Saint John Fisher's "A Defense of Free Will against Luther"

From an article in First Things--brought to my attention by one of my theologian friends--I found out about an upcoming publication of an important work by Saint John Fisher, the holy Bishop of Rochester, executed on June 22, 1535. The article by Michael Root, "Overcoming Theological Amnesia", argues that we skip too many centuries in our overview of Catholic theology, jumping from Saint Thomas Aquinas to the Ressourcement movement, and proposes:

We need to recover what has been lost. We need a wider ressourcement, not unlike the ressourcement of the mid-twentieth century, but one that casts a wider, more “catholic” net. The endeavor will not be easy. Late medieval and early modern theologians are hard nuts to crack. When a late medieval theologian says that a certain adjective is applied in the second mode of per se predication, one has to stop and figure out what that means. And the early modern theologians can be horribly long-winded. In many ways, twelfth- and thirteenth-century theologians are easier for us to understand than those of the fourteenth or seventeenth centuries. But the hard work will be worth it.

Root later comments:

It’s easy to anticipate the objection that a wider ressourcement seeks to perform the impossible, or at least what is impossible for most of us. Mastery of an almost two-thousand-year history of theology is more than can be expected from the theologian. Many important pre-modern theological works, especially from the late medieval and early modern periods, are untranslated, and most of us do not have the Latin facility typical of our theological forebears. Nevertheless, things are improving. The Catholic University of America Press series of Early Modern Catholic Sources is making available in English translation significant works that have been long ignored. Google Books, the Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive make older editions available as never before.

So I clicked on the link to the CUA Early Modern Catholic Sources website and found this: A Defense of Free Will against Luther: Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio, Article 36, by Saint John Fisher; translated by Thomas P. Scheck. 

From the book's blurb:

Lord Acton said that of all the works written against Martin Luther in the beginning of the Reformation, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester's Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio of 1523 was the most important. Oddly enough this massive work of Catholic apologetics, composed in Latin, has never been rendered into the English language. It contains Fisher's detailed responses to all forty-one articles defended by Martin Luther against the censures of Pope Leo X found in the bull Exsurge Domine (1520).

In this volume Thomas Scheck presents for the first time in English translation, introduced, and annotated, Fisher's Preface to the Reader, Ten Truths, and the most important single article found in Fisher's Confutation, namely his Confutation of Luther's Assertion of Article 36, in which Fisher defends the existence of free will against Luther's claim that free will is a fiction with no reality. Fisher's reply is thoroughly grounded in Scripture and in the interpretation of Scripture found in the ancient Fathers of the Church. Interestingly to defend free will he makes abundant use of Augustine, Origen, Jerome, Tertullian and John Chrysostom. . . .

Something to consider next month!