The Christian - Theological Branch
The question is not the Descent’s question. The Descent asks on what a Self can stand once every ground has failed. This branch asks whether the Self already stands, or fails to stand, before a God who establishes it, and whether that failure is sin before it is an act.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 354 | Augustine born, Thagaste; Pelagius born, Britain or Ireland |
| 386–387 | Augustine’s conversion and baptism |
| 388–395 | Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will |
| 397–400 | Augustine, Confessions |
| 410 | Sack of Rome |
| 413 | Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias |
| 413–426 | Augustine, City of God |
| 418 | Pelagius condemned at Carthage; dies c. 418 |
| 430 | Augustine dies, Hippo |
| 1483 | Luther born, Eisleben |
| 1517 | Ninety-Five Theses |
| 1520 | The Freedom of a Christian |
| 1521 | Worms |
| 1524 | Erasmus, Diatribe on free will |
| 1525 | Luther, The Bondage of the Will |
| 1546 | Luther dies |
| 1623 | Pascal born |
| 1654 | Night of Fire |
| 1662 | Pascal dies |
| 1670 | Pensées |
| 1813 | Kierkegaard born |
| 1849 | The Sickness unto Death |
| 1855 | Kierkegaard dies |
| 1886 | Barth and Tillich born |
| 1889 | Marcel born |
| 1919 / 1922 | Barth, Romans, first and second editions |
| 1929 | Marcel received into the Catholic Church |
| 1932–1967 | Barth, Church Dogmatics |
| 1933 | Tillich dismissed from Frankfurt; exile |
| 1934 | Barmen Declaration |
| 1935 | Marcel, Being and Having |
| 1945 | Marcel, Homo Viator |
| 1951 | Marcel, The Mystery of Being |
| 1951–1963 | Tillich, Systematic Theology |
| 1952 | Tillich, The Courage to Be |
| 1965 | Tillich dies |
| 1968 | Barth dies |
| 1973 | Marcel dies |
Pascal and Kierkegaard are not repeated in full. Each is reset for this branch only: the self before God, and sin as prior condition. The descent sections still stand. Pelagius is here as the border the branch exists to refuse, not as a station on it.
Pelagius states the position the branch refuses. The will is intact; sin is an act; nature is good enough to be charged. Augustine’s message is the negation that founds everything after: the will is bound, the race is wounded in Adam, rest is in God or nowhere, grace gives what it commands. They interact as a single controversy, not as successive influences. Without Pelagius, Augustine’s later formula has no edge.
Luther inherits Augustine’s bound will and spends the medieval apparatus that had softened it into cooperation and merit. Erasmus is Pelagius in humanist dress; The Bondage of the Will is the anti-Pelagian treatise of the Reformation. The new message is imputation. The sinner remains sinner in himself and is righteous in Christ. Augustine narrated a healing of desire. Luther proclaims a verdict. They agree on the condition and disagree on how the answer inhabits the person.
Pascal inherits both and changes the organ. He does not retry Pelagius. He describes the bound will as diversion, ennui, and the deposed king, and he refuses the philosophers’ God in the name of the God of Abraham. Luther’s assertion becomes a night of fire and a wager. The influence is Augustinian more than Lutheran in doctrine, and modern in pressure: the self alone in a room, after mechanism and honnêteté.
Kierkegaard inherits Pascal’s individual and Luther’s sinner, and refuses the congregation that thinks it holds their doctrine. Despair is the structure; before God it is sin; faith is transparent rest. Hegel is the border here, as Pelagius was at the root: the System claims the misrelation is healed in the whole. Kierkegaard’s message is that it is not. He influences Barth directly—the infinite qualitative difference is Kierkegaard’s phrase put to work on Romans.
Barth inherits that difference and spends nineteenth-century religion as a way to God. The message of Romans is judgment on every human bridge, including piety. The message of the Dogmatics is that the No was never the last word: God’s Yes is Christ. He interacts with Luther by retrieving grace from experience, and with Kierkegaard by taking the offense out of the private journal and into the Church’s speech. Liberal theology is his Pelagius: confidence that the creature can approach.
Tillich inherits Barth’s refused idol and Kierkegaard’s anxiety, and reopens the philosophy Barth had shut. Estrangement replaces original sin as the working term. The God above God replaces the wholly other, so that doubt itself becomes a place God can appear. He interacts with the descent; Heidegger’s anxiety, the existentialist literature of meaninglessness, by claiming it as the question to which the Christian symbol is the answer. Barth thought this a return of the analogy he had forbidden. The disagreement is the branch’s last real quarrel.
Marcel does not derive from Tillich or Barth. He derives from a Catholic conversion and a refusal of Sartre, and he meets the branch at Kierkegaard’s individual. His message answers a question the spine barely asks: not “why do I sin?” but “how do I remain available?” He interacts with the descent more than with Luther. Use him as the reply to Sartre’s look, or leave him off the spine.
Influence, narrowly: Pelagius begets Augustine by opposition. Augustine begets Luther’s condition, not Luther’s imputation. Luther begets Pascal’s seriousness about the will, not the wager. Pascal begets Kierkegaard’s individual. Kierkegaard begets Barth’s difference. Barth begets Tillich’s problem; how to speak of God without making him an object. Tillich’s answer is the one Barth rejected. Marcel begets no one on this list. He closes a side door.
Pelagius says the will is free and sin is only what it does. Augustine says the will is bound and sin is what we already are; the heart rests in God or it does not rest. Luther says that bound will cannot cooperate in its rescue; righteousness is imputed while the sinner remains. Pascal says the condition is now a room, a diversion, a contradiction only a God who is not a theorem can hold. Kierkegaard says the condition is despair, and faith is not a doctrine the age can hold but a self resting transparently before God. Barth says that God is not approached by religion at all; He speaks, and the speech judges every approach, then elects in Christ. Tillich says the same unrest is estrangement and anxiety, and that the God who answers appears when the God of theism has disappeared in doubt.
The continuity is the refusal to let sin be a mistake added to an intact agent. From Augustine to Barth, the act is late. The relation is first. Tillich keeps the relation and begins to translate it into being and nonbeing, which is how this branch touches the descent without joining it. Marcel, if he is kept, adds only this: the relation that fails is not only the relation to God. It is the relation to the other person, and hope is the refusal to call that failure final.
Pelagius
Augustine
Luther
Pascal
Kierkegaard
Barth
Tillich
Marcel
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