In his first years as a Christian Augustine had written a treatise De libero arbitrio (On Free Will). He had sought then to square the existence of evil with the benevolence of an omnipotent God; and his answer was that evil is the result of free wilclass="underline" God could not leave man free without giving him the possibility of doing wrong as well as right. Later, under the influence of Paul’s epistles, he argued that Adam’s sin had left upon the human race a stain of evil inclination; that no amount of good works, but only the freely given grace of God, could enable the soul to overcome this inclination, erase this stain, and achieve salvation. God offered this grace to all, but many refused it. God knew that they would refuse it; but this possibility of damnation was the price of that moral freedom without which man would not be man. The divine foreknowledge does not destroy this freedom; God merely foresees the choices that man will freely make.66
Augustine did not invent the doctrine of original sin; Paul, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose had taught it; but his own experience of sin, and of the “voice” that had converted him, had left in him a somber conviction that the human will is from birth inclined to evil, and can be turned to good only by the gratuitous act of God. He could not explain the evil inclination of the will except as an effect of Eve’s sin and Adam’s love. Since we are all children of Adam, Augustine argued, we share his guilt, are, indeed, the offspring of his guilt: the original sin was concupiscence. And concupiscence still befouls every act of generation; by the very connection of sex with parentage mankind is a “mass of perdition,” and most of us will be damned. Some of us will be saved, but only through the grace of the suffering Son of God, and through the intercession of the Mother who conceived Him sinlessly. “Through a woman we were sent to destruction; through a woman salvation was restored to us.”67
Writing so much and so hurriedly—often, it appears, by dictation to amanuenses—Augustine fell more than once into exaggerations which later he strove to modify. At times he propounded the Calvinistic doctrine that God arbitrarily chose, from all eternity, the “elect” to whom He would give His saving grace.68 A crowd of critics rose to plague him for such theories; he conceded nothing, but fought every point to the end. From England came his ablest opponent, the footloose monk Pelagius, with a strong defense of man’s freedom, and of the saving power of good works. God indeed helps us, said Pelagius, by giving us His law and commandments, by the example and precepts of His saints, by the cleansing waters of baptism, and the redeeming blood of Christ. But God does not tip the scales against our salvation by making human nature inherently evil. There was no original sin, no fall of man; only he who commits a sin is punished for it; it transmits no guilt to his progeny.69 God does not predestine man to heaven or hell, does not choose arbitrarily whom He will damn or save; He leaves the choice of our fate to ourselves. The theory of innate human depravity, said Pelagius, was a cowardly shifting to God of the blame for man’s sins. Man feels, and therefore is, responsible; “if I ought, I can.”
Pelagius came to Rome about 400, lived with pious families, and earned a reputation for virtue. In 409 he fled from Alaric, first to Carthage, then to Palestine. There he dwelt in peace till the Spanish priest Orosius came from Augustine to warn Jerome against him (415). An Eastern synod tried the monk, and declared him orthodox; an African synod, prodded by Augustine, repudiated this finding, and appealed to Pope Innocent I, who declared Pelagius a heretic; whereupon Augustine hopefully announced, “Causa finita est” (The case is finished).70* But Innocent, dying, was succeeded by Zosimus, who pronounced Pelagius guiltless. The African bishops appealed to Honorius; the Emperor was pleased to correct the Pope; Zosimus yielded (418); and the Council of Ephesus (431) condemned as a heresy the Pelagian view that man can be good without the helping grace of God.
Augustine could be caught in contradictions and absurdities, even in morbid cruelties of thought; but he could not be overcome, because in the end his own soul’s adventures, and the passion of his nature, not any chain of reasoning, molded his theology. He knew the weakness of the intellect: it was the individual’s brief experience sitting in reckless judgment upon the experience of the race; and how could forty years understand forty centuries? “Dispute not by excited argument,” he wrote to a friend, “those things which you do not yet comprehend, or those which in the Scriptures appear … to be incongruous and contradictory; meekly defer the day of your understanding.”71 Faith must precede understanding. “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand”—crede ut intelligas.72 “The authority of the Scriptures is higher than all the efforts of the human intelligence.”73 The Bible, however, need not always be taken literally; it was written to be intelligible to simple minds, and had to use corporeal terms for spiritual realities.74 When interpretations differ we must rest in the decision of the Church councils, in the collective wisdom of her wisest men.75
But even faith is not enough for understanding; there must be a clean heart to let in the rays of the divinity that surrounds us. So humbled and cleansed, one may, after many years, rise to the real end and essence of religion, which is “the possession of the living God.” “I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing whatever.”76 Oriental Christianity spoke mostly of Christ; Augustine’s theology is “of the First Person”; it is of and to God the Father that he speaks and writes. He gives no description of God, for only God can know God fully;77 probably “the true God has neither sex, age, nor body.”78 But we can know God, in a sense intimately, through creation; everything in the world is an infinite marvel in its organization and functioning, and would be impossible without a creative intelligence;79 the order, symmetry, and rhythm of living things proclaims a kind of Platonic deity, in whom beauty and wisdom are one.80
We need not believe, says Augustine, that the world was created in six “days”; probably God in the beginning created only a nebulous mass (nebulosa species); but in this mass lay the seminal order, or productive capacities (rationes seminales), from which all things would develop by natural causes.81 For Augustine, as for Plato, the actual objects and events of this world pre-existed in the mind of God “as the plan of a building is conceived by the architect before it is built”;82 and creation proceeds in time according to these eternal exemplars in the divine mind.
3. The Philosopher
How shall we do justice so briefly to so powerful a personality, and so fertile a pen? Through 230 treatises he spoke his mind on almost every problem of theology and philosophy, and usually in a style warm with feeling and bright with new-coined phrases from his copious mint. He discussed with diffidence and subtlety the nature of time.83 He anticipated Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”: to refute the Academics, who denied that man can be certain of anything, he argued: “Who doubts that he lives and thinks? … For if he doubts, he lives.”84 He presaged Bergson’s complaint that the intellect, through long dealing with corporeal things, is a constitutional materialist; he proclaimed, like Kant, that the soul is the most directly known of all realities, and clearly stated the idealistic position—that since matter is known only through mind, we cannot logically reduce mind to matter.85 He suggested the Schopenhauerian thesis that will, not intellect, is fundamental in man; and he agreed with Schopenhauer that the world would be improved if all reproduction should cease.86