Between a Pelagian Rock and a Hard Predestinarianism: The Currents of Controversy in City of God 11 and 12* Gene Fendt / University of Nebraska, Kearney May you live in interesting times. (Ancient Chinese curse) It is perhaps one of Christ’s church’s greatest misfortunes that a better mind than any of ours was forced to become an administrator, for that Augustine became a bishop in such interesting times guaranteed that he would not have the freedom to write a systematic philosophy or theology, but would be thrust—will he, nill he—into one controversy after another. In the course of answering one set of heretics with the strongest possible argument, Augustine sometimes tread upon ground that another set of heretics would presume to share with him, as happened when the Pelagi- ans took some elements of his teaching in De libero arbitrio (hereafter DLA) as defending their position. In his later arguments against the Pelagians, Augustine has a similar problem: some overzealous arguments against the Pelagians find a hard predestinarian place to set their firm foot. The summary position I wish to defend here is that the explanation of the will available in DLA and underpinning Confessions is sufficiently ab- stract to apply to every finite free will (angelic or human) and that it is sufficiently developed to avoid Manicheanism and Pelagianism, as well as the hard predestinarian doctrine about which Augustine seems to grow more adamant as he ages. What I think happens to Augustine which leads him to take up that extremely strong predestinarian doctrine is the battle with Pelagianism, which heresy is perhaps at its political high-water mark when Augustine is writing De civitate dei (hereafter DCD) 11 and 12 and * This article was originally written because Joshua Schulz raised some pointed questions about the issues in the above-discussed sections of De civifate dei in a seminar on Augu: it was presented at the Patristics, Medieval, Renaissance Conference held at Villanova Uni- versity in 1999. I am particularly thankful to Phil Cary for some helpful comments, as well as to an unnamed reader at this journal. The errors, of course, are predestined to be my fault © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved 0022-4 189/2001/8102-0002$02.00 Ie, 211The Journal of Religion which battle continues until the official condemnation of the council at Ephesus the year after Augustine’s death. In these two books of City of God we see writ small a whole history of a personal and intellectual prob- lem that is not just a personal and intellectual problem. 1. FROM DE LIBERO ARBITRIO TO DE CIVITATE DEI 11 AND 12 Augustine begins DLA in 388, during a time when he is still writing out the cure to a controversy in which he himself had, for a time, been on the wrong side—as he acknowledges at DLA 1.2.10-11. When he begins that book, he also is writing his comparison between the Catholic and Mani- chean ways of life and a book on Genesis directed against the Maniche- ans. He continues to write explicitly against the Manichean for over a decade, and it is a popular misinterpretation to insist that he never quite completes his own cure. Even after he finishes Confessions, he still recom- mends DLA (in Contra secundinum 11 of .p. 405) as the answer to this par- ticular heresy, though Confessions (esp. 7.2.3 and 7.12.18) seems to me to bea far more direct destruction of their position. De libero arbitrio replaces the Manichean solution to the problem of evil with a more adequate Christian one, and while it does lay out Augustine's solution to the prob- lem of evil with greater philosophical rigor and clarity, it does not seem to go further than, or differ from, Confessions in understanding and re- solving the problem. De libero arbitrio’ philosophical rigor is in no small part due to its not being a directly controversial piece. Rather, like De magistro, it is—in ori- gin, inspiration, and form—a classroom set piece in which a student is led out of a puzzle. Evodius’s puzzle about the cause of evil is one that could lead to Manicheanism, as it did for Augustine, but Evodius himself is not Manichean and is never tempted that way. Against them, Augustine encourages Evodius to continue to hold that God is supreme, omnipotent creator and most just ruler (1.2.12), and he goes to work to loosen his perplexity about those premises, implying that God is the cause of sin. But holding those premises is already anti-Manichean, not an argument against them. And they are premises here, Augustine encourages Evodius to believe lest he shall not understand (1.2.11) and to let piety lead him into the paths of reason (rationis vias pietas fretus ingredere, 1.6.43), while Evodius confesses, when the problem reappears more strongly, that he believes but does not yet grasp with understanding how everything he be- lieves hangs together (1.11.79). The Christian premises are never in ques- tion for Evodius, they were for Augustine the Manichee. No small part of the difficulty of getting a young philosopher out of the perplexity here—as Augustine illustrates in his own case in Confes- sions—is to get him to look at the problem correctly, for some ways of 212Currents of Controversy in Augustine seeking are themselves evil (Confessions 7.5.7, 7.7.11). The turn that took Augustine many years, he does rather quickly with Evodius. From Evodi- us’s opening question, utrum Deus non sit auctor mali? Augustine turns him to begin chapter 2 with unde male faciamus? and he himself begins chapter 3 with quid sit male facere? This turning of the problem from the metaphysi- cal (treating evil as a thing present whose causes need to be found) to the moral (treating evil as a thing done, and by us) does not by itself resolve the problem, but it is the sine qua non of any Christian solution. It was this turn of Augustine's from the metaphysical epicycles of Manicheanism to the workings of the human will that not only cured him but also gave joy and sustenance—if not inspiration—to Pelagius and his followers some twenty years later. But to turn for one’s explanation of evil to the working of the will, and to say that sin can be avoided by the will (DLA 3.28.171) and that “noth- ing is so completely in our power as the will” (DLA 3.3.27) is not to speak of the necessity of grace for the will, just as an anatomy of the muscula- ture of a body does not say anything about the caloric requirements for the activities the body is capable of as a body of that anatomical type. Augustine says of De libero in his Retractations that he did not allude explic- itly to “the grace of God [since] this was not the subject under discus- sion.”! In DCD 11 and 12, however, the two issues of will and grace are explic- itly joined. No doubt one of the strongest historical reasons for their ex- plicit joining in this text is that the time of its writing is also the political height of the Pelagian controversy. A brief review: Having disbelieved that Pelagian ideas were actually held by anyone, Pope Innocent died in March of 417, and Zosimus replaced him.? The new pope temporized— offering to curse both houses for hairsplitting, pointless debate, infectious curiosity, and uncontrolled eloguence—until riots forced his hand; then he died in 418. In parts of Christendom it would not have been impos- sible that news of his death outran news of his condemnation of Pelagius.* Peter Brown summarizes the political machinations thus: the views on grace of the cavalry officers proved decisive. Augustine, at age 63, is not only a leader of the African anti-Pelagian party, but he is also one of the most noted figures in Christendom and in the thick of all this. It is in this ' Augustine, The Retractations 8.4, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, Fathers of the Church, vol. 60 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968). ® See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 358-63, for discussion of the politics that this paragraph summarizes, * Both popes will be referred to and copies of correspondence with them will be packed together with Augustine's letters 414 and 415 to Valentinus and the monks at Adrumetum eight or nine years later in 426-27. Augustine writes “On Grace and Free Will” at that time in an attempt to quell a Pelagian upset at their monastery. 213The Journal of Religion situation of reflective detachment and contemplative otium that Augustine takes up the issue of grace and free will as it would apply to any spiritual creature: the creation and fall of the angels.‘ As in his explanation of human free will thirty years earlier, Augustine finds that “the contrary propensities in good and bad angels have arisen, not from a difference in their nature and origin . . . , but from a difference in their wills and desires” (DCD 12.1). Like the human mind, which chooses to abandon wisdom and follow its lust (DLA 1.11.76-79), the evil angels are enamoured of their own power, as if they could be their own good, and so lapse from the beatific good to that vanity injurious to na- ture known as sin (DCD 12.1). Evodius's question at this point of the argu- ment in DLA might seem more perplexing in DCD. For if it makes sense to ask of the human, “why should we suffer punishment when, though assuredly we are foolish, we have never been wise” (DLA 1.11.79), then to ask how an entirely intellectual creature can so unwisely put off wisdom seems a much more difficult one to answer. But really they are the same question and will get the same answer. As in the human case, the heart of Augustine's answer about the fall of the angels is that their defection from God, being an act of the will turn- ing to itself rather than cleaving to God, has no further efficient cause. “When the will abandons what is above itself and thus turns to what is lower, it becomes evil—not because that is evil to which it turns, but be- cause the turning itself is evil” (DCD 12.6, of DLA 1.16.114-116). Free will, as every aspect of a nature, is a good thing, as DLA taught, it is that particular kind of good without which no one can live rightly (DLA 2.18.185). The deficient use of this natural power, then, is not to be blamed on the giver of the power, just as pride is “not the fault of him who delegates power, nor of power itself, but of the soul inordinately ena- moured of its own power” (DCD 12.8). The single necessary condition for the possibility or occasion of sin is, then, free will itself, for once there is a created free nature, it can cling to God or choose itself. Once finite freedom exists, the possibility of sin seems to be a logically necessary as- pect of reality, though that sinful possibility is not actual until the will wills not to cling to God. One might argue that the possibility of sin does not really (as opposed to logically) exist until one considers the possibility of choosing other than God, unfortunately, such a consideration is al- ready actually sin. It seems rather strange to say, but considering a pos- sible sin is already actual sin, for the will must be turning away in order to so consider. The original Adam and the angels shared two powers— both were able not to sin and able to sin (potuit non peccare, sed potuit et “Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 366. 214Currents of Controversy in Augustine peccare, DCD 22.30), but these two powers are merely another way of indi- cating the will’s freedom to love God and so its own nature, or to love its own nature apart from God. The freedom of the new man after the resurrection shall also be like the (good) angels, who cannot doubt of their eternal felicity (DCD 11.11-13),° for our final freedom shall not be able to sin (peccare non potest, DCD 22.30) by virtue of participating in God, accepting from him the ability not to sin, which is his by nature (particeps vero Dei ab illo accepit ut peccare non potest). God cannot sin because he can- not love himself apart from God, his freedom is not finite or conditioned. To participate in this is to be taken up by love into the love that cannot fail or turn. Thus far DCD and DLA are in complete agreement, the fall of man or angel is a defection of the will from the eternal good to a lower good, or in other words, an inordinate love for the good of some created nature. No love is by nature inordinate, but it becomes so by the willing attach- ment to the object—which is in one sense always oneself, for the sweet- ness of concupiscence is not a matter of the taste of the pears, but of doing one’s own will in having them. In other words, the way Augustine understands the will’s defection is as the desire for unconditioned free- dom, figuratively, the desire to be God, who is the unconditioned. The sinful will desires to be able to say “this is good, let's do it” and make it be true that it is very good. It seems to me that the more difficult philo- sophical problem is not to explain the fall but to understand our final freedom. And the difficulty there is not to understand that a will could be free from delight in sinning even to an indeclinable delight in not being able to sin (DCD 22.30) nor to think that a will could want this but to understand how this state can be freedom for a finite or conditioned will, granted that no one would say that since God is unable to sin, he is, as the unconditioned, not himself free. A more metaphysical way of put- ting the problem is, how does finite freedom participate in God’s uncon- ditioned freedom without having its nature as finite freedom destroyed?® Perhaps, since the participation must itself be given by the higher power, it is not ours to understand ahead of time. In any case, it is not the topic here. But if the explication of our first freedom’s fall is explicable and that of our final freedom’s eternal regeneration is (perhaps) presently inexpli- cable for the very good reason that the richness of the grace of God is ° There is an interesting connection here between “considering other possibilities than God” and “doubt of eternal felicity”; the good, who do not consider other possibilities, do not doubt, those who do consider other possibilities (and such a turn is already sin) doubt. of their eternal felicity. Sin is the act, the doubt its immediate psychological doppelganger. The discovery of this connection is necessarily unhappy. ® John Rist raises this problem also in his Augustine (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 27-83. 215The Journal of Religion not calculable in our present state, Augustine's further explanation of the differential deliverance of the angels both becomes problematic in itself and foreshadows the extreme position of hard predestinarianism he ap- parently holds at the end of his life. The problem has its beginning in what looks to be an anti-Pelagian motivated sentence attached to the sum- mary statement of what is clear so far. “There is, then, no natural (natu- ralis) . . . or substantial (essentialis) . . . efficient (efficiens) cause of the bad will, but if we should say there is also no efficient (¢fficientem) cause of the good will we must beware. ...” And it seems we must beware of several things. Augustine finishes the sentence with (1) “we must beware of believing that the good will of the good angels is not created but is coeternal with God” (12.9). But if they them- selves are created, then their wills cannot be coeternal. Augustine then lays out the possibilities for a created (non-coeternal) will: (2) the angels’ wills were created with the angels, and as soon as they were created they clung to him who created them with the love by which they were made; and (3) the angels were created and (a) they existed for some time without a good will. But “without a good will, what were they but evil?” This is both (theologically) anathema, for God does not create evil, and (philosophically) problematic, for one must wonder whether a creature with a will can be neither good nor evil but morally inert. Kant, for example, explicitly denies this is possible in the Religion. Or, they produced a good will of themselves without God’s interfer- ence, thus making themselves better than he made them. “Away with such a thought!” Or, they made themselves better by the helpful operation of him without whom they could not come to possess that good will which made them better, and by being so united to him their own being was enlarged. } ©) But we must ask of this last option (and may ask it of 3a and 3b) whether the making themselves better was done either willingly or un- willingly, if unwillingly, it is not their act, if willingly, then they already had a good will “thus we are driven to believe that the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. But the angels who, though created good, are yet evil now, became so by their own will. And this will was not made evil by their good nature, unless by its voluntary defection from the good” (12.9). We must, then, beware of every option except the second. 216Currents of Controversy in Augustine Now this answer seems perfectly cogent to me, it avoids Manicheanism, Pelagianism, and strong predestinarianism. Created by the love of God, the angelic will sees the eternal good, and, receiving that love as love, it chastely binds itself to that good, or else, seeing the eternal good, it falls into itself, loving its goodness as its own, defecting from the chastity of heaven (that love by which we were made) into the land of want. Most to the point of the problem, it seems to me that God's love or grace is well understood here knowing it would do so, grace creates the will out of nothing, knowing it would do so, grace allows the intellectual creature suf ficient knowledge of the supreme good, and knowing it would do so, grace fulfills the desire of the will that cleaves to it.” The will cleaves to God with the love by which it was made, or it chooses to defect from that love to a love of its own. Grace is active at every step, but not preemptively necessi- tating. Grace is “efficiently” or “substantially” causative of the good will; it is even necessary, but not necessitating. Thus we have one explanatory story, sufficient for both unfallen man and angels. Unfortunately, this seems not to be a sufficiently strong case to Augustine when writing DCD 12. I. THE NONNECESSITY OF STRONG PREDESTINARIANISM So Augustine proceeds in a more forceful and extreme way in continuing this section's argument. Going further than the story we have already traced of grace as the silent but substantial or efficient partner in the good will of the angels, he takes up arms against what looks like it must be the threat of Pelagian freedom. He will seem in a moment to go quite as far as those he elsewhere complains of, those who extol “grace to such an extent that they deny freedom of the human will” (Letter 214 to Valen- tinus). Coming immediately after the conclusion we have seen reaches all the way back to his discussion in DLA—“this will was not made evil by their good nature, unless by its voluntary defection from the good” (DCD 12.9)—the next sentence is discombobulating.* “Hence the cause of evil is not a good thing, but lapsing from the good.” So far, so good; then: ” This unproblematic way of stating things goes along with the explication Augustine gives of the terms “predestined, called, justified, glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30) in the more pastoral setting of Sermon 158, given the date 417 (or perhaps a year or two later) by the editor of the new edition of the Sermons, in The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle, N.¥.: New City, 1990). *“Isti autem qui, cum boni creati essent, tamen mali sunt (mala propria voluntate, quam bona natura non fecit nisi cum a bono sponte defecit, ut mali causa non sit bonum, sed defectus a bono) aut minorem acceperunt divini amoris gratiam quam illi qui in eadem perstiterunt aut, si utrique boni aequaliter creati sunt, istis mala voluntate cadentibus ili amplius adiuti ad eam beatitudinis plenitudinem unde se numquam casuros certissimi fierent pervenerunt, sicut iam in libro quem sequituriste tractavimus.” 217The Journal of Religion “These [fallen angels], either received (acceperunt) less of the grace of divine love than those who persevered or if both were created equally good, those evil fell through their evil will, while the others, more amply aided, came through to the fulness of beatitude and utmost certainty that they should not fall. Thus we have already discussed in the preceding book” (DCD 12.9, my emphasis). This more forceful arm is one sentence too strong, for if the fallen received less grace, or those who persevered were more amply aided, then grace moves from being an essential and efficient cause to being the efficient and decisive cause. This is no matter of degree, but a totally different story, for if something other than the decision of the will is decisive for the creature's fall or holding, then the will is not the locus of the fall, and we return to a kind of Gnosticism. Not, perhaps, the Manichean form in which there is another power than God, but one in which God himself is the creating source of both good and evil, for by giving or withholding grace he casts down some and raises others. The deficiency in the created will comes to be because of what looks to be very much a deficiency in the love of God, for that particular falling creature is loved enough to cause it to exist, but not enough to cause it to exist happily. Julian of Eclanum’s coming accusation that Augustine is still a Manichee is unfair, but it is in the right family of heresies. At this point all of Evodius’s troubling questions from thirty years earlier are legiti- mate—and unanswered. His footnote to himself (“we have already discussed ... ”) notwith- standing, the previous book Augustine refers to had not explicated this new source of trouble, though it had come up to the same issue from the point of view of the angel’s knowledge. Like book 12, book 11, too, had offered two different stories, though it had not explicitly decided between them. The angels “were created partakers of the eternal light, which is the unchangeable Wisdom of God . . . so that they, being illumined by the light that created them might themselves become light and be called ‘Day’ ” (11.9). Then the question was raised, To what extent does the en- lightenment of these angels extend? The first possible answer is that the good and bad angels, created as partakers of the light, could not have equally known of their eternal blessedness, for some were known by God not to be eternally blessed. So, in their case, either fear or ignorance would prevent complete happiness. But this would be to create some as light and some as not light, which is counter to scripture (though again in line with Gnosticism). It strictly predestines those who have the greater or more certain knowledge as well as those who have it not. This story appears to be on all fours with a story Augustine criticizes in DCD 19.33, there he is talking about what Hecate says of Christ, who “gave to other souls the fatal gift of being involved in error; souls to whom the fates had not granted they should gain the gifts of the gods or acquire 218Currents of Controversy in Augustine knowledge of immortal Jove. For this they were hated by the gods, for they were neither to know God nor receive the gifts of the gods (nec dona ab diis accipere).” We must ask of Augustine's version of God, as Augustine asks of Hecate’s version of Christ, does he involve those who fall in error “willingly or against his will? If willingly how is he righteous? If against his will, how is he blessed?” (cf. DCD 19.33). The destructive dilemma is unanswerable—which is why he uses it in his answer to the pagan expli- cation of Christ; but the hard predestinarian story he tells about the angels in DCD 12, and sets up as an angelic possibility here in book 11, involves Augustine himself in just the same dilemma, if God more amply aids some, the others by default of that aid are given a fatal gift in their very creation. Does God do this willingly or unwillingly? And we should note here that about the angels Augustine does not have the escape he will utilize in his last writings, that since in Adam all are condemned justly, so it is grace alone that saves whosoever is saved; about that divine pre- destining, calling, justifying, and glorifying, “who has known the mind of God or who has been his counselor?” (DDP 37). The second possible story about angelic enlightenment in book 11 runs thus: if all are of equal felicity at creation, it must be that the good angels become assured of their felicity after the fall of the evil, and this addition of unshakable assurance to happiness is the fullness of beatitude. In order not to introduce the problems of time into angelic knowing, Augustine’s phrase in 12.9 was “as soon as they were created they clung to him who created them with the love by which they were made.” The logical com- plement is “from his being created,” the devil refused the justice which only a will pious and submissive to God can possess (11.13). This second story allows that we may ask of each group whether they did so “willingly or against their will,” and so it does not require us to suppose that the devil was originally created to incite laughter among the angels, though after his sin he is ordained to that punishment. He was not, that is, strictly predestined to it while the others were just as strictly made to be laugh- ing. Neither does this second option make grace a necessitating cause, where in the first case (of different knowledge of their own happiness at creation) it seems, again, that the cause of the difference in the angels is God's gift of the grace of fuller knowledge. On the contrary, this second story does not go so far as to suggest that one set of angels was more amply aided or had more certain knowledge or that the other received less of the divine love and had less certainty ab initio. Further, this second story of the angelic fall fits perfectly with De libero arbitrio. ° De dono perseverentiae, henceforth DDP and De praedestinatione sanctorum, henceforth DPS, both from pp. 428-29. I have used the edition available in The Nicean and Post-Nicean Fathers, Ist ser., vol. 5, ed. Philip Schiff (1887; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991). 219The Journal of Religion In other words, book 11 suggested a way of understanding book 12's “more amply aided” or “receiving less of the grace of divine love” in terms of differential angelic self-knowledge granted with creation, but not only did Augustine not embrace that explanation, he also presented a story right next to it which fits perfectly with the long tradition of his thought, explicated in DLA, which begins in equal felicity and makes the fall de- pendent upon the defection of the will from the good. If we throw out the first (Gnostic) option of book 11 (as Augustine explicitly does not— though he does not embrace it either), we are throwing out the “receiving less of the divine love” option of book 12 (similarly Gnostic). The concom- itant phrasing that the others must have been “more amply aided” in order to come to the fullness of beatitude or accept justice from the mo- ment of creation, which completes this strict and double predestinarian position, is also not embraced. On the other hand, if we accept the “more amply aided/receiving less of the divine love” story in book 12, the story in the previous book which “explains” it is the Gnostic one of differential knowledge of their beatitude given to the angels at creation. In sum, Au- gustine seems to think he has to choose between a gnostic story of a lack of perfect goodness in God causing some to be “more amply aided” and resulting in a hard and double predestinarianism of a story which does not allow him to point to any act of the finite free will as efficiently, deci- sively, and solely caused by divine grace. The problem is understanding why he considers this choice a problem, why he even brings up the gnos- ticizing hard predestinarian option in these two books of DCD. Why does he claim that some were more amply aided when the other story about grace as necessary but not necessitating, about how grace is an efficient and ever-active, but not the efficient or absolutely decisive, cause fits per- fectly with the trajectory of his thought explicated in DLA and underpin- ning Confessions? The hard predestinarian option Augustine begins to mount here in DCD is not only not necessary for him, it is not in keeping with his earlier explications of the finite free will, it also falls to that reduc- tive dilemma he will use almost a decade later against the pagans. Why does he go there? Perhaps we must ask, why does he go there now?! My suggestion is that in the condition of a pitched battle against Pelagi- anism, the subtle philosophy and refined rhetoric of DLA and Confessions are perhaps too gentle and refined a whisper for Augustine’s audience to hear. The additional troubling sentence seems, in fact, to bleed over from Augustine's decade earlier (a.D. 397) discussion of the fallen human will in his answers to Simplician. There he had made clear that fallen man It should be noted that nowhere in this discussion of DCD 11 and 12 does Augustine quote the difficult phrase from Rom. 8:29-30, which became something he could not re- frain from quoting in his latest treatises (DDP DPS). On that matter, see below. 220Currents of Controversy in Augustine has a will that is in a somewhat different situation (and rightly so) from libero arbitrio in itself. In explicating Romans to Simplician, Augustine says that “In this mortal life one thing remains for free will, not that a man may fulfill righteousness when he wishes, but that he may turn with sup- pliant piety to him who can give the power to fulfill it” (Ad simplician [hereafter AS] 1.14). The Adam not destined to die was able to fulfill righ- teousness by clinging to the creator's grace, as was the angel. The later Adam—including ourselves—is not able to do so, but at best only begin, which is done by turning. “Unless they turn piously to the grace of God,” the law exercises dominion over fallen men and condemns all, justly, to death (4S 1.15). The best we can do now is turn and hope God will cling to us. It is to this mortal man that the rest of the explication of Romans to Simplician must apply, for since after Adam’ sin all are justly condemned, God's gracious election must now precede the faith of turning (AS 2.7). God's hatred of Esau is merited by Esau as a son of Adam, God's love of Jacob is unmerited and does not come from foresight of Jacob’s faith, but enables the turn to faithful piety, and being so enabled, Jacob chooses to turn: “For no one can believe unless he is called, although none can be- lieve against his will” (AS 2.9). It is not, in Esau’s case “that anything is imposed by God whereby [he] is made worse, but only that He provides nothing whereby [the] man is made better” (AS 2.15). Here, in the story of the fallen human will, the troublesomeness of the phrasing “received more of the divine love,” or “was more amply aided” is abrogated by the preexisting state, which is sin, and its concomitant just condemnation. Here that “more amply aided” story makes sense and is not Gnostic. God more amply aids Jacob, enabling faith in him, he does not grant such aid to Esau. In both cases, the destiny of each is still a result of both grace and free will since Jacob, being enabled, turns, and Esau, who is in his position by the act of Adam's will (in which his own nature as a finite will is involved), continues in sin. Even here the strict and double predestina- tion of the problematic sentence of DCD 12.9 is not implied, nor is there any indication or argument that even this weaker predestinarian position (all are rightly condemned, but some graciously saved) makes sense for any will not yet sunk to mortality, as the new angel’s obviously is not. In his last writings, through which we hear an almost constant echoing of Rom. 8:29-30, 9:10-24, and 11:25-32 (seemingly read without corre- lation to 5:15-21, and with an all but completely tendentious explication of | Tim. 2.4),"' the story first suggested in DCD about angels—that some received less or others more ample aid—is compounded with God's fore- "' For the tendentious interpretations of 1 Timothy, see De correptione et gratia 15.44 and DPS 14, where he adds the word he needs—God “wills that all such be saved"; some of the echoing of Romans will be noted below in the text. 221The Journal of Religion knowledge to reduce freedom to predestined incapacity to either em- brace salvation or to escape it. There are some of whom it is said: “He wills not to come to their help” (DDP 25), and thus they are not by the predestination of grace separated from the mass of perdition, but predes- tined to judgment (DDP 35), while to others it is “given by the Father to come to the Son” (DDP 37), and this calling, predestinating, justifying, glorifying on God's part are “without repentance” (Rom. 11:29; cf. DDP 33, 36 [twice], 41; DPS 33)—they cannot fail. So, not only are the Tyrians and Sidonians left in perdition, “who might have believed had they seen Christ’s wonderful miracles,’ so also the Jews who saw them and did not believe “that the saying of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, .. . ‘He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart that they should not see with their eyes not understand with their heart, and be converted and I should heal them’” (DDP 35). Nor is this hardening limited to the deny- ing Jews at the time of Christ or the disbelieving Sidon and Tyre of Isaiah, but it is general “He hardens whom He will, even though his merits may have preceeded” (DDP 25). It is impossible for such to embrace salvation even if they would. And on the other side, too, “the ordering of his future works ... is absolute” (DDP 41): “He foreknew the remnant which he should make [holy and without spot] according to the election of grace. That is, therefore, He predestinated them, for without doubt He fore- knew if He predestinated, but to have predestinated is to have foreknown that which He should do” (DDP 47). It is impossible for these to escape the salvation of God. And as to the question “why He delivers one rather than another—‘His judgments are unsearchable, and his ways past find- ing out’” (Rom. 11:33; DPS 11, 16; cf. DDP 18, 21, 25, 27, 30, 35). It is in keeping with Augustine’s longest-held story (from DLA on) that God would know which created spirits would choose what without em- bracing the hard predestinarianism that makes it God's decision, by the gift of differential knowledge or aid, that these are saved and those damned. But Augustine must feel at the time of writing this part of DCD the threat of Pelagian huzzas, for if we do not make salvation the direct determination of (predestining) grace, it sounds like it is within our power to save ourselves. It is, therefore, to this position that he, in the last treatises against them, comes. The terms of battle seem to be grace versus free will, and, when the noise of the world organizes itself in this way, not to be more adamant about grace may give comfort and solace to the enemy. That would be impiety. This threat may be especially problem- atic in Augustine's case. He is a bishop charged not only with catechizing the simple but also the confused and the mistaken; not only has he a much longer training in methods of making things clear that are useful in rhetoric than he has in finer-grained distinctions of philosophy, it is also required of a bishop in the pressing situation to be forceful and obvi- 222Currents of Controversy in Augustine ous. In a battle you have to be able to see the flag. And Augustine has to carry it—so, despite the moral difference between the equally fallen Esau and Jacob and the unfallen newly created angels, in DCD he pushes the argument he gave to Simplician (about the mortal will) back into the situ- ation of all created wills, foreshadowing therein the hard predestinarian- ism of the last treatises. In this, he is at least consistent about the relation- ship between any will and hard predestinarianism—a free will is a free will (whether enfleshed or angelic), and absolute ordering predestination is absolute ordering predestination. Clearly, if the battle is seen as one of grace versus free will, Augustine chooses the right side. For the rhetorical situation of the hearers of this debate is whether they ought to fall before the mercy of God or depend upon themselves for righteousness. The hybris of the Pelagians and the difficulties their preaching mimetically evoked—even among dedicated monks and bishops—was a serious moral danger. Augustine calls his sheep in the right direction, for Pelagius and Julian renew the original turning of the fall toward the glorious vision of . . . oneself. Certainly the writer of Confessions is not going to doubt the continual activity, necessity, and efficacy of grace. Nor is any adequate reader of the earlier works going to think anything else than that it is grace that the defiant run into, itis grace which seeks out the lost, grace which enlightens the confused, and grace which loosens the bond of sinful habit. But all of that does not entail that those angels who are saved were “more amply assisted” or that those who are not fail due to “receiving less of the grace of divine love”; in fact, to go so far completely unravels the entire fabric so carefully wo- ven in DLA and Confessions, of which fabric the act of confessing itself is made. As the Vandals beseige and eventually destroy his earthly city, the attacks of Pelagius and Julian make Augustine destroy his own best work to keep their heresy from taking the sheep of his heavenly city. Philoso- phy, it seems, takes second place to rhetoric—for the sake of winning souls. III. CONCLUSION It is often said of Augustine that his doctrinal hardening on the issue of predestination is due to the difficulties he underwent as a North African bishop and the continuous human evils of the age—slavery, gladiatorial games, the recrudesence and horrible grimness of paganism—evils with which he was all too familiar."? It was a cultural struggle, but the cultures were made of human beings, and having had to struggle mightily to turn toward his own salvation, he knew how much of what one takes to be = Compare, e.g., Rist, Augustine, pp. 267-68. 223The Journal of Religion oneself has to be lost, destroyed, thrown away, or sacrificed in order to discover that all that is not really one’s self but the effects and attachments of those demons of the air which constitute through their praise so much of any culture. After Adam, sin is operative in the world to such an extent that even a devout woman thinks more of grandchildren than of chastity and embraces learning, thinking it is not dangerous when really it is per haps the most likely place (before television or the internet) for the de- mons to take up their parastatic bodies. Escaping from the totalized power of the Prince of this world is not, Augustine must have thought, within anyone's power, will, or desire, and it must have seemed to him that for most it was not even within the power of their intellectual vision to see the problem—the demons keep most people too busy to ever become philosophers, the first conscious step in Augustine’s own conversion. Per- haps it is true, as many scholars consider, that as Augustine thought more about the problem he steps into here against the Pelagians, he came to the conclusion that the salvation of any rational being must be predestined by grace, and there seem, in fact, to be very few such fortunates. So he some- times says, most frequently at the last. But beside the push of the Pelagian debate, and a kind of growing (and not entirely misplaced) despair of the world, there is another thought that attracts me as having its influence on Augustine’s turn here in DCD 12. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Augustine's genius was more poetic than philosophical, by which I mean nothing but that a different kind of praise is due to him—certainly no less. We remember the youth who wept for Dido (probably as unusual then as a student weeping for Juliet in a classroom today); we remember that what attracts the young philoso- pher first to Ambrose is the beauty of his speaking; we remember his continuing fear that the beauty of even liturgical music might be sinful. And if his genius is more mimetic than representational, his training more rhetorical than philosophical, his soul more finely attuned to the tremors and timbres of passion than to exactitude of dialectic and clarity of terminology (and to say this of the writer of De trinitate is to say in his praise what can perhaps be said of one other human being in the history of the world), then perhaps what is going on between DLA and the middle of DCD, between Confessions and the late treatises on predestina- tion, is an effect of the mimetic act in which the man is engaged. I do not, by this remark and what follows in explication of it, mean to suggest that what Augustine writes is not argument, nor do I mean that as a trained rhetorician he habitually dresses his arguments for battle to the death, just as I would not say the first about Plato, or suggest that in Plato rhetoric is just dressing. I mean that since he is engaged in a mi- metic act in writing his works, there is always more going on than just argument (and there always is). There is always more going on than con- 224Currents of Controversy in Augustine necting theses, and this “more” is orienting and shaping. All the arts of the muses, and so all writing, according to Plato (Laws 668a) are both mimetic and iconic—besides saying or representing something through iconic reference, they also evoke through mimesis.'® Nothing could be a clearer example of this than the opening of Confessions, where unless you, as reader, are praying with Augustine—the writer and prayer—you are not reading Confessions. And in such confessing prayer, the idea of proving existence, for example, cannot even appear. I will touch here upon only one aspect of this mimetic effect with re- gard to the present problem. Consider that on what we might call the nonpredestinarian side—DLA and Confessions—Augustine is speaking with another person—Evodius or God, respectively. He is speaking with that person throughout the text, and even though in the case of DLA Evodius disappears, the origin and mimetic form of the whole is still a (probably historically based) discussion with a person whom he knows and loves. The mimetic form—discussion—and the presence of the per- son addressed, as much as the content of the texts, precludes what we might call an objective point of view, or an objectifying solution to a prob- lem—for example, the relation between evil and freedom. On the other hand, DCD—though addressed to Marcellinus—and the late treatises— because they are addressed against Pelagius or Julian, have a quite oppo- site mimetic structure. That is to say, writing a book combining history and a philosophy of history, especially writing one against a previous com- plainant (for example), is the kind of thing that calls forth objective think- ing. So, too, does writing an argumentative response against a position already lined out by an opposing party (e.g., Pelagius or Julian). Objective distancing is the stance and mimetically induced character that taking up this kind of writing induces in the writer, as surely as writing (or singing) a confession or lyric induces another kind of character in both listener and speaker." Augustine is, in these strongly predestinarian texts, address- ing no one and arguing against an already propagated error. He falls into objectivity as a matter of course. He is defending a thesis, not seeking or speaking with a beloved. Perhaps, then, the question we should think about as readers is whether or not the question about God’s will regarding the salvation of '* For a more detailed explication of this matter, see my “Intentionality and Mimesis Can- onic Variations on an Ancient Grudge, Scored for New Mutinies,” Sul/Stance 75 (1994): 46-74. 1 Even Hegel is able to notice this distinction, if not perform it, in his Early Theological Writings, tans. T. M. Knox (Chicago, 1948). See, e.g., his remarks in $14 and §19 of “The Positivity of the Christian Religion.” But once he begins on the large historical (or pseudo- historical—the Phenomenology) projects, he becomes perfectly objective, this is a necessity of the form. All subjectivity disappears—his, God's, the reader's 225The Journal of Religion the world is appropriately asked in such an objectively distancing fashion by a finite soul in medias res? Is the objectivity into which this theological question of predestination—the predestination of faceless others, past and future, and even ourselves (at one remove)—is the objectivity into which this problematizing casts us a real possibility for such a finite soul? And if it is a real possibility, is it a good one to actualize—as a reader or as a writer? I do not merely mean to point out that the framing of such a question induces the kind of answer (objective judgment)—if not its precise content (judgment, not grace)—which is undeniably true, even in physics. I also mean to wonder about whether or not certain mimetic forms of writing might not engender the morally wrong kind of character in both reader and writer; that kind of character is induced in precisely this kind of grammatological situation. There are wrong ways of seeking; I learned this from Augustine. Might it not be that taking up the problem of predestination in this way is a culturally shaped style for which many and loud voices say “well done, well done” (Confessions 1.13.21) no matter which side of the answer we take up, because having taken it up in this way we have already erred—precisely in placing our good in the develop- ment of a suitable answer to a question (and one asked in a manner) en- tirely unsuitable? For let us be clear about what we are doing: to raise the problem of predestination is to ask about some unnamed and faceless fel- low creatures whether or not they are eternally damned. Does even God’s justice ask the question this way? Is this properly posed as a theological problem? If someone had not asked you this as an undergraduate, or perhaps earlier, would you have ever thought to propose it to yourself? A teacher is often a seducer, mostly (let us hope) unknowingly, as a mere persona for a much more powerful cultural voice, charmed by mimesis out of his (or her) mouth. There are demons that live in the air. Dog Iam not sure that Augustine, with the finesse of his passional develop- ment, is unaware of these mimetic effects. He is perfectly aware of them in his own best writing. Certainly in Confessions he discovers that the evil was in the way he framed the problem of evil, a way that he picked up, let us note, from the philosophers he read and the reputed wise men with whom he hung around. We note that he starts and breaks from this problem many times in the course of his Confessions, sometimes it is with the remark that he has no answer, but frequently it seems as if he feels there is something not quite right about what he has just said or the ques- tion he has just asked. Indeed, this stopping and starting, posing and dropping, engenders just such a feeling in the reader—as if there is some- thing disgusting about the whole problem phrased that way. So, if some complain of Augustine—even of his Conféssions—that he composes badly, 226Currents of Controversy in Augustine perhaps it is because he is not ever wholly under the mimetic charm of a stance that we, centuries later, are all too seriously and completely given to—that of objective science. Perhaps, then, it is grace that predestines him not to be able to find the time to twist himself into the posture of a systematic theologian or religious philosopher. Grace, which we pray prevents us everywhere, prevented him too, making sure that even where he would so twist himself, he is only allowed to do so by the fits and starts of the occasional tract. Ironically, he is saved by the sheer variety of heretics and problems he faces. Just so do all things work to the good for those who love God. Let us pray that we be similarly prevented. Amen. 227