love2
THE PROBLEM OF LOVE
by Ray Shelton
Between Plato and Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, there was a period about five hundred years. During this time, Platonism (called Middle Platonism to distinguish it from Plato’s philosophy and Neoplatonism) developed Plato’s philosophy giving it a strong religious coloring. Emphasis was placed on understanding the divine world and practically on finding the way to attain the greatest possible likeness to God. Theologically it brought together the supreme Mind that Aristotle postulated and Plato’s Good, and equated them. Thus Middle Platonism was more theistic than its forerunner. At the top of the hierarchy of being it placed the unique Divine Mind; it retained Plato’s conception of a transcendent world of Ideas or Forms, but interpreted them as God’s thoughts.
The system of one of these Middle Platonist, Albinus (2nd century A.D.), was more complex. As a member of the School of Gaius and associated with the Fourth Academy, he systematized the doctrine of his teacher. Combining the thought of Plato and Aristotle with that of Stoicism, he emerged with the point of view Neoplatonic in tone where knowledge is a means to religious insight, where three-fold divisions is prominent: for example, the division of reality into pure form, ideas, and matter; the division of God into an unmoved mover with two hypostasis. He distinguished the First Mind or God, Who is unmoved (like Aristotle’s unmoved mover), from the Second Mind or World-Intellect, through which the First Mind operates and which is set in motion by desire of Him, and from the World-Soul.
Another Middle Platonist, Celsus, the critic of Christianity, whom the Christian philosopher, Origen (c. A.D.185-254), attempted to answer, argued that God cannot have created the body, or indeed anything mortal, and only Soul can have come from God directly; and the idea of His coming down to become a man must be rejected as involving a change in Him, and a change necessarily for the worse. In general, the Middle Platonists were ready to allow the existence of intermediary divinities and this view was to be expected, given the position they assigned to the supreme God. While including God in the hierarchy of being, they nevertheless regarded Him as utterly transcendent, only to be known in occasional flashes of divine illumination.
In Neoplatonism, this tendency to make God transcendent was pushed as far as it could go. Neoplatonism was a fully developed system, Platonic in its origin, but incorporating Aristotelian, Stoic and Oriental elements. Its founder and one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world is the Greek-speaking Egyptian, Plotinus (A.D. 205-270). His philosophy, called Neoplatonism, was basically a monism, in contrast to Plato’s dualism of two worlds: the world of Ideas and the world of the senses. Plotinus conceived of reality as a vast hierarchical structure with grades or levels descending from what is beyond being to that which is below being. His highest reality, or “hypostasis“, is God, which he designated as the One. The One is beyond being, and even beyond Mind (with which the Middle Platonists equated God). The One is the source from which being derives, the goal to which it ever strives to return. Plotinus describes analogically the process by which being comes from the One as emanation, just as the radiation of light comes from the sun. This emanation leaves the One unchanged and undiminished, just as the sun suffers no loss by its radiation. The One is ineffably simple and cannot be the subject of any attributes; it can be called good, but not in the sense that it possesses goodness as a quality, but that It is goodness. Plotinus identified three great levels of emanation from the One.
1. The first emanation is that of the Nous or Mind, Intelligence. Immediately below the One, the first hypostasis in the hierarchy, comes the second hypostasis, Mind or Thought. This is Plato’s realm of the Ideas or forms. Plotinus interpreted the Nous as a multiplicity reflection of the unity of the eternal One. Mind comprises the world of the Ideas or Forms and below, and issuing from it, comes the third hypostasis, the World-Soul.
2. The second emanation is that of the Psyche or World-Soul. This is the principle of life and active intelligence. It exists in contemplation of the Nous in its effort to return to the One. The World-Soul is like the demiurge of Plato by which the forms become the patterns of the material world. The World-Soul is the causal principle of the material world; thus introducing multiplicity into the universe. The Soul is divided into two: the higher Soul, which is akin to Mind and transcends the material order, and the lower soul or Nature (phusis), which is the soul of the world of sense. For Plotinus this World-Soul contains the world as its body. All individual souls are emanations from the World-Soul, and like it they have a higher element which is related to Mind, and a lower element which is directly connected with the body.
3. The third emanation in the series is the Hyle or matter itself, which is devoid of form and is as such the closest approach to non-being. The evil in the world, and in man, is due to the privation of Being and the Good. Matter in itself, unilluminated by form, is darkness or non-being, and as such is evil.
Three features of Neoplatonism must be stressed.
1. First, though Matter is evil, the visible universe reflects the intelligible order, and as such is good and should be accepted as the best possible worlds. The material world as we know it is good; it has been made and ordered by the higher soul and is held together by Nature. But it is mixed with Matter which is evil.
2. Second, Neoplatonism contains one element that is is quite foreign to the original Platonism and Aristotelianism; that is, the descending movement in the universe, the idea of emanation; whatever exists is an “overflow” of the One. Plato’s emphasis was on the ascent of the soul to the world of the Ideas; how it happened that a Divine soul ever came down to earth and became imprisoned in a human body is a question of secondary interest to Plato, and at most it receives only mythological treatment. But for Plotinus, as for the Alexandrians generally, this question is of primary importance, maybe because of Judaism’s and Christianity’s doctrine of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth. In the Alexandrians view the ascent presupposes the descent and is conditioned by it; for the stages of the cosmological process (the Descent) must be reproduced, though in reverse order, by the human soul on its return to the One (the Ascent). For Plotinus the whole world process is summed up in this double conception of the out-going of all things from the One, the Divine, and the return of all things to the One.
3. This leads to the third feature; pervading all of reality at its different levels, is the ardent desire for union with what is higher, and ultimately with the One itself. The whole universe bears the marks of Eros, the lower reaching up after the higher and striving to become like it. This striving manifests itself from sphere to sphere,
“in the stars as a striving after the likeness of God; in the sun as a striving after the likeness of the stars; in nature, with its everlasting growth and decay, as a striving to become like the sun.”
So the human soul, fired by the heavenly Eros of which Plato spoke in his Symmposium, is compelled to undertake this ascent. There are three stages in this ascent.
(1) The first stage is one of purification; the soul must free itself from the body and its beguilements of sense-perception.
(2) At the second stage, the soul rises to the level of Mind and concerns itself with philosophy and science, retaining its self-consciousness.
(3) In the final stage, the soul obtains mystical union with the One; this stage is mediated by ecstasy, in which the beholder becomes one with that which he beholds; and when this occurs, the awareness of the distinction between subject and object is lost. Only then shall the soul have reached the goal, when the copy has returned and has been taken up into the Original. Then the soul has found rest, for it has found the ultimate object of its longing and desire. In the present life, the state of ecstasy is rarely attained, if ever, and is bound to be short-lived. Plotinus, as we are informed by his biographer Porphyry, was himself granted this experience four times only in five years.
Augustine (354-430 A.D.), also known as Aurelius Augustinus, was born at Thagaste, Numidia, in North Africa on November 13, 354 A.D., His father, Patricious, was an affable, good-humored heathen but his mother, Monica, was a prayerful, devout Christian, a woman of great strength of character and a devoted adherent of Catholic Christianity; her one aim in life was to see her son to be a Christian. For many years this wish and proyer did not seem likely to be fulfilled. Young Augustine was raised as a Christian lad, but he deferred baptism until around the age of thirty, believing that once he thus identified himself with the Christian community, the dissolute type of life he had been living would become a thing of the past. He attended school at Madaura and Carthage. His youth in the currupt city of Carthage made him familiar with a life of dissipation, which he has described in his Confessions. His ambition, which his brilliant intellectual gifts justified, turned him to secular pursuits. He became a rhetorician, and after leaving Carthage he practiced for a time in Rome, and then in Milan.
When he was a young man, soon after reading the Hortensius of Cicreo, which turned him to the search for truth, Augustine accepted the teaching of the Manichaens, which seemed to give to him the truth and was distinct from the Christian doctrine. Christianity maintained that God created the whole world and that God is good. This teaching raised a problem for him: how, then, could Christianity explain the existence of evil and suffering? The Manichaens solved this problem by a dualistic theory, according to which there are two ultimate principles: a good principle, the Light, God or Ormuzd, and an evil principle, the Darkness, Ahriman. These are both eternal and are eternally at war with each other, and this strife is reflected in the world which is the production of these two principle in conflict. In man the soul, composed of light, is the work of the good principle, while the body, composed of grosser matter, is the work of the evil principle. This system commended itself to Augustine because it seemed to solve the problem of evil, and because of its fundamental materialism, light and darkness, because Augustine at that time could not conceive how there could be nonmaterial reality, imperceptible to the senses. Conscious of his own passions and sensual desires, he felt the he could now attribute them to an evil principle outside of his real self. Also Manicheans condemned sexaual intercourse and the eating of meat and prescribed ascetic practices such as fasting, but these practices were obligated only for the elect, not for the “hearers”, to which group Augustine belonged.
Shortly before Augustine left for Rome, a noted Manichaean bishop, Faustus by name, came to Carthage, and Augustine asked him to resolve the intellectual difficulties that Augustine was having with Manicheanism, namely, the source of certitude in human thought, the reason why the two principles were in eternal conflict, etc. Although Faustus was agreeable and friendly, Augustine did not find his answers intellectual satisfactory. This shook his faith in Manichaeanism, as he departed for Rome. In Rome he was attracted to the scepticism of the early Academy, though he retained a nominal adherence to Manichaeanism and still accepted some of Manichaean positions, for example, their materialism. In A.D. 384, Augustine sought for and obtain a position at Milan as municipal professor of rhetoric. At Milan, Augustine read certain “Platonic” treatise in the Latin translation by Victorinus; these treatises were probably the Enneads of Plotinus. The effect of Neoplatonism was to free him from his bondage to materialism and to help him to accept the idea of nonmaterial reality. In addition, the Platonic conception of evil as privation, rather than as something real, showed him that the problem of evil could be solved without having recourse to the dualism of the Manichaeans. That is, Neoplationism at this time help Augustine to see the reasonableness of Christianity, and he began to read the New Testament again, particularly the writings of the Apostle Paul. At this time, he became acquainted with a group of Neoplatonic Christians which associated with Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan; Ambose’s sermons on the Scriptures help Augustine to think better of Christianity. Though Augustine was ready to become a catechumen again, his passions were still too strong. Also at this time he met two men, Simplicianus and Pontitianus. Simplicianus, who was an old priest, gave Augustine an account of the conversion of Victorinus, the Neoplatonist, to Christianity, with the result that young Augustine “burned with the desire to do likewise.” Pontitianus spoke of the life of St. Anthony of Egypt, which made Augustine disgusted with his moral state. There followed an intense moral struggle which culminated in the famous event that occurred in the garden of his friend’s house, where Augustine heard the voice of child over the wall crying repeatedly the refrain “Tolle lege! Tolle lege!” [“Take up and read! Take up and read!”]. Augustine picked up his New Testament and opened it at random and his eyes lighted on the Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans 13:13b-14:
“not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
He tells us later,
“No further would I read, nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away”.
On Holy Saturday of 387 A.D. at the age of 33 years, Augustine was baptized by Bishop Ambrose and then Augustine returned to North Africa in 388 after the death of his mother at Ostia. On his return to Tagaste, he formed a fellowship of “servants of God”, who were committed to contemplative philosophy (see True Religion, 389-391 A.D.). He had already started writing against Manichaeism. While visiting Hippo on monastic business, in 391 A.D. at the age of 37, he was ordained a priest. He founded a monastery there, and on succeeding Bishop Valerius in 396 A.D. he was consecrated Bishop of Hippo at the age of 42. He became deeply involved in the usual liturgical, pastoral, disciplinary, administrative, and judicial duties of a bishop. He preached diligently, with long series on the Psalms and the Gospel of John, in a appealing and profound style. He traveled often, around his diocese, to Carthage and elsewhere, especially for synods, consultations, and disputations, but never outside of Africa. He propagated the monastic life and in league with Aurelius of Carthage he rejuvenated African Catholicism. He also wrote extensively against the Manichaeans, the Neo-Platonist, the Donatist and the Pelagains. He died on August 28th, 430 A.D. at the age of 76 years.
Augustine went through a variety of philosophic schools on his way to Christianity, each leaving their mark on his thinking. Among these was Neoplatonism, but his relation to Neoplatonism was different from his relation to the others. He never leaves Neoplatonism like he does the others; even as a Christian he never breaks with it. All his life he remains a Neoplatonic Christian, or more accurately a Christian Platonist. He does not set Christianity and Neoplatonism in opposition to each other; he believes that there is a lot of agreement between them. He believes that if Plato could live again in his time, Plato would accept Christianity, with a few change of his words and phrases that would bring his views into entire harmony with Christianity. Augustine considered the transition from Neoplatonism to Christianity to be easy as illustrated by his treatment of the Christian belief in resurrection of the body in relation to the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Early Christian apologists had thought that Platonism and Christianity could be reconciled on this point. Augustine was aware that there were differences, but he considered that they are not irreconcilable. He did not consider the differences as a clash of two fundamentally different views of reality, and he passed from one to the other with relative ease.
Augustine underwent two conversions: an intellectual conversion to Neoplatonism and a moral conversion to Christianity. Although Augustine as a Christian wrote against pagan philosophy, he still showed a strong predilection for Neoplatonism. There is a depreciation of sense-objects in comparison with eternal and immaterial realities; a grudging admission of practical knowledge as a necessity of life; the insistence on “theoretic” contemplation and purification of the soul and liberation from the slavery of the senses. Philosophically this predilection is shown in the Platonic and Neoplatonic view that the objects of the senses, corporeal things, are inferior to the human intellect, which judges them with reference to objective standard as falling short. These standards are the immutable and eternal universal ideas or forms. The standards of goodness and beauty, for example, correspond to Plato’s first principles or archai, the exemplary ideas, and the ideal geometrical figures correspond to Plato’s mathematical objects, ta mathematika, the objects of the understanding, dianoia.
To the question, which was asked about the Platonic Ideas, “Where are these ideas?” Augustine answers that they are in the mind, the Nous, of God, they are the thoughts of God. The Neoplatonists made this suggestion and Augustine apparently accepted it as the answer to the question: Where are they? Augustine does not accept the emanation theory of Neoplatonism, where the Nous emanates from the One as the first hypostasis. But Augustine held that the exemplar ideas and eternal, immutable truths are in God. This theory must be accepted, Augustine argues, if one wishes to avoid having to say that God created the world unintelligently. Thus creation is like Plato’s formation of the sense-world by the divine artisan, the demiurge, except that there is no pre-existent matter; God created it out of nothing. Thus the world of creatures reflects and manifests God, even if it does so in a very inadequate way. The order and unity of creatures, their positive reality, reveals the goodness of God and the order and stability of the universe manifest the wisdom of God.
But God, as the self-existent, eternal and immutable Being, is infinite and, as infinite, is incomprehensible. God is His own Perfection and is “simple”, without parts, so that His wisdom and knowledge, His goodness and power, are His own essence, which is without accidents. God, therefore, transcends space in virtue of His spiritually and simplicity, as He transcends time in virtue of His eternity.
“… He is above all things. So too He is in no interval or extension in time, but in His immutable eternity is older than all things because He is before all things and younger than all things because He is after all things.”
From all eternity, God knew all things, which He was to make. He does not know them, because He has made them, but rather the other way around. God first knew the things of creation though they came into being in time. The species of created things have their ideas or rationes seminales in the things themselves and also in the Divine Mind as rationes aeternae. God from all eternity saw in Himself, as possible reflections of Himself, the things that He could create and would create. He knew them before creation as they are in Him, as Exemplars, but He made them as they exist, that is, as external and finite reflections of His divine essence. Since God did nothing without knowledge, He foresaw all that He would make, but His knowledge is not distinct acts of knowledge, but “one eternal, immutable and ineffable vision”. In virtue of this eternal act of knowledge, of vision, to which nothing is past or future, that God sees, “foresees”, even the free acts of men, knowing them “beforehand”. This exemplarist doctrine passed into the Middle Ages and was taken as characteristic of Augustinianism.
But Augustine rejected the Neoplatonic belief in the divine origin of the human soul. To this he was most strongly opposed; man is not a disguised divinity. He was most concerned to keep clear the distinction between God as Creator and man as His creature. God is God and man is man. Augustine was always conscious of the distance between them. He expressly rejects – despite his attraction to Neoplatonism – the interpretation of the Old Testament Creation story of man that God breathed into man a part of His own Divine Spirit. The spirit of life which God breathed into man was not God’s own Spirit, but was a created spirit. Augustine did not recognise any original identity between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man.
In the seventh book of his Confessions, Augustine describes what he found and what he did not find in Neoplatonism. He found God and the eternal world, and he was fired with eros for the Divine. Neoplatonism had showed him the object for his love and longing, but not the way to gain it. Between God and man is a vast gulf that man can not bridge. By eros man is bound to the One but he can not reach it. The yearning is not strong enough to lift man up to the Eternal. Augustine had no doubt that eros is the way to God, but he began to doubt that we, as we are, are able to gain access to God this way. If we are to find God, God Himself must come down to us; but Neoplatonism knew nothing about this. Of God and His nature, and of man’s yearning for Him, even of the Word (logos) that is with God from the beginning, he could read in the writings of the Neoplatonists. “But of the Word become flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there,” Augustine writes. The writings of Neoplatonist tell us nothing about the Son of God, who emptied Himself and took the form of a servant, humbling Himself and became obedient unto death; they do not tell us that God spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all. In Neoplatonism, Augustine finds human love (eros) which tries to climb up to heaven, but in Neoplatonism he finds nothing of God’s love (agape) which descends, and without which eros cannot attain to God.
But Augustine does not see that Christain Agape is the direct opposite of the Neoplatonic Eros. He seeks a compromise that will unite them, but when he finds that compromise, Eros will be the basis of that compromise. Agape will be added as new element which will aid and help Eros to obtain its desired object. Agape is fitted into the framework of Eros. Agape is the necessary addition, without which Eros cannot reach its goal. Thus Augustine understands God’s love as Caritas, grace that makes it possible for Eros to obtain its desired goal. In Augustine’s thinking all love is acquisitive love. To love means to direct one’s longing and desire to an object by the possession of which one obtains happiness. For him love is desire for the Good and only that which is a “bonum,” can be loved. Why? Because only this can exercise upon the soul that power of attraction which is essential to love. To love is to seek one’s good in the beloved object. And the object can only be loved if it can be conceived as including this good in itself. It is not enough that it should be a “bonum” in general, but it must be a “bonum” for me who is the lover. Since love means seeking the satisfaction of my own need, then I can only love my “bonum.” Augustine believed that desire, acquistive love, is the basis of human life. This is true of the righteous as of the sinner. Desire is the mark of being a creature; but it is grounded in God’s being. God alone is the Immortal who has life in Himself; therefore He needs nothing outside Himself. God has His “bonum” in Himself, and that is why there cannot be found in Him any need or desire. He is Absolute Being and as such is the Highest Good. There does not exist anything that is good which He does not already posses; God is totally self-sufficient and without any longing and desire.
Created life is quite different; it does not have its “bonum” in itself; its existence depends entirely on something which outside itself. As a creature, it does not possess its “bonum,” but must seek it, and this it does through love; that is, through the desire that is set upon the acquisition of this good. If man ceased to desire, it would mean that man possesses his “bonum” in himself and no longer needs to seek it outside himself; he would be God, which he is not. This acquisitive love is neither good or bad; to desire is simply to be human and is an expression of the fact that man is a temporal being, belonging to the sphere of created beings. The distinction between good and evil, which is the distinction between a right and a wrong love, occurs with respect to question of the object of the love. That love is right which sets its desire upon a good object, that is, on an object which really can satisfy man’s needs; that love is wrong which is directed to a wrong object, that is, to an object which is unable, or only apparently able, to satisfy his needs. Upon what objects can love be set? Augustine answers that there are ultimately only two possibilities: “All love either ascends or descends.” [“Omnis amor aut ascendit aut descendit.”] Love is directed either upwards toward God, the Creator, or downwards towards created things. This gives Augustine his fundamental distinction between Caritas and Cupiditas. Caritas is love directed upwards toward God and Cupiditas is love directed downward toward the world. Caritas is love of God, Cupiditas is love of the world. Caritas is love for the eternal, Cupiditas is love for the temporal. The reason that human love can take these contrary directions is that man is by nature both a spiritual and a fleshly being. Man’s spirit seeks the Creator and his body seeks the lower creation. His spirit seeks to fly away up to the Eternal and find happiness there, but his bodily and fleshly nature binds him by its weight to the earthly and temporal and prevents his flight. The difference between Caritas and Cupiditas is not one of kind, but of object. In kind, Caritas and Cupiditas, love of God and love of the world, is love of desire and longing, whether it directed toward God and the Eternal, or toward the created and temporal. For Augustine love is a longing whose quality is determined by the object to which is directed. “Love, but see to it what you love. Love to God and love to neighbor is called Caritas; love of the world and love of temporal things is called Cupiditas.” We must be converted from the false Cupiditas love, but the conversion (conversio) consists simply in turning love’s desire from the lower to the higher object.
Augustine was faced with a difficult problem. In Caritas man wants to ascend to the Creator in order to possess his highest good. But the greater the distance between the Creator and man, His creature, the more difficult is the ascent of Caritas. Has man any power to raise himself up to God, or is he doomed as a created being to set his love on the created things around him? In the struggle between Caritas and Cupiditas, is Cupiditas bound to win? Can man realy achieve such a Caritas (love of God) as the great and first commandment of love requires?
Augustine had occasion to think on this problem, especially in connection with his controversy with Pelagianism. This was the doctrine of the austere British “monk”, Pelagius (c,360-c.420 A.D.), who was probably of Irish birth. (The question has been raised whether or not he was actually a monk, but his contemporaries referred to him as monachus) Sometime between A.D. 384 and 409, he had come to Rome and was shocked by the moral laziness he observed, and came to believe that the doctrine of man’s total depravity had permittedd an evasion of moral responsibility. Pelagius was primarily a moralist, and was concerned with right conduct. As a fashionable teacher at Rome, who exhorted his hearers to do good works, he was shocked when he heard Augustine’s prayer, “Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt” (da quod iubes et iube quod vis), for it seemed to suggest that man was incapable, apart from God’s grace, of doing good works to earn salvation.
This was just the opposite of Pelagius’ whole system of ethics which was based upon the assumption of unconditional free will and responsibility. He held that God in creating man, unlike other creatures who were subject to the laws of nature, had given man the unique ability of being able to accomplish the divine will by his own choice. Pelagius rejected the idea that man’s will has any intrinsic bias toward wrong-doing as a result of the Fall of man. He believed that each soul is created immediately by God, and it cannot have come into the world tainted by original sin transmitted from Adam through its parents. Pelagius opposed the traducian theory that souls, like bodies, are generated from the parents, and thus have inherited from their parents a corrupt or sinful nature. Pelagius considered that this theory is tantamount to Manichaeism. He argued that if this theory is true, then the offspring of baptized parents would be free from the taint of original sin since baptism washed away the taint of original sin from the parents. Pelagius held that Adam’s trespass had disastrous consequences for human race; it introduced death, both physical and spiritual, into human race, and it set forth a habit of disobedience which was propagated, not by physical descent, but by custom and example. These wrong customs and bad example are overcome by God’s grace which was given at the soul’s creation; this grace of creation was
1. free will itself, or the possibility of not sinning which God endowed the soul at its creation; and
2. the revelation, through reason, of God’s law, instructing us what we should do and showing what would be consequences if we did not do those commands.
This grace overcomes the obscuring of the Law of Moses and the teaching and example of Christ through evil custom and bad example . This grace also bestowed forgiveness of sin in baptism and penance. But this grace of God does not bestow any special favor upon some, the elect, since God was no “acceptor of persons”. By merit alone men advances in perfection, and God’s predestination operates strictly in accordance with the quality of the lives that He foresees they will lead.
With these presuppositions Pelagius did not shrink from the logical implication that “a man can, if he will, observe God’s commandments without sinning”. He argued, Was it not written in the Bible, “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” (Lev. 19:2), and “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:49)? It would be impious to suggest that God, the Father of all justice, enjoins what He knows to be impossible. Thus Pelagius argued for the possibility of sinless perfection. Of course he recognized that some will not live such a life from childhood to death. But he envisage a state of perfection that could be attained by strenuous efforts of the will and which can be maintained only by steadily increasing application. Pelagius held that perfection was attainable in this life, otherwise, if it was not attainable, why did God command it?
Thus Pelagius began to teach a view of human nature diametrically opposite to that taught by Augustine. By A.D. 397, Augustine was already putting forth his conception of mankind as a “lump of sin”, totally unable to save himself by good works because of his sinful nature, and wholly dependent upon God’s grace to enable him to do the good works necessary for salvation. Pelagius represented the moralistic view of Christianity that asserted that man could achieve such a love of God without any divine aid. Pelegius does not deny man’s need for Divine grace, but he reduces it to the following three points:
(1) grace was given at creation when God gave man a free will, in virtue of which man is able choose the good as well as evil.
(2) In addition, God graciously made man’s choice easier by showing him, in His law and above all in the example of Christ, the good which he has to choose. And
(3) if man uses his freedom to choose evil, God’s grace is shown in that He will forgive the sin, thus making it possible for man’s free will to begin afresh without being burdened with the past sins.
Augustine found these views of Pelagius heretical and he attacked this Pelagian concept of grace most vigorously. He argued that a “grace” which includes just these three elements – freedom of the will, the law and example of Christ, and the forgiveness of sins – is just not enough to help us.
(1) How can this freedom of the will help man who is surrounded by a sense world with all its allurements, which drag our desire downwards and bind us to transient things by means of the pleasure they arouse? And
(2) what use is it that we learn in the law and the example of Christ that our desires ought to be directed upward to heavenly things, when these in their remote transcendence leave us cold and unmoved? And
(3) what use is it that God in His grace and mercy forgives us the sins we have committed in the past, if in our future activity we have only the resources of free will, which is inadequate to free our desires for lower things and redirect them to the heavenly? If grace is to have value for us, it must be a power intervening in our actual life, being effectual here and now.
For Augustine salvation by grace was an absolute necessity. Without God’s enablement, man cannot carry out the prescriptions of the law. The grace of God was not just an external aid to the keeping of the law that the Pelagians allowed. The grace of God must work internally, within us. It is an “internal and secret power, wonderful and ineffable”, by which God works in men’s heart. For Augustine the power of the grace of God is in effect the presence of the Holy Spirit. The letter of the law kills unless we have the life-giving Spirit to enable us to do what it prescribes. Augustine says, “It is the Spirit Who assists our infirmity.” For Augustine the Christian life was Spirit-empowered law-keeping. He distinguishes four kinds of grace.
a. There is “prevenient grace” (from Psa. 59:10: “His mercy goes before [in Latin, praevenient] me.”), by which God goes before and initiates in our souls whatever good we think or aspire to or will.
b. Then there is “co-operating grace”, by which God assists or co-operates with our will once it has been bestirred.
c. There is also “sufficient grace” (adiutorium sine quo), which is the grace which Adam possessed in Paradise and which placed him in the position, subject to his using his free will to the end, to practice and preserve in virtue.
d. Then there is also “efficient grace” (adiutorium quo), which is the grace granted to the saints predestined to God’s kingdom to enable them both to will and to do what God expects of them.
Grace of whatever kind is God’s free gift: gratia dei gratuita. The divine favor cannot be earn by good deeds of men for the simple reason that those deeds themselves are the effect of grace: “grace bestows merit, and is not bestowed in reward for them.” No good act can be performed without God’s help, and even the initial motions of faith are inspired in our heart by Him. This view of the grace of God led to Augustine view of predestination. Since grace takes the initiative and apart from it all men form a massa damnata, it is for God to determine who shall receive grace and who shall not. Augustine believed on the basis of Scripture that God has done this from all eternity. The number of the elect is strictly limited, being neither more than nor less than that required to replace the fallen angels. Then Augustine twisted the Scripture text, “God wills all men to be saved” (I Tim. 2:4) making it to mean that God wills the salvation of all the elect, among whom are men from every race and of every type. God’s choice of those to whom grace has been given in no way depends on God’s foreknowledge of their future merit. For whatever good deeds they will do will themselves be the fruit of grace. As far as foreknowledge is involved, what God foreknows is what He Himself is going to do. Then how does God decide to save this man rather than another? Augustine answers that can not be known by man since God has not revealed it. God will have mercy upon those whom He wishes to save and He will harden those upon whom He does not wish to have mercy. If this looks like favoritism, then let us remember that all are justly condemned. All are condemned because they all have sinned in Adam’s sin and because they all have personally sinned by the sinful nature they inherited from Adam. And that if any are saved at all, it is an act of ineffable compassion. This inscrutable decree is a mystery; man does not know who will be saved. Augustine was prepared to accept that certain people are predestined to eternal death and damnation; and they may include decent Christians who have been baptized, but have not received the grace of perseverance by which they will be enabled to finally earn eternal life. But Augustine spoke mostly of the predestination of the saints which consists of “God’s foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits by which those who are to be delivered are most assuredly delivered.” These alone have the grace of perseverance, and even before they are born they are sons of God and cannot perish.
Augustine does not think that Pelagius’ “deistic” grace is real grace. It is only means that God ordered at the beginning that we should fend for ourselves. Augustine puts in its place an effective grace, a grace that provides to change our desires and redirected them toward God. It is not that free will and the law are being rejected, but they are not enough. Free will and law are necessary, since without them free will would be impossible to choose between good and evil not knowing them through the law. Thus Augustine reserves the word “gratia” for the Divine intervention which is necessary over and above them. What is necessary is that the will should really be won to the supernatural good. This cannot be brought about by any legal command, but only by a new desire driving out the old, by Caritas overcoming Cupiditas. How are we to gain possession of this Caritas, which is the “fulfilling of the law” and the root from which all good grows? Pelagius affirms that man himself can produce Caritas in himself; Augustine denies that.
“He who asserts that we can possess God’s Caritas without God’s aid, what else does he assert than that we can possess God without God?”
If man had originally been a divine being, we could have spoken of a natural upward atttraction dwelling in him even as he is now; but Augustine rejects this Platonic idea and holds that man is a created being who as such belongs to the rest of creation. Further, by the Fall man has cut himself off from God and sunk down into transient things; and so naturally he seeks his “bonom” in the temporal things about himself. Since the fall there has dwelt in man’s nature a downward attraction, and he cannot direct his longing to the eternal. He does not possess any Caritas in himself, and if he is to gain it, it must be given to him by a special Divine act of grace, it must be infused into his heart from without.
How did Augustine suppose this infusion of Caritas to take place? He explained it in the following manner. As a creature, man must seek his “bonum” outside himself, either in the higher or lower world. The higher world can offer an eternal and infinite bonum; the bonum of the lower world, on the other hand, is transient, but it lies close at hand and within easiest reach. It pushes his desire in its direction by its close proximity and captivates man by the pleasures it arouses in him, and by comparison the heavenly good seems so remote and unreal so that it can take no firm hold on man’s soul. By His law God has bond man to the supernatural good and commanded him to set his desires upon it in Caritas; but this is merely external bond, not to be compared to the inward bond of desire by which the things of the world holds man captive to themselves. The reason the eternal cannot seriously compete with the temporal is because its attraction does reach to man. Temporal things being so near to man ceaselessly attract and allure him. If the eternal is to gain such power over man, then it must come near to him, so near that its power of attraction becomes greater and more irresistable than that which comes from temporal things. And this is just what happened in the Incarnation. It bridged the gulf separating man from his Creator. God, our eternal bonum, is no longer far from us; in Christ He has come so near to us that the every temporal must pale in comparison. This revelation of God in Christ is the power that attracts us. When God gives Himself to us in Christ, He gives us at once the object we are to love and the Caritas with which to love it. The object we are to love is Himself, but Caritas is also Himself, who by the Holy Spirit takes up His abode in our hearts. The fact that we love God is itself entirely a gift of God.
At this point, Augustine appears to be as far as possible from the Platonic theory, from which he started. But this is not so; if God had not come down to us in His gratia, we could never ascended to Him in Caritas. This is why grace is so important to Augustine; without grace there is no access to God. Without grace, Caritas has no air beneath its wings for its flight to God. Without the grace that precedes, the ascent of Caritas can not be accomplished. But all that Augustine says about the Way of salvation is based on the scheme of ascent to the supreme good. Grace has simply been introduced as the indispensible means of this ascent. What the law and free will combined could not do, since our pleasure is found in earthly things, is done by God’s grace coming to meet man with the eternal and supernatural bonum and awakens in him a longing for it. Grace does not annul the law, but it gives what the law requires. Unlike the law, it does not merely command the good; it awakens in the soul delight in the good. Grace does not destroy free will, but simply gives it a new object and a new direction and purpose. “The Grace of God makes a willing man out of a unwilling one.” Caritas, which is the fulfilling of the law and the root of all good, is not part of our natural endowment, nor is it something that we can acquire or merit. It must be given to us from outside us by God as unmerited grace; it must be infused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. This unmerited grace enables us earn and merit eternal life with God.
These ideas made Augustine the founder of the Roman Catholic doctrine of grace. His combination of Gratia and Caritas, God’s descent and our ascent, created a synthesis between the New Testament and the Neoplatonic Way of salvation, which dominated the Mediaeval church. Although at many point the Catholic Church has rejected Augustine’s idea of grace, the basic idea of grace as “infused love” which makes our ascent to God possible, it has remained faithful to the way that Augustine began.
Even though Augustine most emphatically asserts the Divine descent in speaking of grace and the Incarnation, he has not left behind the scheme of ascent. Grace and the Incarnation are simply the necessary means for it. The descent of Christ has as it purpose and goal our ascent to God; God became man so that we might become gods. This can be shown by how little grace counteracts the eros tendency. Since grace is the same as infusio caritas, grace itself can be described as a ladder on which we may mount up to the Divine life and make our way to Heaven. In other words there is no real change in Augustine’s view; our love for God is the necessary condition for fellowship with God, but we cannot have this without the help of God’s love. The descent of God in Christ to lost humanity is not motivated by the need for a real change in man but only to enable him to accomplish his ascension to God. The revelation of God in Christ is an end itself, the revelation of God’s love for man, and not just the means to an end; man’s love for God.
Augustine accepted the Neoplatonic steps of salvation, but insisted that the grace of God makes it possible for man to ascend to God. To the problem of how man is to raise himself from the sense-world to the pure spirituality of God, Augustine proposed a three-fold mode of ascent: by the ladder of Virtue, of Speculation, and of Mysticism.
a. The ladder of Virtue is by human merit (meritum). But this merit can be earned by man’s good works only by the grace of God which enables him to do the good works. “When God crowns our merit, it is nothing but His own gifts that He crowns.” Grace is on the one hand that gift which man receives by grace, and on the other hand it is the “fulfilling of the law” and sum of all virtue. Therefore the ascent by Virtue or Merit is nothing more but ascent by the grace of God.
b. The ladder of Speculation is by human reason. God has made for us a ladder of created things by which we can mount up to Him. On the basis of Romans 1, Augustine worked out a complete Natural Theology (theologia naturalis). He held that God has arranged the universe as a great “order of nature”. By its aid, man can transverse His works from the lowest to the highest and so finally to reach the Creator Himself, to whom all these things point him. According to Plato, it is the beauty of things that arouses Eros in man and drives him to reach out longingly toward that which is in itself the Beautiful. Augustine also sees in the beauty of created things that leads us to look up their Creator and kindles our love for Him. At this point man must decide to turn his attention either downward to the corporeal world, or upward to God. Since God is not a corporeal being, man must choose to turn his attention upward, which is the right direction. If we are to find God, we must not seek Him here below in corporeal things but turn our attention upward, and ascend by meditation above everything that belongs to the corporeal world. But the ascent is not finished here even when we have transcended the corporeal world and reached the spiritual world. God is a spirit but not a mutable spirit. If we are to ascend to God, we also must not only ascend above the corporeal world, but also ascend above the world of mutable spirits. Augustine expresses this stage of the ladder of Speculation with the following command: “Transcend the body and taste the spirit; transcend the spirit and taste God.”
c. The ladder of Mysticism is ascent to God by means of a ecstatic union with God. The ladder of Speculation points in this direction, but this union cannot be reached by human reason, by one’s intellect. How is this union with God to be accomplished? Augustine’s answer is that man must find God within himself. Here Augustine enters upon the path advocated by all forms of mysticism in all ages, the introspective way to God. At the beginning of this road stands the sign, “Know thyself” (gnothi seauton). By entering into ourselves and examining one’s own nature, Augustine thinks that we can pierce through and into the mystery of the Holy Trinity. To know oneself is to know God; to abide in oneself is to abide in God. Following the injunction, Augustine finds three distinct elements within himself and within man in general: memory, understanding, and will. These are closely united, and are “of one and the same substance”, that is, they are “one essence”, nevertheless they are “three inasmuch as they are related to each other”, “not merely each to each but each to all… the whole of each is equal to the whole of each, and… to the whole of all together” (Trinity, x.18).
Though these ladders are similar to Neoplatonic way of salvation, Augustine is careful to distinguish these from it. Augustine is opposed to the view that the spirit of man is divine; man is not a disguised divinity. Augustine is very concerned to keep the distinction between God the Creator and man as His creature. God is God and man is man. Augustine is always conscious of the distance between God and man. He expressly rejects the interpretation of the Old Testament creation story of man, which makes it mean that God breathed into man part of His own divine Spirit. The spirit that God breathed into man was not God’s own spirit, but a created spirit. Augustine also rejects the Hellenistic interpretation of the goal of the third ladder is a mystical absorption of the human soul into God, where the distinction between God and man is abolished. The distinction between God and man is never abolished; even at the highest point of the Christians spiritual life, the distance between God and man is preserved. The goal of the Christian life is the dwelling of the Triune God in us, but “the Trinity is in us as God in His temple, but we are in Him as the creature of its Creator.”