Smith: CH750-b
Not According to Power
Divine Love and Human Will in Augustine of Hippo & John Cassian
Originally written for CH750 Paper 2, November 2, 2012
Augustine of Hippo has demanded great esteem for his theology of grace, and for good reason. But the doctor of the church was not without his formidable opponents. His maxim of "grace alone" is advanced in a number of his writings, not the least being his The Spirit and the Letter. According to Augustine, grace was made necessary by the Fall, during which human nature was corrupted and bent out of its natural shape. After Eden, we knew God's wrath, acting out of fear of punishment once our sin was made known to us. As our nature turned in upon itself, we began to fear God under the letter of the law. However, Augustine claims that the fulfillment of the law was that the Holy Spirit was made to pour a love into our hearts that would overpower the fear by which our will had once been motivated. But Augustine came under fire in his own time and does still today. Theologians struggled with how his claims about the depravity of the human will might dissolve human culpability and the very nature of sin. A contemporary of Augustine's, John Cassian, is one such theologian. Cassian debated Augustine in various writings, but the selection of concern here is his Thirteenth Conference on God's Protection. In it, he recognizes that a neutral will capable of both good and evil is necessary to uphold a sound Biblical theology of grace. In Cassian's moral frame, the mutuality of salvation safeguards the neutrality of human agency and necessarily upholds a positive view of the human nature. He is careful to avoid attributing all good or all evil to human will and capacity, and ultimately maintains divine sovereignty without trampling human will. In this paper, Augustine's theology in The Spirit and the Letter is outlined and shortcomings articulated before Cassian's more moderate theology is offered as a response to the more stark Augustinian view.
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Human agency, Augustine posits, is bent by the Fall, such that our own will is curvatus, and not sufficient to affect salvation, since "We can will the good but cannot carry it out."[1] Under the letter of the law we ultimately serve ourselves sinfully, for without grace, the best we can do is to serve God out of fear. Augustinian grace might be summed up in his claim that "Love is being poured out in our hearts neither by the sufficiency of our own will nor by the letter of the law, but by the Holy Spirit who has given it to us."[2] For Augustine, the cross overcomes the Fall; love conquers fear. The letters of John make clear that "There is no fear in love… fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."[3] To be afraid of the same loving God who died for you is nearly the same as outright rejection.
Of the people who insist on living under the law of the Hebrew Scriptures, he says "They no longer correctly use [the law] as a vehicle, since they have arrived, or they no longer use it as a schoolmaster, since they have already become educated."[4] The law, for these arrogant people, is sufficient. But Christian faith, he insists, depends much more upon "love which only finds pleasing what is permitted, not fear which is forced to do what is permitted."[5] Faith for Christians is life-giving joy, not oppressive legalism.
"Faith is in our power,"[6] and it "works through love, not through fear; not fearing punishment, but loving righteousness."[7] With John, Augustine most surely knows that "God is love."[8] It is the Holy Spirit that makes love present in our hearts. For Augustine, obedience cannot be coerced, only evoked, since without love, without the Holy Spirit, obedience to the law is mere fear. Action without the motivation of divine love falls short of true salvation. Against Pelagius, he argues that action alone is not sufficient for salvation. The will must be healed in order for us to even pursue salvation, "because grace heals the will by which we freely love righteousness."[9] Without God's grace, Augustine argues, we cannot freely love.
For Augustine, God's grace is fully, and uninterruptedly, the agent in human salvation. Augustine has a low view of human will and high view of God's agency; grace alone saves, not works. He writes, "Free choice is capable only of sinning."[10] Augustine's certainty for the lowliness of the creature comes out in his view of predestination, that people are not capable of acquiring righteousness on their own. In fact, "human righteousness must be attributed to the action of God."[11] The good we do accomplish, by this logic, is not ours, but God's. People are through and through incapable of goodness, incapable even of comprehending their own depravity, they must "be shown the foulness of their disease."[12] The agency of human beings is corrupted, bent, curvatus, in need of the Holy Spirit to achieve any semblance of righteousness. To those that think their deeds indicate their goodness, Augustine maintains "God did not see in their will what human beings saw in their action."[13] However, if "they were held guilty as a result of what God knew they wanted to do,"[14] what guilt does action transmit? What good does restraining themselves do if they are already judged by their mere desires?
It is for this reason that Augustine's polemic against Pelagius makes one wonder if his heavy-handedness is a hindrance to orthodoxy, whether his zealous condemnation blinds him to the logical consequences of his claims. He wants to believe that the will is neutral, that "The free choice which the creator has given to the rational soul as part of its nature is a neutral power that can either turn to faith or fall into unbelief."[15] But he contradicts himself by his argument "free choice is capable only of sinning."[16] Precisely how much room Augustine leaves for human action is difficult to determine, given his emphatic condemnation of free will. Human righteousness, after all, "is not attained without the human will,"[17] "for those things… which [God] has determined can be done by him with the cooperation of the will of his creature." The moral frame Augustine constructs, therefore, leaves significant doubt as to the value and purpose of the human will.
John Cassian answers Augustine's stark 'grace-alone' view by arguing in favor of the mutual work of salvation. Furthermore, by safeguarding the neutrality of the will as created by God, he also defends a high view of human nature. He is careful to make very clear that divine and human agency work in tandem, for in his writings "Both the grace of God and our freedom of will are affirmed."[18] He agrees with Augustine that the will must be sparked, fostered, stirred up, and strengthened by the love given by the Holy Spirit. Human will cooperates with and shares in the effort of the divine, since, when God "notices good will making an appearance in us, at once he enlightens and encourages it and spurs it on to salvation, giving increase to what he himself planned."[19] In tipping his hat to divine foreknowledge, Cassian buffers himself against accusations that he is a Pelagian. By conceding that omniscience precedes omnipotence, Cassian maintains divine supremacy in matters of agency; even if humans are not totally dependent upon grace to will and do the good, their agency is nonetheless subordinate to God. Put another way, even if I act with full agency, God foreknows my actions. For Cassian, my agency is affected only in that God increases "what he himself planned."[20]
This view of grace amends an Augustinian view by safeguarding the neutrality of the will created by God. In this way, Cassian grants far more agency to human beings, correcting Augustinian ideas of predestination. That God knows does not mean God imposes. For even Augustine concedes that "When the power is given, necessity is certainly not imposed."[21] In other words, when faith is given it is not the will of God forced upon us. God did not even impose his will on the Son, for if he had it could not be said that Jesus shared the will of the Father, even reluctantly. Jesus' own free will is said to have been one with the Father, despite his asking that "this cup may be taken from [him]."[22] Neutrality of will is essential to love. Love cannot be imposed, coerced, or required. His will and ours must be defended as neutral if it is ever to be said that it was willing. After all, "We must be on the watch lest we attribute all the good works of holy persons to the Lord in such a way that we ascribe nothing but what is bad and perverse to human nature."[23] Anything less would be almost gnostic.
Against Augustine, Cassian has a high view of human nature, stating emphatically, "It must not be believed that God made the human being in such a way that he could never will or be capable of the good."[24] He qualifies the Augustinian view of corrupt human nature by arguing that while perfect salvation might be out of our ultimate grasp, it is not outside responsibility. While our natures are created good by the kindness of our Creator, "they cannot attain to the perfection of virtue unless they are guided by the Lord."[25] A good nature is not a perfect nature and a Christian cannot attain perfection apart from the guidance of the Lord. After all, that human nature is corrupt requires we assume that its most unfiltered form is ultimately good. Something that is "corrupted" was at one time, and may once more be, "incorrupt." Therefore it should be clear that Cassian's positive view of human nature makes possible the orthodox claim that we humans are corrupted, since we were at one time (and strive again to be) pure. That we strive to be pure implies that we are not seeking to become something we never were, but to become what we were actually created to be. That our nature is good, and even that we need God's help to reorient our lives, should not suggest that it is by God alone that we achieve righteousness. It is together with the help of God that we eventually will achieve righteousness.
Take, for example, the people who made clear the Kingdom most undeniably, the martyrs, those souls to whom an Augustinian "grace alone" would be totally incoherent. When Rome came knocking, they knew that certainly grace would save them, but not without a healthy dose of active, embodied response. Discipleship not only offered endless riches in heaven, it expected the ultimate sacrifice. The "power" of the martyrs was not merely the faith in their hearts, but the courage in their bones and their steadfast resolve in the face of bodily danger. Cassian knew "The grace of God always works together with our will on behalf of the good,"[26] "not with a lazy or careless person but with one who labors and toils."[27] His comment was a shot across the bow of an Augustinian theology of passive, non-human agency. However, both he and Augustine were in agreement that God worked with each person uniquely. For Cassian, this meant "God dispenses salvation… according to the capacity of each person, so that he wills to administer healing not according to the uniform power of his majesty but according to the degree of faith he finds in each person or that he himself has bestowed on each person."[28] But for Augustine, individual free "will is to be attributed to God's gift… because God brings it about by the enticements of our perceptions that we will and that we believe."[29] Grace is universally offered, but individually crafted and pursued.
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By now it is clear that Augustine's theology of grace, like the man himself, is not without faults. His refrain of "grace alone" must be qualified with a more positive view of human nature and a strong defense of the neutrality of the human will in order to be theologically coherent. To attribute to human kind only the capacity for evil threatens the very nature of the doctrine of sin. Cassian provides an appropriate revision of Augustinian grace that should receive greater attention in the Church. We certainly were irrevocably bent by the Fall, but if it was by our hand that we acquired this state, it is not without our will that we will be redeemed by God. Salvation is a work we are called to by God, with whom we work forever toward, trusting that its final realization is as certain as Augustine's theology but as mutual as Cassian's.
Footnotes
[1] Augustine of Hippo, The Spirit and the Letter, 191
[2] Ibid., 192
[3] 1 John 4:18, New International Version
[4] Augustine, 159
[5] Ibid., 188
[6] Ibid., 187
[7] Ibid., 189
[8] 1 John 4:16, NIV
[9] Augustine, 185
[10] Ibid., 152
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 154
[13] Ibid., 157
[14] Ibid. (Emphasis added)
[15] Ibid., 190
[16] Ibid., 152 (See note 10, above)
[17] Ibid., 154 (Emphasis added)
[18] John Cassian, Thirteenth Conference on God's Protection, 475
[19] Ibid., 472 (paraphrase)
[20] Ibid., 474 (Emphasis added)
[21] Augustine, 187
[22] Matthew 26:39 & 42 and Luke 22:42 (paraphrase), New International Version
[23] Cassian, 479
[24] Ibid., 478
[25] Ibid., 475 (Emphasis mine)
[26] Ibid., 481
[27] Ibid., 482
[28] Ibid., 486
[29] Augustine, 192
