“Let us bless God who has given us being, and a being which has a relationship and a movement towards him. That movement is impressed by the Creator’s power in the depths of his creature, deep within it from the very moment of its creation. And it is a movement so deep and so powerful that the will cannot affect it except to fight against it, that no sin we commit can hold it back, that hell itself cannot obliterate it. That movement will last as long as the creature itself, and is inseparable from it. And the struggle that will take place in hell between the movement naturally imprinted upon the creature by the Creator, and the movement of will whereby the creature turns away from him, will be one of the chief and everlasting torments of the damned. That inclination, which is natural to the soul, is hidden in this life, just as the soul is hidden from itself as long as it is buried within the body. It sees neither its own being, nor what lies at the depths of its being. When it leaves the body, it will see itself and will then also feel the powerful weight of that inclination, but without the power or freedom to make any good use of it.”
Pierre de Bérulle
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
You double posted this part:
“And the struggle that will take place in hell between the movement naturally imprinted upon the creature by the Creator, and the movement of will whereby the creature turns away from him, will be one of the chief and everlasting torments of the damned. That inclination, which is natural to the soul, is hidden in this life, just as the soul is hidden from itself as long as it is buried within the body. It sees neither its own being, nor what lies at the depths of its being. When it leaves the body, it will see itself and will then also feel the powerful weight of that inclination, but without the power or freedom to make any good use of it.”
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Thanks, Calvin!
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You’re welcome.
Of course, it’s the part of the quote I would most vehemently disagree with, and so I’d hardly want it to be posted twice.
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Dr. Feser has responded to Dr. Hart’s book on nature:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/03/80430/
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It’s instructive to compare the Bérulle citation with Feser’s review. It demonstrates that there were those during the scholastic period (a Cardinal no less) who affirmed the innat absolute desire of humanity for the Good.
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My complaint with Feser’s review is that he states that Hart wrote an entire book against the scholastic position, when in fact only one essay (the first one) is devoted to that topic. Feser ignores the other essays. One wonders if he read the others essays. For my ignorant money, Hart’s essay on Nicholas de Cusa is the best in the book.
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Honestly, I think Hart would have done better to use his last chapter full of theses as the skeleton for the full book, elaborating on each along the way and showing how one flows logically into another. The whole book comes off as scattershot without such a unifying framework.
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Excellent suggestion. The simple fact is, Hart delivered four different lectures that are only vaguely connected, to which he then appended his theses. The theses need a book length elaboration.
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I do hope Dr. Hart will reply, because it seems to me that Dr. Feser has missed the whole point. For instance, he compares grace being supernaturally added to human nature to a computer receiving software created after its own design, by way of being intrinsically open to such an update but nonetheless being a complete computer on its own without such improvements. What he misses is the fact that the computer is not in itself complete, as only a computer which had attained transcendental computing perfection could justly be deemed more than partially finished. Likewise, a human would not be satisfied with the state of natural perfection which Thomists like himself have decided is somehow possible.
Also, this statement stood out to me:
“And it is striking how dramatically it confirms the fears of Pius XII, Garrigou-Lagrange, and other mid-twentieth-century Catholic thinkers about where the novel theological developments they resisted were leading.”
It’s worth noting that at no point does he seem to be asking “are we right” but rather “what do I believe to have been dogmatically taught”. Also, invoking Garrigou-Lagrange of all people is baffling. Read that man’s tome on predestination if you have a strong stomach and ask yourself if you would truly even want to associate with the “God” he portrays.
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