Synergists

Summary

[Alongside the theology of free will and predestination lay the juridical question of an individual's responsibility for his harmful acts, and whether other factors, such as grace or destiny, played a part. Bayle uses this piece to show that there were better and worse ways of handling the problem. This irreconcilable debate was familiar because of the dispute between Jansenists and Jesuits, satirised in Pascal's Lettres provinciales (1656–9). Bayle proposes (in Remark (C), and n. 10=23) that if progress were to be made, it would be by employing the cosmologists' method of exploring rival propositions as hypotheses. By applying to dogmatic theology the method of critical science Bayle can avoid saying that certain truth is never attainable in some matters. At the same time, he can show that honest support for a mistaken theory should never, in justice, be a civil offence.]

Synergists. The name given in the sixteenth century to certain theologians in Germany. Finding Luther's hypothesis on free will too severe, they taught that men are converted not through the grace of God alone but with the aid of the human will. This was the fifth schism that arose in the communion of the Lutherans. Melanchthon laid its foundations, while Victorin Strigelius and certain other ministers, who respected his authority, drew attention to certain passages that they found in his writings which strongly emphasised man's will. This is why they maintained that the natural power of free will [franc arbitre] concurred with the grace of God in the conversion of a sinner.