The Wisdom of the Cross Is the Wisdom of Charity: Thomas Aquinas's Soteriology—an Anticipatory Refutation of Neo-Pelagianism and Neo-Gnosticism

Although God may be surpassingly merciful, his mercy in no way obviates his justice. For a mercy that removes justice deserves much more to be called stupidity rather than virtue, and this does not befit God.

—Thomas Aquinas¹

In the justification of the ungodly, justice is seen, when God remits sins on account of love, though He Himself has mercifully infused that love. So we read of Magdalen: "Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much" (Luke 7:47).

—Thomas Aquinas²

Introduction

In its opening paragraph, the 2018 Letter Placuit Deo [PD] of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Aspects of Christian Salvation states the very heart and center of the Catholic Faith by citing Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum:

In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will (cf. Eph 1:9) by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature (cf. Eph 2:18; 2 Pt 1:4). The deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation

[Dei Verbum §2].³

Immediately following this statement, the letter observes that "the teaching on salvation in Christ must always be deepened" (PD §1). One salutary way of deepening our present teaching on salvation in Christ is the constant returning to the sources, the ever renewed ressourcement in the theological patrimony of the Fathers, but also in the theological wisdom of that doctor of the Church, who synthesized the theological patrimony of the Fathers in such a way that for the longest time he has been called the "common doctor." A ressourcement in Aquinas's theology of the Cross does not need any extraordinary justification, yet it seems to be especially apposite in light of the analysis advanced in Placuit Deo of present recurrences of perennial heresies some of whose characteristic tenets have found their way into strands of contemporary Catholic piety and theology—neo-Pelagianism and neo-Gnosticism:

Pope Francis, in his ordinary magisterium, often has made reference to the two tendencies … that resemble certain aspects of two ancient heresies, Pelagianism and Gnosticism. A new form of Pelagianism is spreading in our days, one in which the individual, understood to be radically autonomous, presumes to save oneself, without recognizing that, at the deepest level of being, he or she derives from God and from others. According to this way of thinking, salvation depends on the strength of the individual or on purely human structures, which are incapable of welcoming the newness of the Spirit of God. On the other hand, a new form of Gnosticism puts forward a model of salvation that is merely interior, closed off in its own subjectivism. In this model, salvation consists of improving oneself, of being "intellectually capable of rising above the flesh of Jesus towards the mysteries of the unknown divinity." It presumes to liberate the human person from the body and from the material universe, in which traces of the provident hand of the Creator are no longer found, but only a reality deprived of meaning, foreign to the fundamental identity of the person, and easily manipulated by the interests of man. (PD §3)⁴

Pertaining to Christ's Passion on the Cross, neo-Pelagianism and neo-Gnosticism might be best characterized as two distinct modern ways of "vacuating," emptying Christ's Cross by way of a profoundly problematic transignification of Christ's Passion and death.

Neo-Pelagianism would tend to regard Christ's Passion and death as the paradigmatic liberating act that overcomes and abolishes all forms of sacrifice. In the background of this theological current stands the assumption that sacrifice emerged in the dawn of history as humanity's...