Natural Powers and Adam’s Grace

Abstract

Controversy arose over two essential aspects of Nicole’s system - the nature of the general grace which is said to give the power to do the good in the absence of efficacious grace, and the nature of the power which man has to resist efficacious grace or dominant concupiscence. In about 1689 Arnauld came to know of Nicole’s ideas from an Abrégé de théologie written some ten years previously and setting out more succinctly the doctrine found in the Écrit sur la grâce. At first, in his Écrit géométrique, Arnauld attacked Nicole’s conception of the nature of the grace given to all,¹ but when Nicole had written a reply to this attack and had gone on to set out his views more fully in his Nature et fondements de la grâce générale,² Arnauld applied himself with his treatise Du pouvoir physique (1691) to demolishing Nicole’s account of man’s natural powers to resist concupiscence. Since this work attacks on sheerly logical grounds the very foundation of Nicole’s thesis it will be convenient to speak briefly of it first.