Augustine

Augustine (354–430)

Message

The heart is restless until it rests in God, and it cannot make that rest by its own will. Evil is not a substance; it is privation, a turning of a good nature away from the Good. Adam’s disobedience is not a private mistake. It wounds the nature derived from him. After the Fall the will can still choose among lesser goods and sins; it cannot, unaided, not sin, nor turn itself back to God. The formula is non posse non peccare: not able not to sin. Grace is not assistance added to an intact power. It is the giving of the will’s conversion. “Give what you command, and command what you will.” Pride is the beginning of sin: the self preferring itself to the One who supremely is. Two cities follow, one ordered by love of God, one by love of self.

Content

Confessions (written c. 397–400): a life as evidence that the will is not master in its own house. On the Free Choice of the Will (begun 388, finished c. 395): early, still granting the will more room. City of God (413–426): history as two loves; Book XIV on the first sin and the punishment in desire itself. The anti-Pelagian works—especially On the Spirit and the Letter, On Nature and Grace, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin—are where the causal claim hardens. Sin is prior to the act. The act discloses the condition.

Presentation

Two registers. The Confessions is prayer that becomes argument: second person, autobiography, exegesis. The polemical treatises are legal and scriptural, tracking an opponent sentence by sentence. City of God is a civic theodicy after the sack of Rome, vast and architectural.

Method

Exegesis of Paul (above all Romans), psychological introspection, and a metaphysics of privation taken from Neoplatonism and then broken against it. He does not define sin as a list. He narrates a will that commands itself and is not obeyed, then generalizes that split into the race.

Summary

We sin because we are already a damaged will. Rest is in God or it is not rest. Pelagius has saved praise by losing the patient.

What shaped him

People: Monica; Ambrose, who taught him to read Scripture otherwise than the Manichees; the Neoplatonists; Paul. Place: Thagaste, Carthage, Rome, Milan, then Hippo. Formative experiences: the theft of the pears; the split will in the garden at Milan; sexual compulsion he could not command; ordination under protest; the death of his son Adeodatus. Cultural events: Manichaean dualism, which he rejects by denying that evil is a stuff; the sack of Rome in 410, which forces City of God; Pelagius in the same decade, which forces the doctrine of original sin into its hard form.

Quotes

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

“Give what you command, and command what you will.”

“Pride is the beginning of sin.”

The wicked angels “are miserable because they have forsaken Him who supremely is, and have turned to themselves.”

“The disobedience of the first man would have plunged all men into the endless misery of the second death, had not the grace of God rescued many.”

After the Fall, man is not able not to sin: non posse non peccare.

“My own will was the enemy of my will.”