself to will what it does not will; it is God who, speaking inwardly to the soul by his inspirations, urges and persuades it to will.'
On his view, then, operating grace is the grace that comes before our effort and diligence and brings it about that we will what we did not will before. It does so without our working to make ourselves will, though not without our freely consenting when we will.
Latin
LI. Haec est sententia Bellarmini, qui pertendit merito posse dici Deum operari in nobis, sine nobis, primum illud Velle deliberatum, quo ad Deum convertimur: licet non tantum physice, sed etiam libere a voluntate nostra eliciatur. Nam, inquit, si consideremus causam efficientem illius actus, ea non solum est Deus per auxilium speciale; sed etiam voluntas per liberum arbitrium; & hoc modo Deus illum operatur non sine nobis. At si consideremus causam ejusdem actus moralem, id est, causam suadendo, hortando, consulendo, ea solus est Deus. Non enim ipsa se voluntas impellit suadendo, & hortando, ut velit quod non vult; sed Deus per inspirationes suas intus animae loquens, ei suadet, & persuadet ut velit. Igitur, juxta illum, gratia operans est, quae praevenit conatum & industriam nostram, & operatur ut velimus quod antea nolebamus, sine nobis operantibus ut velimus; non tamen sine nobis libere consentientibus, dum volumus.