20.10. St. Augustine, Free Will, Grace, and Atonement
To this conclusion Augustine was led in large measure by his own experience. He had undergone a two-fold conversion, first intellectual and then moral. The former brought him a conviction of divine truth and beauty; the latter, a recognition of human weakness. He had seen God, but the cloud of sin obscured the vision, the power of the world still enthralled his will; for the surrender to which he felt himself called meant surrender of all his habits, hopes, and desires. The conflict between his will and his reluctance was terrific. The world must have won, had not God come to his aid and set his will free to serve. Looking back at his life, the long enslavement of his will and the final victory, he is compelled to confess that he himself contributed nothing towards the restoration of his will and the recovery of peace.
He had always believed in God's Grace, but once he held that man's own Faith, fruit of Free Will, went forth to meet it. Now he felt, and St Paul confirmed the conviction, that the whole movement was from God, that Faith as much as Grace is His gift, and that both are determined by the inscrutable decree of His predestinating counsel.
Henceforth (this conversion took place in A.D. 386) the sense of God's guidance colours all his thought — a guidance unseen at the time but recognisable in a retrospect. What was true for him must be true for all. Augustine's character and circumstances are the clue to his later doctrine and his controversies. Thus it was the passionate cry of the Confessions for help against self, da quod jubes et jube quod vis, that evoked the Pelagian controversy. Pelagius, quiet inmate of the cloister, hardly knew what temptation is, and protested against words that discouraged moral effort and fostered fatalism. "Grace was good and a help; sin was widespread; but the latter was due not to an inherited taint but to the influence of Adam's bad example. Man can overcome temptation, if he sets his will to it." Augustine met the charge of fatalism by a scornful repudiation of the superstitions that attend the system, and of the impiety which confuses blind and undiscriminating Fate with Grace working with infinite wisdom on vessels of choice. But God's Predestination involves necessity, and this he coordinates with man's Free Will in a scheme that clearly betrays the influence of Roman jurisprudence. The synthesis is incomplete, the facts are stated scientifically and empirically, but the legal cast given to a purely metaphysical conception clouds rather than clears the issue.
Here was material for debate. The fight began in A.D. 411 and lasted with varying fortune until A.D. 418 when Pelagianism was condemned by Councils in Africa and at Rome, the infirmity of the Will and the vital need of Grace for the fulfilment of God's purposes being affirmed against all compromise. But a strong body of Christian sympathy, due partly to the prevalence of the monastic ideal and partly to a confusion between sin and atrocious sin, remained and still remains on the side of the Pelagians. Attempts were made to mediate between the two extremes by Cassian and Faustus of Riez, both of them monks, who were in great fear of fatalism and who, whilst condemning Pelagius as a heretic, urged the need of man's co-operation in the work of Grace.
The predestination of a few they regarded as simple impiety, though they could not deny God's foreknowledge as to who are to be saved. It is plain that Foreknowledge raises more difficulties than it answers. A further and a bold attempt at explanation is offered by Boethius, who saw very clearly the danger of measuring the arm of God by the finger of man. He starts with the thesis, "all things are foreseen but all do not happen by necessity." But how can human freedom be really free if it is already foreseen by God? The answer lies in a recognition of the difference between the divine and human faculties of knowledge. "God's knowledge is a present consciousness of all things, past, present, and to come. Human knowledge as regards things future is called prescience. The divine knowledge of things future is rather called providence than prescience, because, transcending time, it looks down as from a lofty height upon a time-conditioned world. Such knowledge is no more incompatible with human freedom, than human knowledge is incompatible with present free acts" (de Cons. v. pr. 6).
The thought of man's fallen nature and consequent alienation from God, which is the starting point of the Free Will controversy, leads naturally to the thought of Atonement through the death of Christ, and Atonement involves the theory of the Church and its sacraments, whereby the benefits of the Atonement are secured. On all these topics our period throws fresh light. Two of the main aspects under which the earliest Christian writers regarded the Atonement were those of a sacrifice to God and of a ransom from evil. They did not specify to whom the price was paid.
The third century had tried to remedy their indefiniteness by the unfortunate addition of the words “to Satan” and the proposition thus enlarged held its own for nearly 1000 years until it was discredited by Anselm. The notion that the arch-enemy had overreached himself, and, while receiving the ransom, found no advantage in it (inasmuch as Christ's death saved more souls than His life), appealed to the mind of the age, and Gregory of Nyssa's grotesque image of the devil caught by the hook of the Deity, baited with the Humanity, was taken up and repeated with applause.
But not by all. The "harrowing of Hell," in the form current in the fourth century, describes deliverance of souls by the triumphant Christ without a word of ransom. Gregory of Nazianzus rejects with scorn the notion of ransom paid to Satan or to God; the views of Athanasius and Augustine are entirely free from bad taste and extravagance. They start from the thought of God's goodness and justice. Goodness required that man should be delivered from the bondage of misery; justice required something more than mere repentance in order to effect that deliverance, nothing less than the offering up of the human nature which contained the sinful principle. This was achieved by Him who assumed human nature and represented man. Thus far Athanasius. Augustine, who is equally insistent on the fact of the sacrifice of Christ, goes deeper than Athanasius into the reason for the particular form that it took and the effects that it wrought. He shares Athanasius' admiration of the divine goodness exhibited in the long-suffering of God and the voluntary humility of the God-man; he is even more jealous for the divine justice. It was just that Satan who had acquired right over the race should be satisfied in respect of his claims. But Satan took more than his due, slaying the innocent. It was therefore just that he should be forced to relinquish the sinners in behalf of whom the sinless suffered.
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