Augustine does support predestination and there is nothing in Augustine contrary to the teachings of the Church. His thought on God’s grace and human freedom, including God’s election of humanity, becomes clearer and more rigorous the later he gets into life. It is particularly sharpened by his confrontation with Pelagius and the efforts he undertook in the Pelagian controversy, in which he was vindicated.
good analysis (I was a big fan of Augustine when I was religious).
There are a few things one should note. First, terms like pre-destination and fore-knowledge, are, Augustine rightly points out, inaccurate insofar as God does not exist in time.
actually a more accurate depiction of Augustine is that he eventually came to reject the idea of foreseen faith (in favor of what we might say is synonymous with contemporary monergism). However, it is correct to say early in his career as a theologian he did believe that god elected by caveat of his foreknowledge of future events (and foreseen human behavior). He wound up rejecting this because he couldn’t reconcile it with the idea of election based on gods choice (and not human merit) as presented in the scriptures.
However, at the same time Augustine never detracted from the idea that mankind retains free will (indeed he believed strongly in free will as the basis of moral culpability, as did Calvin notwithstanding what most people think of his soteriology… mostly because many Calvinists have never actually read Calvin and are not qualified in theology & hence misrepresent his work).
Second, God always gives grace freely and in love. It is not something human beings possess as their own nor can they coerce God into loving them. God loves humanity freely. Everything else follows from God’s love for humanity.
as is obvious from my profile I don’t really have a stake in this debate one way or the other … but I see you sliding down the road of universal prevenient grace (something Augustine ultimately came to reject).
You’re probably thinking of Aquinas (who made many modifications to Augustinian soteriology).
Third, human beings are free because God knows humanity to be free (as opposed to a rock, which God knows to be, but not to be rational and free). Human beings are free for God because God gives them grace every step of the way, and human freedom is the way in which God’s grace works.
this is the kind of stuff that drove me away from Catholic theology (I say this with the utmost respect for your personal views). This sounds more Aristotelian than biblical. It’s funny, I was helping a friend with her physics homework today (we’re both all grown up … but she decided to go back & get her degree, while I have more degrees than space on my wall, so I’m the guy my friends tend to exploit for intellectual help
). And I ran into the history of Galileo and Copernicus, who both rejected the geocentric view of the universe in favor of the heliocentric (geocentric means the earth is at the center of the universe, while heliocentric cosmology asserts the earth rotates around the sun). Geocentrism was the predominant view since the time of Aristotle; and both Catholics and Protestants felt geocentric cosmology was affirmed by a literal reading of scripture (yes, at one time the CC held a view somewhat synonymous with what we today term literalism).
The point of all this is biblical revelation cannot be quantified philosophically (because scripture is clearly internally inconsistent, from a human intellectual standpoint). When scripture states things like gods choice of the elect (I’m paraphrasing passages like those found in Eph. 2:8-9, 2 Cor. 3:5, etc.) is not based on personal merit, or personal effort … this idea cannot be reconciled with a universal prevenient grace. When Paul states at Rom. 10:14 that people cannot believe in a god they’ve never heard of & the only way to hear of god is through exposure to the gospel; this also cannot be reconciled with the concept of a universal prevenient grace.
Even the idea of foreknowledge as presented in scripture is often misconstrued by Catholic (and certain groups of protestant) theologians. When you look at verses like Jer. 1:5 it’s clear that when the term foreknowledge is used (as in Rom. 8:29) it is referring to personal relational knowledge, not omniscient prescience (in other words the mere ability to see the future).
Augustine’s position is the dominant position within Roman Catholicism, and can be found repeated (with variations of course) in theologians from Anselm to Bernard to Thomas Aquinas (and thus right into the modern Thomisms from Garrigou-Lagrange to Maritain, etc.).
I would say Aquinas was a wonderful philosopher (I read him quite extensively years ago); but his departure from Augustine was pretty substantial (though he did hold Augustine’s work in high esteem).
Finally, I think it is fair to point out that Augustine thinks that God’s mercy is more clearly highlighted, and God’s justice demonstrated, by the fact that God abandons a certain portion of humanity (in fact, the “mass” of humanity) to its sin, and thus hell. This is probably the place in which one would want to press Augustine because no matter how Augustine deals with this issue, he still has to understand the damned as standing within and as an expression of God’s love (if for no other reason than that human beings only exist because they are loved of God: to be is to be loved). If this is true, then eternal damnation would have to mean something like an eternal resentment of one’s own being…i.e., of God’s love.
I’m really not sure what you said exactly … but to be clear, Augustine believed in a raging hell (as your church and most religions still do).
Not that I reject religion because of the idea of hell; I just think its mere ancient mythology (no more compelling than Zeus or Odin) & unbelievable. I don’t even necessarily dispute that a man named Jesus may have existed (or Muhammad or Moses for that matter). I would simply say it seems pretty convenient that in every religion known to man their god has only appeared to ancient men (and of course there’s always a profound reason why he or she doesn’t appear to us today). Those of every religion will also say their god does make himself known to us in modern times … yet when they cite examples they’re always intangible and unprovable (and always explainable by psychological or natural phenomena); and they’re never the type of grand manifestations of divine presence and power we read about in mythology (such as the Jewish, Muslim, or Christian bibles).
As Freud asked … what will be the future of this illusion? Anyway, to each his own I guess.
LXIV, 1014 points to strong double predestination views:
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