Augustine and Grace

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, is the greatest of the Latin Fathers and one of the minds that most marked Christian thought. His life was first a long search, then his reflection on sin and the help of God shaped forever the way the West understands grace. He worked out this doctrine while defending the faith against a monk named Pelagius, in a controversy that remains one of the most decisive in the history of the Church.

Augustine’s Road

Born in the fourth century in a small town of Roman Africa, Augustine was a brilliant and restless mind. Gifted in letters, hungry for truth, he searched long without finding: for a time he attached himself to a sect that promised wisdom, ran after honors, led a life he later regretted, all the while pushing away the faith of his childhood. His mother, Monica, a Christian, prayed and wept for him without tiring. At Milan, the preaching of the bishop Ambrose shook his resistance, and one day, in a garden, he heard a child’s voice repeating “take and read”; he opened the letters of Paul, and light broke upon him. He received baptism at the hands of Ambrose, returned to Africa, was made priest then bishop of Hippo. He would later sum up his whole life in a sentence: God has made us for himself, and our heart is without rest until it rests in him.

He told this road himself in his Confessions, written once he was bishop: a long prayer addressed to God in which he reads back over his life, from the sin of his youth to the grace that seized him. These words open its first lines.

This sect was Manichaeism, which promised a rational wisdom and explained the world by the struggle of two eternal principles, light and darkness, good and evil. In it evil was a substance, an empire rivaling God. Augustine sought there for nearly ten years an answer to the problem of evil; it was in freeing himself from it that he came at last to see evil not as a thing, but as the good that is missing wherever the will turns away from God.

The Pelagian Quarrel

Pelagius was an austere monk, scandalized by the laxity of Christian morals. To rouse the lukewarm, he exalted the will of man: God having commanded us to be perfect, man must surely have the power for it. He taught, then, that one can, by one’s own strength, keep the whole law of God and live without sin. In this system, grace was reduced to outward gifts, free will, the Law, the example of Christ, but it did not work within the heart. Pelagius further denied that Adam’s fault had wounded human nature: each would be born innocent as on the first day, and sin would be only a bad habit imitated from others. Man would thus save himself, in essentials, by his own effort.

Augustine’s Answer

Augustine answered from Scripture and from his own experience. The fall of Adam, he showed, has wounded all humanity: we are born turned away from God, marked by original sin, unable to heal ourselves. Grace, then, is not a help added to efforts already good; it precedes them, awakens the will and carries it. Without Christ, man can accomplish no supernatural good: “Whoever remains in me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.” John 15:5 Even our first movement toward God is already his gift, for none possesses anything he has not received. All is grace. But grace does not destroy freedom: it heals and frees it, so that it may at last will and love the good. Augustine was surnamed the Doctor of grace.

It remains to say how a grace that goes before and carries the will still leaves it free. It does not force it from without: it gives it to love. Where man was drawn only by lower goods, grace awakens a sweeter and stronger attraction for God, and the will, won by this new joy, moves toward the good with all its weight, freely, because it now desires it. Augustine summed it up in a prayer of the Confessions, “give what you command, and command what you will”: we can obey only if God first gives us the willing. It was this sentence, it is said, that put Pelagius beside himself and opened the quarrel.

The Judgment of the Church

The Church sided with Augustine. Councils gathered in Africa condemned the theses of Pelagius, and Rome confirmed the sentence: Pelagianism was declared a heresy. Later, semipelagianism, upheld by monks of Provence around John Cassian, held that while the rest of the road comes from grace, the first step toward faith would come from man. The Church rejected it likewise at the second council of Orange, in 529: even the beginning of faith, even the desire to believe, is a gift of God. So was fixed a truth the Church has never left: in the work of salvation, the initiative is always God’s.

Augustine’s Legacy

Augustine’s doctrine has become the pillar of the Western theology of grace. It holds together two truths one is tempted to oppose: all comes from God, and yet man is truly free and responsible. It thereby wards off two contrary errors: the presumption of the one who thinks he saves himself, and the discouragement of the one who thinks himself without resource. The following centuries will keep returning to Augustine to think the relation of grace and freedom, even in the great questions of predestination. His answer to Pelagius remains the measure of the Catholic faith on this point: it is God who first seeks us, awakens us, and makes us able to answer him.