The basic authority is I Corinthians 3:9: ‘We are workers together with the Lord’. In the Vulgate Latin we are God’s ‘helpers’ (adjutores); Erasmus and others insisted that ‘synergism’ entails ‘cooperators’, or ‘workers together’ not ‘helpers’. (God, being almighty, needs no help but by allowing human beings to cooperate with him he bestows on them the dignity of causality.) Such synergism forms the very stuff of the moral laughter in Rabelais.
