Freedom and Salvation

"In the West [the] mystery of freedom was distorted by the necessary but impetuous and exaggerated reaction of St Augustine to the voluntarism of Pelagius. Increasingly freedom and grace were contrasted by describing their respective roles in terms of causality. Can the free will of human beings be the cause of their salvation, as Pelagius claimed? Or is it the grace of God alone, as Augustine said? The latter's intuition - I am a wretch who has been saved gratuitously and so I sing Alleluia - is correct existentially, subjectively, but dangerous when stated objectively as part of a system. [...] The Greek Fathers (and some of the Latin Fathers), according to whom the creation of humanity entailed a real risk on God's part, laid the emphasis on salvation through love: 'God can do everything except force man to love him'. The gift of grace saves, but only in an encounter of love. Grace envelops the individual, the whole person, like an atmosphere ready to seep in through the smallest breach. But only faith in its sovereign freedom can cause the breach to be made. Then it becomes an active opening-up, the beginning of abandonment to the divine life. And for the good of humanity as a whole some are 'set apart', for it is not the isolated individual but humanity in communion, or rather, all human beings together, who truly constitute the image of God."

-Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism