Turretin and Pure Nature

Thanks to Joel Garver for pointing me to a couple of passages in Turretin’s Institutes where he explicitly discusses and rejects the idea of “pure nature.” A brief summary follows of Turretin’s discussion from the Fifth Topic, Question 9 follows:

1) Turretin offers several definitions of “natural,” and the relevant ones are these: what is natural is “what constituted nature and is its essential or integral part” and what is natural is “what immediately and necessarily follows the constituted nature.” To speak of man in a state of “pure nature” is not to speak of him in contrast to some “impure” nature; in that sense, man was created with a “pure” nature, that is, one unstaind by sin. Rather, “pure nature” in this context is set in “opposition to gifts and spiritual habits of righteousness and holiness.” Man is in “pure naturals” if he “consists of his own parts and essential properties without the gift of original righteousness and without any superadded qualities of habits (good or evil).” To say man was created in a state of pure nature thus raises the question “whether man, as he came from the hand of God, was created in such a state” that he was neither good nor depraved.

2) Turretin attributes the notion of pure nature to Pelagians old and new. Pelagius argued that “man at the beginning was created (and even everyday is born) in a state of pure nature.” Augustine quotes Pelagius to the effect that “we are born capable both of good and evil, but not in possession of these qualities; for in our birth we are equally destitute of virtue and vice.” Latter-day Pelagians (he mentions Bellarmine, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Jesuits, as well as Socinians and Remonstrants) follow Pelagius “that they may the more easily prove original righteousness to have been a supernatural gift, superadded to nature.” Thus, “a pure and fallen nature differs in no other way than a ‘naked’ from a ‘despoiled’” nature (Bellarmine’s image). Man was created without any clothing of good or evil; he was robed with superadded, supernatural graces; but at the fall, he lost this covering and was back to his natural state of nakedness. Thus, they “differ only in that the one has lost what the other never had.” (Turretin recognizes that not all Catholics accept the notion of pure nature, but some define “pure naturals” simply as “innocence.”)

3) Turretin cites two overtly biblical arguments against the notion of pure nature: First, man is made in the image of God, and that must mean he was morally upright; second, he was made to glorify God, and he could not have fulfilled these duties without wisdom and holiness. In addition, he offers an argument from logic: “Where two things immediately opposed belong to any subject, one or other of the two must necessarily be in it. Now righteousness and sin are predicated of man as their fit . . . subject and are directly . . . opposed to each other. Therefore one or the other must necessarily be in him; nor can there be a man who is not either righteous or a sinner.” Even infants, though they are not righteous or sinners by any actual righteousness are sin, may still be so “by habitual and congenital,” as an infant is described as rational though he has never exercised his reason.

4) Turretin argues that God could not have created man in a state of pure nature. Man is physically dependent upon God his Creator, and by the same token he must be “ethically” dependent. Once God determined to create, “he could not have created him lawless and not imposed a law upon him when created.”

5) The reason “Romanists” hold to a doctrine of pure nature, Turretin claims, is “for the purpose of patronizing the integrity of free will and to make concupiscence natural in the first man.”