Augustine, doctor of grace

A restless heart

No Father of the church has shaped Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, as deeply as Augustine. He was born in 354 at Thagaste in North Africa, in today's Algeria, to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica. Around 397 he began the Confessions, the story of his early years told as a prayer to God; its first page sums up his search: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" Augustine, Confessions 1.1.

A gifted student at Carthage, he became an ambitious teacher of rhetoric and lived for years with a woman he never married, who bore him a son, Adeodatus. At about nineteen a book of Cicero's set him on fire for wisdom, but the Bible seemed crude beside it. For nine years he followed the Manichees, who explained evil as a dark substance at war with the light; it was a comfort, he later admitted, to think that his sin was not wholly his own doing. Their answers did not survive his questions.

In 384 he moved to Milan as the city's professor of rhetoric. He went to hear its bishop, Ambrose, for his eloquence and stayed for his message. Ambrose's spiritual reading of the Old Testament cleared away difficulties that had kept Augustine from Scripture, and books of the Platonists helped him think of God as spirit and of evil as the absence of good. Yet his will still clung to old habits. In the summer of 386, shaken by the story of the Egyptian monk Antony, he wept in a garden and heard, as he tells it, a child's voice from a neighbouring house chanting ‘take up and read’. He opened Paul's letters at the first passage his eyes fell on:

Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Instead, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.

Romans 13:13-14

He needed to read no further, he says; a light of certainty flooded his heart and every shadow of doubt fled. At Easter 387 Ambrose baptized him together with his son. Monica died soon after at Ostia. Back in Africa, in 391 the congregation at Hippo pressed him into ordination as a presbyter, and by the mid-390s he was its bishop. There he preached, wrote and settled disputes until his death in 430.

The Donatists: whose holiness makes the church holy?

His first great controversy was a schism that had divided African Christians for most of a century. In the Great Persecution that began in 303, some clergy had handed over the Scriptures to be burned. When Caecilian became bishop of Carthage around 311, many refused him, believing he had been consecrated by such a ‘traitor’, and set up a rival bishop; the movement took its name from that rival's successor, Donatus. At their best the Donatists were a church of martyrs' memory and moral seriousness. The church must be pure, they said, and sacraments given by an unfaithful priest are void. Following the martyr-bishop Cyprian (d. 258), who had held that there is no baptism outside the church, they rebaptized those who came to them from the catholic (universal) church. In Augustine's day they were about as strong in Africa as the catholic church itself.

Augustine answered that the church is holy because Christ, its head, is holy, not because its members or ministers are spotless. In this age the church is a field of wheat and weeds, and the Lord said, "Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30). Nor does a sacrament belong to the minister: Christ is the one who baptizes, and a sinful minister cannot spoil his gift. On John 1:33 Augustine asks, "What hindrance is the badness of the minister, when the Lord is good?" Augustine Most churches today hold this principle.

The story has a dark side, and it should be told honestly. Bands of Donatist zealots attacked catholic clergy; from 405 imperial laws bore down on the Donatists, and at a conference in Carthage in 411 an imperial official ruled against them. Augustine confessed in a letter, "This indeed was at first my own opinion, that no man was to be driven by force into the unity of Christ; but he was to be led by discourse, contended with in controversy, and overcome by argument" Augustine. Seeing whole towns return under pressure, he changed his mind. In the parable of the banquet the master's order, which the BSB like his Latin Bible renders "compel them to come in" (Luke 14:23), became for him a warrant for force: pressure from outside, he reasoned, could bring people to face the truth, and a willing heart might follow. Later centuries used his argument to justify persecuting dissenters. Yet the same Augustine wrote on John 6:44, "though a man can enter the Church involuntarily, he cannot believe other than voluntarily" Augustine.

Pelagius: does grace come first?

Around 400 a monk named Pelagius, usually said to have come from Britain, was a respected teacher in Rome. He was grieved by baptized Christians who lived carelessly and pleaded human weakness. In his Letter to Demetrias (413), written to a young Roman noblewoman vowed to Christ, he urged that God has given us a good nature, so that we are able to keep his commands; to plead that we cannot is to accuse God of commanding the impossible Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias. Grace, as he understood it, was God's gift of our nature and free will, the law, the teaching and example of Christ, and the forgiveness of past sins. Adam had harmed his descendants by his bad example, not by passing on a damaged nature. His call to holiness was earnest, and he meant to defend God's justice.

In the Confessions Augustine had asked God to give what he commands, and then to command whatever he wills. By Augustine's own later account, when that prayer was quoted in Pelagius's presence in Rome, he could not bear them. In On Nature and Grace (415) Augustine argued that since Adam every human being is born with a nature wounded by sin; the will is not destroyed but bound, and it cannot love God until grace heals and frees it Augustine, On Nature and Grace (see the doctrine course's lesson Original sin and its effects). Grace is not merely an example set before us but God's power going before us and renewing the will. So he reads the vine: "lest any should suppose that a branch could bring forth a little fruit of itself, He adds, For without Me you can do nothing. He does not say, you can do little" Augustine.

Paul asks, "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). Augustine later recalled that this very verse overturned his own earlier view that faith, at least, was our own contribution Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints. It is God "who works in you to will and to act" (Philippians 2:13), and salvation is "not from yourselves; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). Hence his words on John 6:44: "no one can say, I believed, and therefore He called me: rather the preventing mercy of God called him, that he might believe" Augustine. ‘Preventing’ has its old sense here: going before.

In 418 a council at Carthage condemned Pelagius's teaching, confessing that Adam's sin reaches his descendants and that grace not only forgives past sins but gives real help not to sin Council of Carthage (418). In Augustine's last years and after his death, some monks in southern Gaul held that the beginning of faith could come from the human will. The Council of Orange (529) answered that every good will, and the very beginning of faith, is a gift of grace, while rejecting the idea that anyone is predestined to evil Council of Orange. The church judged that Pelagius, for all his earnestness, had misjudged the disease. Paul writes, "you were dead in your trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1), and an example cannot raise the dead.

Two cities, and his legacy

In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome. Pagans blamed the abandonment of the old gods, and Christians were shaken. Augustine answered in The City of God, written from 413 to 426. Its central image is famous: "two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self" Augustine, The City of God 14.28. The two cities are mingled in history until the end, and no earthly state, not even Christian Rome, is the city of God. Believers live here as pilgrims: "here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13:14). In 430, with Vandal armies besieging Hippo, Augustine died.

A thousand years later, both sides of the Reformation called him their teacher. The Catholic Church honours him as a Doctor of the Church and built on his teaching about the church and the sacraments as well as grace. Luther was a friar of the Augustinian order, and Calvin quotes Augustine on page after page of the Institutes Calvin, Institutes. Protestants found in his doctrine of grace the roots of ‘grace alone’ (see the Reformed Faith course's lesson Grace alone, faith alone). The Orthodox churches honour him as a saint, though their account of what we inherit from Adam differs in emphasis from his.

Evangelicals, too, read him in different ways. The Reformed churches follow him in teaching that God freely chose some and that his grace surely brings them to faith; the Wesleyan tradition agrees that grace always comes first, but teaches that this grace is given to all and may be resisted (see the doctrine course's lesson Grace and election). Many evangelicals part from him over his view that baptism washes away the guilt of original sin, and over his defence of compelling the Donatists. Even the greatest of the Fathers stands under Scripture.

His greatest gift is humility before grace. If even our coming to God began with his drawing, we have nothing to boast of, only thanks and prayer. And the restless heart finds its rest in God alone. For more, see What is grace?.

Practice