§ 1. On Merit

Notion and general conditions. 1. Merit is the retribution, or quasi-price, of a good work ¹. For after it has been done, a good work is, as good, worthy of fitting retribution, or wages, before him to whom it is useful and acceptable in some way, or to whom it is ordered ²; and the action in which this title is present is called meritorious.

2. The common conditions of every merit are seen to be these: peace between the agent and the one making retribution, for a work done in the state of offense cannot be acceptable to the offended person ¹; a work freely done; a relation of the work to another's service; proportion between the work and the price; acceptance by him in whose service the work is offered.

Moreover the relation to another's good can either be innate in the work, or connatural, or it must be completed by a certain intention. Thus works by which a servant serves his master, indeed whatever things are nobly done by a son, are naturally referred to the master, to the father who is thereby honored; on the contrary, a literary work is indeed apt of itself to please readers, but it will bring honor or other utility only to those for whose sake the labor has been undertaken, or to whom it is offered to be read; and so a certain dedication or new intention must be added. Yet this intention, which accedes to a work complete in itself, must be carefully distinguished from the intention which constitutes and specifies the act.

¹ 1, 2, q. 114, art. 1; and q. 21, art. 4.

² 1, 2, q. 114, art. 2, ad 3.

¹ 1, 2, q. 114, art. 2, ad 3; and q. 21, art. 4.

Division. Merit can be human, before men, or theological, before God. The latter is said broadly of any divine remuneration, even temporal; strictly, of the retribution of eternal life.

Theological merit understood strictly in this way is customarily distinguished into merit de condigno and merit de congruo. Merit de condigno means the title of some justice or equality of proportion between the action and eternal life, insofar as the work truly becomes worthy of eternal life from divine ordination and the quality of the work. But in the dignity of the work, the dignity of the one working is included. Merit de congruo means a partial or inadequate title, to which nevertheless retribution is to be connected by some equity. Just as merit de condigno itself depends both upon divine ordination and upon man's free action, so there seems to us to be a twofold root of merit de congruo: one, the grace of God inviting, to which it is consonant that what He has begun He bring to its end; the other, the good effort of man: for it is fitting "that to a man working according to his own virtue God should recompense according to the excellence of His own virtue" ¹. Merit de condigno infallibly brings an increase of sanctifying grace or glory; merit de congruo gives actual aids, but is not infallibly joined with sanctifying grace, because man does not necessarily furnish the required cooperation. But for both kinds of merit the state of a wayfarer is required, since both immediately or mediately regard the retribution of eternal life.

Natural merit would befit the works of a man not elevated; supernatural merit is the merit of the present order; it befits the works which elevated man effects from grace.

¹ 1, 2, q. 114, art. 3.

Note concerning theological merit. From elsewhere we already know that nothing can be offered to God by a rational creature except external glory, which God wills as wise and holy, but does not seek as needy. Besides, these things must be well noted concerning the reward of eternal life. The reward of eternal life cannot be compared with those extrinsic and accidental rewards which men are accustomed to confer. But it must be called essential, insofar as man himself as a whole is ordered to it; insofar as, under the respect of beatitude, he is called by the intimate inclination of the will; insofar as it is loved and sought by every moral action. And it is intrinsic, insofar as it is the complement or perfection of man, such as he now is. Wherefore he who wills to act well is understood in reality to intend this, as he wills the harvest who sows it.

Nor is the reward only future: already now it is conferred on us inchoatively in sanctifying grace, although not yet in an inamissible mode.

Wherefore, even under this respect, a good action is a way to beatitude already present. Nor did Christ promise only future beatitude to His disciples through the repeated words: "Blessed are they who..." "Blessed shall you be when..."

Conditions of supernatural merit de condigno. These conditions are certainly required, the necessity of which the expositors of dogma demonstrate: 1. the state of grace; 2. the moral goodness of the work; 3. a supernatural principle, or the concurrence of actual supernatural grace.

On the universality of this merit. But it is controverted whether or not, besides these, a special intention, either of charity or of exercising a supernatural virtue, ought to move the agent to the act; not because, such an intention being excluded, an act done from supernatural grace would be thrust down to the natural order, but because the concurrence of that grace is bound together with such a motive by an individual nexus, so that either you have the supernatural motive with actual grace, or both are lacking together.

Those who require a motive of this sort admit, even in just men, acts which will be only naturally good.

The opinion which St. Thomas taught as certain is more pleasing to us: "Every act of one having charity either is meritorious or is sin, and none is indifferent" (in 2. S., d. 40, q. 1, art. 5).

This is already persuaded to us by the very silence of the Sacred Scriptures. For to merit eternal life is altogether principal in the Christian life. Therefore if a special intention is required for meriting, that condition will be read clearly in the revealed sources. But in fact the Sacred Scriptures nowhere expressly mention a moral honesty which in a just man does not pertain to salvation; rather, with no mention made of a supernatural motive, they simply commend various morally good works, for example where they are said to proclaim pure religion ¹, so that Christ Himself said in express words: "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments" ². They exclude from reward merely a work done from the not right end of vanity and hypocrisy (St. Matthew 6, 1. 5. 16).

Besides the sufficiently open texts of many Fathers, for example of St. Augustine ¹, what do the Holy Fathers commonly do? They promise eternal life to those who act from faith; that is, as they themselves explain, to those who are in the state of grace and pursue honesty in acting.

This is also persuaded to us by that continual influx of grace into the works of the just, which, having been insinuated by Christ in the figure where He said that He was the vine and the apostles the branches, is formally handed down by the Council of Trent (Sess. 6, c. 16, De iustificat.).

And we are confirmed by reason.

As Lehmkuhl himself (I, 365) admits: "All good acts are referred to the honor and praise of God." On account of this religious respect, every good act has order to God; then the habit of grace and charity effects that the act is the act of a friend of God, that is, of one sanctified by grace and habitually disposed by charity to doing acts of friendship ².

Consequently, according to that love, the just man acts as often as he observes a commandment, or does a good act; for every good act is a mode of loving God: "he who hath my commandments and keepeth them," said the Lord, "he it is who loveth me" ³; and the Apostle reduces all precepts to the precept of loving (4). Therefore as often as a good act is elicited or commanded by a will informed by charity, just as it is referred to the free will as agent, and so is moral, so it is imputed to the will friendly to God, and thus is meritorious. Therefore this is the proper force of that habit in the will: that it requires all good acts to be accepted by God as acts of a friend of God, or of a man supernaturally related to God, and hence to be meritorious.

To use other words, concerning the true condition of man, which is that of elevated man, and not merely concerning the natural state in which he could have been but has not been constituted, these words written by St. Thomas are valid: "Wherever there is some due order to an end, it is necessary that that order lead to the end, but departure from the order exclude the end... But God imposed upon the acts of men some order in respect to the end of good... Therefore it is necessary that if that order has been rightly placed, those walking by that order attain the good end, which is to be rewarded; but those departing from that order by sin be excluded from the end of good, which is to be punished" ¹. But the man who acts well walks by the order established by God. Therefore he ought to arrive at the end of the order, unless there stand in the way the state of enmity by which he is turned away from God. For divine Providence will not omit to give opportune, or supernatural, aids.

Those who think otherwise seem gratuitously to ascribe to the agent a positive intention of the natural end. But the matter is not so. The agent acting morally well, while he serves a right appetite, implicitly wills the merit of that act, or the end to which his good action tends, even if he is ignorant of another respect besides the respect of moral goodness.

The same authors seem also to give too much force to the intention of the agent for elevating acts, a force which we ought to refer as received from the gift of grace. You would say that man, as they imagine him, is substantially in the natural order and accidentally in the supernatural order, so that only by a special effort does he act supernaturally; whereas man has been so changed by the gratuitous benefit of God that he is wholly directed to the supernatural end ². Cf. also Noldin, Princ., n. 104.

¹ St. James 1, 27.

² St. Matthew 19, 17.

¹ On Psalm 30, sermon 2, n. 10 (P.L. 30, 341).

² For charity has a more immediate order to operation than grace. It is in the will and renders it apt for loving God by the love of friendship and for acting consequently to that love.

³ St. John 14, 21. - (4) Rom. 13, 9.

¹ Summa contra Gentiles, c. 140.

² These things will be treated more fully in the future volume I of the Moral Questions.

In the sinner, there cannot be salutary acts, or acts meritorious de condigno. On account of the reasons taken from the present state of man, we think that not even in them are found merely natural acts which are morally good, but that all are done from supernatural grace as principles of penance and conversion. Cf. St. Thomas, De Malo, q. 2, art. 5, ad 7; in 2 1. S., d. 38, q. 1, art. 2, ad 4.

Going beyond these advances, Ripalda (De ente supern., l. 1, d. 20, s. 2) holds that there is no morally good effort of nature which some supernatural grace does not forestall. Most theologians, however, admit in unbelievers acts morally good and at the same time supernaturally indifferent. The opinion of Ripalda is not opposed by Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit, t. 2, nn. 153-158. To us it seems more consonant with the present condition of the human race, with the unity of the counsels of divine Providence, and with the universal salvific will; and it is confirmed by a certain common sense of the faithful, who acknowledge in the good works of any man whatever a certain preparation and positive disposition for grace. Nor does that received statement, "the first grace is the beginning of faith," stand in the way of our admitting it; we shall say that this supernatural aid for acting honestly is given so that unbelievers may be led to faith, and consequently that it can come under the name of the beginning of faith. Nor do the condemned propositions make difficulty, which denied that there are any acts besides meritorious acts or sins, or rejected the distinction between morally honest acts and meritorious acts of the eternal kingdom ¹. For we exclude merit de condigno from the acts of those who are not just; nor do we deny the utility of distinguishing natural honesty from supernatural honesty. Unbelievers preserve the natural capacity of doing honest acts: this must be firmly held; but the concurring grace of God effects that the same acts are supernatural and at least meritorious de congruo.

¹ Cf. article 16 of John Hus, from the thirty condemned at the Council of Constance and by Martin V, March 25, 1418; and proposition 62 of Baius condemned by St. Pius V, October 1, 1567. (D.B. nn. 642 and 1062).

N.B. Our conclusion concerning the just rests not at all upon the permanent virtue of some first act of charity, but upon habitual sanctifying grace and charity, by which it comes about that the good acts of the just are acts of sons and friends of God. Nevertheless they are bound by the precept of charity to be fulfilled. Cf. 188.

Concerning the object of merit. these things are usefully recalled from dogmatic theology.

1. We can merit de condigno only for ourselves. But we merit an increase of sanctifying grace and eternal life. In what way, by what measure grace increases, does not agree among theologians: we more cautiously abstain from offering mathematical or quantitative reasons.

We do not merit other things de condigno, because man, through his good works, from divine ordination, is ordered to obtain these things, not others.

2. For ourselves we can merit de congruo actual graces, or richer aids: as sufficient, however, not as efficacious, because, since they are efficacious through our free consent, we cannot merit this consent. But we can merit graces which will be efficacious. Even having been made sinners, we can thus merit aids for rising again. Among these aids temporal goods also are found. These, as such, can be given by God even to a work of merely human goodness. Cf. 1, 2, q. 114, art. 10.

For others we can merit the same aids, indeed even first grace itself, de congruo.

3. For ourselves we cannot merit first grace, or the first supernatural aid: all proportion fails between our action without supernatural grace and the supernatural object. Nor, while we are just, do we seem to be able to merit, not even de congruo, the restitution of justice after a future fall. St. Thomas teaches this, 1, 2, q. 111, art. 7. Yet there are some who think otherwise.

Neither for ourselves nor for others can we merit, not even de congruo, final perseverance, insofar as it is a gift distinct both from sanctifying grace and from actual grace. But aids for persevering, or perseverance materially taken, we can both impetrate and merit de congruo, for ourselves and for others.

4. Other things being equal, we merit more easily for ourselves than for others.

The quantity of merit depends both upon the dignity of the agent and upon the value or magnitude of the work. Upon the dignity of the agent: therefore the more he has been joined to God through sanctifying grace and charity, the more, other things being equal, he will merit. Hence already the infinite merit which was in each of Christ's actions is evident. Moreover the value of the work is considered both in itself and in the intention from which it flows: according as this has been higher and more intense, so much the more merit increases. But the noblest intention is that of charity. Therefore the more effectively an action has flowed from a will which has been made one with the divine will (charity effects one thing), the more excellent is the action.

Therefore an action will not have greater formal merit insofar as it is more difficult or laborious, but insofar as the difficulty or labor denotes a great work ¹. You may say the same of the rejection of pleasure: that rejection is not good and meritorious for its own sake, but only insofar as it gives place to a higher good.

¹ 1, 2, q. 114, art. 4, ad 3.

Usefulness of asking for special things. Merit de condigno is not diminished by the fact that we direct an action to impetrating various graces for others or for ourselves. Indeed from the good endeavors which are thus fostered at the same time, the merit of the action can increase. Therefore, although already of itself God, who beholds our heart, accepts our good works not only as meritorious de condigno, but also as meritorious de congruo and impetratory, nevertheless it is consonant with human nature to express particular vows distinctly and thus to join good works with formal prayer ². This is to be done at least insofar as we are thereby helped to pray and act better, but not insofar as by a certain scrupulous anxiety it could become harmful to the fervor of charity: in a spiritual matter that fervor is always the chief thing.

² Cf. Lehmkuhl, I, 375.

Concerning the satisfactory fruit. Besides the fruit of merit and of impetration, there is also in our good actions, insofar as all are laborious, a satisfactory fruit. We can neither abdicate all the former fruits, nor is it expedient; the latter we can laudably cede to others out of charity, especially to souls existing in purgatory. The Supreme Pontiffs have approved the act called heroic toward the purifying souls. Cf. concerning indulgences.