Chapter 7: The Fatal Argument: Augustine and Pelagius

Chapter 7: The Fatal Argument: Augustine and Pelagius It must be recognized that Augustinianism remains down to our own time determinative of Western theology not only in its motifs but also in its rending contradictions; Western theology neither exhausted nor overcame it, a fact generally visible in connection with its weak acceptance of the idea of Divine–Humanity as the foundation of anthropology Sergius Bulgakov The Fading of the Light Augustine’s thinking will go through many changes. When he considers the question from the standpoint of the individual, he wants to affirm the Will, at least in some measure, however limited. But when he examines the question from the standpoint of Divine election, the Will withers in the presence of God’s omnipotence. As he puts it in The City of God,, “The wills of men are more in God’s power than in their own.” Quoted in Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Predestination, 43. As Eric Jenkins states, In the middle works he attempts to balance them by affirming the will’s power to say “No” to grace, but this is inconsistent with his doctrine of unconditional election. In his later works, he will deny the will’s power to say “No,” and fully embrace the causally determined will. Efficacious grace and unconditional election will soon conquer his early notion of free will and his balance will shift completely toward grace. Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 1601. At the end of Book Three of On the Free Choice of the Will, there is such a dramatic shift in Augustine’s description of man’s fallen condition that many scholars think this section must have been added at a later date. Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 391. The dialog with Evodius disappears and the rest of the book is a pure essay. And in this added essay, he declares that the Free Will which has been the subject of the book applies only to “human beings [as they] were originally made.” Augustine, On Free Will, bk. III. 18. 52. Fallen man “has not the freedom of will to choose to do what he ought to do or fulfill it when he will.” Quoted in Jenkins, Free to Say No?, ll. 405–6. This is an ominous shift, negating as it does the entire dialog up to that point. Augustine and Evodius were talking about the current situation and applying it to themselves; now it applies to one man only, the first man, who is also, from the standpoint of the freedom of the Will, the last man. To the obvious objection that people cannot be held responsible for another’s sin, Augustine can only reply, “let them stop muttering against God and be quiet!” Augustine, On Free Will, bk. FCW III, 19, 53. The discussion which follows from this point on is frankly bizarre and untenable. He maintains that the fact that one man (Jesus Christ) “triumphed over error and lust” means that we have no legitimate complaint. Augustine, bk. FCW III, 19, 53. In justifying the name of “sin” to both what Adam does in freedom and we do by necessity, he makes an analogy to the different languages with are all called “tongues,” an analogy that is totally unintelligible. Augustine, bk. FCW III, 19, 54. He then makes a distinction between “nature” as it was in Adam and “nature” as it is now, Augustine, bk. FCW III, 19, 54. which seems to be a clear return to the Manichean “two natures” theory of this youth. He holds that since Adam is the father of all, it “was not fair that he beget offspring better than he was himself.” Augustine, bk. FCW III, 20, 55. He then considers various possibilities for the generation of individual souls. Either they were derived from the single soul of Adam, in which case “who can say that he did not sin when the first man sinned?” Or if souls are created individually, then “the deserved evil of the earlier belongs by nature to the later.” Augustine, bk. FCW III. 20, 56. This discussion proceeds to enumerate other ways the soul can occupy a body, but the all lead to the same end: each man is guilty of Adam’s sin: What anyone ignorant does not do rightly and what anyone rightly willing cannot do are called “sins” precisely because they take their origin from [Adam’s] sin of free will; the one that came first deserved those that followed upon it. Augustine, bk. FCW III, 19, 54. All of this means that infants are born not merely guilty, but damnable. The logic of babies tossed into hellfire is inexorable, and without it, the whole theory falls apart. Hence, the burning babies must be considered as human sacrifices offered on the twin altars of philosophical necessity and theological purity. But this is a claim that Pelagius, Augustine’s opponent and nemesis, could never accept, but for Augustine it forms the irrefutable argument. In The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins, written around 411, he argues that original sin is sufficient to ensure the damnation of unbaptized infants. Since infants are condemned at birth and redeemed by baptism, all without ever using their wills, then clearly the Will is irrelevant to the question of one’s election to salvation or damnation. Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 1406. While he concedes that infants are innocent and have committed no sin by their own will, nevertheless he says they cannot be guiltless or else there would be no need for baptism. Jenkins, ll. 1420–24. The decisive change in Augustine’s thinking seems to have taken place in To Simplician, written in 396, which is before his great argument with Pelagius, and even before his affirmation of the Will in Confessions. Writing in Predestination around 428, he acknowledges the shift that took place with this letter. Referring back to it, he writes, “In resolving this question I worked hard in defense of the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God conquered.” Jenkins, l. 2596. It is in this work that the question of the Will is referred to the question of God’s election to grace, an election that cannot be based on a foreknowledge of merits. Most Church fathers had taught that election was based on God’s foreknowledge of our faith, but Augustine argues that this would not be substantially different from foreknowledge of works. Jenkins, l. 1150. His conclusion is that even our will is not our own: “I do not know how it could be said that it is vain for God to have mercy unless we willingly consent. If God has mercy, we also will, for the power to will is given with the mercy.” Jenkins, l. 1155. This is a complete reversal from his former position that the will is its own cause; now it is at best a secondary cause and not really in our power at all. The Argument with Pelagius The dramatic shift in Augustine’s thinking comes well before his argument with Pelagius, but it was this argument that crystalized his thinking and even made it an obsession. It will lead him to a “witch-hunt” that will extend to the farthest corners of the Empire. Steenkamp, “Post-Metaphysical God-Talk,” 83. What was it that Augustine found so offensive in Pelagius? It was simply the idea that man played any part whatsoever in his own salvation. To do so would mean that man somehow merited his glorification, and could therefore make a claim on God. Pelagius was trying to widen the space for man’s freedom without compromising God’s omnipotence. Augustine’s reply was to narrow that space, and toward the end of this career, it disappeared entirely, because he seemed to think that any initiative on man’s part would limit God’s omnipotence. For Pelagius, every good action involved three elements: Possibility, volition, and action. The first comes from God, and the others from ourselves. “Thus in every good action there is praise for both God and man.” Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 66. Where they differ is the role of the Will. For Pelagius, man’s power to will comes from God, but man is left on his own initiative. He is, in Julian of Eclanum’s famous phrase, “emancipated from God.” Bonner, 67. This “emancipation” Augustine can never accept; for him, every good act of the will requires such grace from God that God “crowns his own gifts and not human merits.” Bonner, 67. The real question here is whether God’s grace simply overwhelms and displaces the will, or at best reduces it to a secondary cause. “Original Sin” Original Sin is such an ingrained aspect of Western Christianity that we forget that prior to Augustine it was not a part of the universal Church (Orthodoxy doesn’t have it), To be sure, it does have some precursors in Tertullian, Cyprian, and especially Ambrose, the teacher of Augustine. Tertullian advances the idea of “traducianism,” the theory that every soul is produced by one and the same “generative act,” hence it is the male sperm which contains the “soul stuff”; every soul is a twig cut from the parent stem of Adam. Steenkamp, “Post-Metaphysical God-Talk,” 74. Traducianism opens the way for a doctrine of innate sin, as opposed to innate evil, and reduces mankind to a massa peccati, a “lump of sin,” Steenkamp, 84. for which Baptism is only a partial cure: It removes the “guilt,” but the defilement of nature is grave that baptism is powerless to correct it. Pre-fall, Adam was righteous and perfect, possessing powers greater than that of the philosophers and holding his appetites perfectly under the control of this free will. Steenkamp, 84–85. But after the fall, free will remains intact, but it can only freely will evil; without grace, it cannot reach to the good. Steenkamp, 86. Augustine teaches human freedom in three modes: 1) freedom before the Fall, characterized by the capability of choosing between good and evil, 2) freedom after the Fall, which does not have this choice and is in bondage to sin, and 3) graced freedom, in which man receives the ability—also without a choice—to be determined, but now towards good. Bulgakov, “A Translation of ‘Augustinianism and Predestination’ by Sergius Bulgakov,” 84. Augustine posits a complex theory of action under grace. There is prevenient grace, which initiates in our souls any good we aspire to; cooperating grace, by which God assists and cooperates with our will to do good; sufficient grace, which enables us to accomplish the good; and efficient grace, which is bestowed on the elect enabling them to both will and do the good. Steenkamp, “Post-Metaphysical God-Talk,” 87. This is a highly mechanical system, with lots of moving parts, but none of the adjectives seem to arise from a consideration of grace in itself; rather, they get added to make grace work with other theories, namely “original sin” and “predestination.” And as Sergius Bulgakov notes, “the activity of grace after the Fall greater than before it, insofar as the later grace grants to the elect the impossibility of sinning, whereas the former grants only the possibility of not sinning." There is no real freedom. "Here there can be no interaction, but only action, the one-sided act of God on the human being or in the human being, deus ex machina.” Bulgakov, “A Translation of ‘Augustinianism and Predestination’ by Sergius Bulgakov,” 85. Pelagius One of the great ironies of the whole debate is that Pelagius thought he was following Augustine, and he was; he was following the youthful Augustine who preached freedom of the will. But the elder Augustine had moved on and repented. A key element in this dispute was the tradux peccati, the “transmission of sin” from Adam. There were two views on this topic which we can characterize as “inheritance” and “creationist.” The first held that each soul was inherited from Adam, in its sinful condition, and the other held that each soul was individually created by God. St. Clair, “A Heretic Reconsidered,” 5. The “inherited soul” would, or at least could, participate in Adam’s sin. But this is more difficult to maintain if each soul is individually created by God. Pelagius holds with individual creation, and hence denies any hereditary transmission of sin; rather, the transmission is social, a voluntary imitation of Adam’s sin. Adam’s condition is neutral and his will is free and undetermined. It is disobedience, not inheritance, that induces physical and spiritual death. Steenkamp, “Post-Metaphysical God-Talk,” 79–80. The transmission of sin is social, not genital. Pelagius upholds the freedom of the will, but he does not deny the need for grace. But that “grace” for him is not some special action of God on the soul, but the grace of creation, revelation, and redemption. It is the human mind, and will, which encounters revelation and responds, or not. This seems to put everything on man, and very little on God. Indeed, Pelagius seems to over-value man’s freedom, as if redemption were totally our choice. The Triumph of Fatalism Augustine concedes that the fathers who came before him wrote only incidentally on the question of predestination, and usually interpreted it as the will to give glory after this life. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Predestination, 39. That it assumed such importance in his work is at least due in part to the fact that he worked mostly in Latin and in poor Latin translations of the gospels, and they were particularly poor in regard to two words and one passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The passage in question is Romans 5:12, which in the Old Latin translation read “in whom [Adam] all have sinned,” which leads Augustine to believe that all men actually sinned “in Adam.” Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 1410. The phrase in question reads ἐφʼ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον (eph’ hon pantes harmarton). But the ἐπί is in the dative, which indicates a causal relationship. Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, sec. ἐπί, B. III. We sin because of Adam, but certainly not in Adam; we bear the effects, but not the responsibility. Given a more accurate translation, Augustine’s theory of Original Sin loses its scriptural base, at best, and completely falls apart, at worst. But having imagined that Paul believed all human beings to have sinned “in” Adam, Augustine was obliged “to assert with such sinewy vigor the justly eternal torment of babes who died unbaptized.” Hart, “Traditio Deformis.” The word which caused Augustine so much trouble was προορίζω (prooridzo, “sketching out beforehand,” “planning”) which was rendered into Latin as “praedestinare,” which is “etymologically defensible, but connotatively impossible.” Hart. The strong reading that Augustine gives the word is likely not even justified by the Latin. The term means “to determine or provide beforehand” but is not used as “to predestine” prior to Augustine. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, sec. praedestino. But in Augustine, the term seems indistinguishable from the pagan notion of “destiny” or “fate.” The strong notions of original sin and predestination set up a tension with Augustine’s benign reading of the Will. The two could not stand together and one would have to give way to the other. Either the Will was its own cause or it is “more in God’s power than ours”; it either moves as primary cause of our actions or is reduced to a secondary cause. But from the standpoint of moral agency, can secondary causes be of any real interest? And in the nearly twenty-year struggle with the Pelagians and semi-pelagians, Augustine choses to answer along the lines of primordial guilt and inflexible destiny rather than that of Will enlightened by love. Before the year 418, Augustine maintained that voluntary assent was necessary to accept, actualize, and preserve the gift of grace. Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 2155. But in Letter 194 (418) he argues that grace is the cause of human assent to God, a concept that excludes all human autonomy; consent no longer comes from ourselves but is the product of grace. Jenkins, l. 2139. Hence, the freedom of the Will has no relation to our election to salvation, and our good works, or even our faith, are not our own but God’s Will working in us: “The help of the Holy Spirit is described in such a way, therefore, that he is said to do what he makes us do.” Letter 194, 4.16, quoted in Jenkins, l. 2162. But why should some receive this grace and others not is question that Augustine excludes, and in this regard the argument for infant damnation becomes critical, for those who complain of God’s partiality “lose all force of their human arguments when it comes to infants.” The only explanation of why some survive to be baptized and others do not is that God hates some infants and loves others, and for the same inscrutable reasons that he loved Jacob but hated Esau. Jenkins, l. 2167. It would not be correct to say that Augustine does away with free will entirely; man retains free choice, but it suffices only for evil. Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 83. The Will truly has become a monstrosity, not because it is caught between willing and nilling, but because it can only “freely” will to sin. Only grace can rescue the Will, and only by depriving it of freedom. Augustine cannot reconcile this view with God’s justice, so he refers it to a “just but hidden judgment.” Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 2542. And when the judgment of God becomes hidden, so too does the meaning of Biblical passages where God clearly expresses his Divine Will, passages such as 1 Tim 2:4 where God wills “all men to be saved.” For Augustine, “all” here must mean “all the predestined.” Jenkins, l. 2556 quoting “Rebuke and Grace,” 14. 44. He then goes on to say, God, then, commands us who do not know who are going to be saved to will that all to whom we preach this peace be saved, and he produces in us this will, pouring out his love in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Hence, the words, God wills all human beings to be saved. Jenkins, l. 2559 Quoting “Rebuke and Grace,” 15. 47. This would seem to suggest that God wants us to Will that which He Himself does not; that he demands that we should will the salvation of all, but He will not do so. And this will not be the last time that this verse will be interpreted so as to mean the opposite of what it actually says. Rationalism Without Mercy It is hard to see in all of this anything less than the triumph of pagan fatalism, but also something worse than pagan fatalism. For that system was not tied to eternal punishment, but to the mundane events of human life. And what is most remarkable is how little effort Augustine gives to reconciling his dark vision with either God’s justice or God’s love, and still less with God’s mercy. Indeed, he dismisses such questions as posing a challenge to the Will of God, in the same way that Job is answered. But while Job receives his ultimate answer in the restoration of his family and fortune, in Augustine the answer is eternal torment for the many and perpetual joy for the few, and beyond that, Augustine will permit no inquiry. It is difficult not to see the concerns of Augustine’s Manichean youth reasserting themselves in his old age. Von Balthasar, The Word Make Flesh: Explorations in Theology I, 250. The fatalism of this system reasserts itself in a Christian context. Jenkins, Free to Say No?, l. 2570. In this we see a rationalism whose obvious flaws are simply referred to fideism. We can also pause here to reflect on the relationship between the intellect and the emotions. Much philosophical ink is spilled over the need to subject the emotions to the intellect. While this is certainly true, it is also true that the relationship is reciprocal. When our chain of logic leads us to conclude that God cheerfully tosses infants into a lake of fire, there to suffer eternal torments, our gut tells us, or should tell us, that we have made an error in our chain of syllogisms and need to reverse course and rethink our position. Intellect run riot is not less ugly than emotions unchecked by reason. But Augustine’s logic is merciless. The logic of babies tossed into hellfire is inexorable, and without it, the whole theory falls apart. Hence, the burning babies must be considered as human sacrifices offered on the twin altars of philosophical necessity and theological purity. Augustine’s grim vision will cast a dark shadow over Western Christianity, down to our own day. The positively conceived view of predestination that prevailed with the early Fathers, which left the matter open, was replaced with, a doctrine of double predestination, equally oppressive whether ante or post praevisa merita. Christian belief thus took on that dark and menacing aspect which brought untold suffering to mankind in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, even to the men of the Counter-Reformation. It was a spirit in strong contrast with that of early Christianity and the patristic era. Von Balthasar, The Word Make Flesh: Explorations in Theology I, 269. The will now truly becomes a “monstrosity” not, as in earlier works, because it is frozen between willing and nilling, but because it can indeed will, but only for evil. It is a poisoned gift that suffices only for our damnation; It can neither will the good nor nil the bad. But once one accepts the logic of unconditional election and marries it to a view of Omnipotence divorced from compassion there is no room left for the free decisions of men. And this is likely to happen when scripture becomes an “encoded philosophy,” stripped of its context and reduced to a series of philosophical one-liners whose meaning must be exposed by proper forensic technique to reveal a systematic mode of thought. As von Balthasar notes, Human thought always has the urge to “systematize”; but scripture lets the possible, indeed the actual twofold outcome of the judgment remain “unreconciled” alongside the prospect of universal reconciliation; nor is there any possibility of subordinating one to the other. Origen attempted this from one standpoint, reducing hell to a kind of purgatory, and so weakening what scripture says of the judgment. Augustine (and the theologians who followed him) did so from the opposite standpoint, depriving the hope of universal redemption of all foundation. Von Balthasar, 273. The Garden: Etiology vs. History Much energy, and many a learned thesis, is given over to discovering the origins of sin in mankind. And many Christian theologians, men far more learned than me, refer the problem to the Garden, in which man, in some tellings, lived a life of perfect innocence and obedience, until sin entered in via the serpent. In reaching for knowledge, he rejected obedience, and thereby hangs a tale, the whole tale of woe-ridden humanity since then. The problem, however, is that if that if sin is the result of “the fall,” then some means must be found of transmitting that sin to all subsequent generations. This involves, as we have seen, one of two absurdities. Either the absurdities of having God create each soul in a “damaged” state, which seems either mean-spirited or poor workmanship, neither of which can be posited of God; or else sin is sexually transmitted, which makes us all carbon, or at least seminal copies of Adam, mired in his sin and as “guilty” as he is. But no such explanations are necessary. Man does sin, and he sins necessarily, but not because he is born in evil but because he is born in innocence. Innocence and ignorance. In Paradise, all man’s needs are met without much effort on Adam’s part, but in our “postlapsarian” world man must act to meet even his most primitive needs. And his basic problem is not the he is surrounded by an excess of evils but because he is surrounded by a surfeit of goods. He is surrounded by the good of work and the good of leisure; the good of sex and the good of chastity; the good of wine and the good of sobriety. For every particular good, there is an opposite and even contradictory good. But man is not like the other animals, who order their goods by instinct; man, lacking much in the way of instincts, must discover the limits to the good, he must learn how to order the goods, how to say, “this is better than that,” or “this is good up to that point, but not beyond.” God does not give us even a scintilla of evil; he does something much more challenging than mere evil: he gives us an excess of goods, contradictory and confusing. Adam in the Garden can be idle; man in the world must act. That is to say, man must reach for the knowledge of good and evil; he has no other choice, if he is to act at all, and he must act if he is to live at all. Presumably, Adam was under no such constraint, and could have lived without much in the way of effort, and lived like that forever. But nevertheless, he did act, and as soon as he did, he had to make a choice between the good of knowledge and the good of obedience. And the choice which faced Adam is fundamentally the same choice we face, and face every day. We might be able to learn something of good from study, but it is only through acting—and living with our actions—that we truly learn to separate the good from the bad. We must learn where obedience lies. The problem in reading Adam’s tale comes in the way we treat the material, as either etiology or as history. An etiology explains the human condition through myth and legend. Modern man has a problem with the term “myth,” equating it with “lies”; he prefers to find his answers in history, either human or natural history. But for pre-modern, or at least pre-Christian man, myth was the realm of eternal time, and hence the realm of fixed truths, while history the realm of all that was uncertain, deceptive, and fallible. Its main function was to glorify kings and warn miscreants, but not to convey truth. Truth was in the realm of mythical time and legend, “legendary time” (as in “once upon a time”) was the halfway house between myth and history. Of course, this conundrum is resolved by the Incarnation, by which the Eternal inserts itself into historical time, which gives Christianity a bias in favor of history. But this does not negate the myths and legends and does not convert them into histories. We might express the difference this way: History is about the past, that which no longer is; etiology is about the present, that which is always a part of us. By treating the tale as a history, we give it a “before” and an “after,” and we can fill this “before” with whatever qualities we like, going far beyond the scriptural data. We can give him a perfectly free will, for example, but only to take it away. Yahweh give Adam a rather detailed list of the “punishments,” but fails to mention this minor detail; it is completely an addition of theologians and philosophers, and an addition made solely to make some other theory work. But the additions (and subsequent subtractions) are not necessary: Our situation is exactly like Adam’s, forced to choose between competing goods and unable to do so, save by long and tedious effort. Like Adam, we are born in ignorance and must make choices. But unlike Adam, we are born into a specific culture, which has a lot of knowledge, much of it wrong and all of it incomplete. It is our task, no less than Adam’s, to advance in knowledge and free ourselves from ignorance, and to perfect the knowledge we are given, but given imperfectly. Augustine, Aurelius. On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. Translated by Peter King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bonner, Gerald. Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Bulgakov, Sergius. “A Translation of ‘Augustinianism and Predestination’ by Sergius Bulgakov.” Translated by Roberto J. De La Noval. Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 2, no. 1 (June 2019): 65–99. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Reginald. Predestination. Translated by Dom Bede Rose, O.S.B. TAN Reprint. Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 1998. Hart, David Bentley. “Traditio Deformis.” First Things. Accessed July 13, 2017. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/05/traditio-deformis. Jenkins, Eric L. Free to Say No? Free Will in Augustine’s Evolving Doctrines of Grace and Election. Kindle. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2012. Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Perseus Digital Library. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=praedestino. Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, and Sir Henry Stuart Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. Ninth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. St. Clair, Craig. “"A Heretic Reconsidered Pelagius, Augustine, And ‘Original Sin.’” College of Saint Benedict/St. John’s University, 2004. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/sot_papers/4. Steenkamp, Yoloande. “Post-Metaphysical God-Talk and Its Implications for Christian Theology: Sin and Salvation in View of Richard Kearney’s God Who May Be.” Doctoral Dissertation. Pretoria, 2016. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Word Make Flesh: Explorations in Theology I. Translated by A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru. Logos. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. SOTF Chapter 1: “I have become a question to myself” Page 9 SOTF Chapter 7: The Fatal Argument Page 8