Augustine understands creation as bringing something out of nothing, something entirely separate from its Creator. God did not extrude the world from Himself. He was not and is not ‘immanent’ in His creation. What is more, He did not need to create the world; he did it by choice or ‘free will.’
Providence or ‘predestination’ means that God continues to perfect His creation by adjusting it according to changing circumstances. By creating man in His image God endowed a part of creation with free will, along with reason and speech or ‘logos.’ Providence refers to the bringing-into-being aspect of creation; free will belongs to its ‘separation’ side because God freely adjusts His creation in response to man’s freely willed thoughts, speeches, and actions.
A cogent interpretation of Augustine on this point was written by John Cassian, who lived between (it is estimated) 360 and 435. In his book the Conferences, Cassian remarks that Augustine defends Christianity form the Pelagian heresy by upholding the human need for God’s grace, which animates His providence. Cassian suggests that Augustine exaggerated the role of grace, somewhat at the expense of free will, because he recognized the (as it were) logographic necessity or rhetorical importance of doing so. Augustine began his intellectual life as a student of rhetoric, and so his approach should come as no surprise, and no disappointment.
Cassian sees that in his letter to Abbot Valentinus of Hadrametum Augustine does argue that to deny free will altogether would be to make God’s judgment of human sins unjust. Further, in his commentary on Psalm 102, Augustine writes: In treating the spiritual illness of sinful man, God “heals whoever is infirm, but not him who refuses healing.” His freely offered grace may be freely accepted or freely refused. Hence the idea of ‘prevenient’ or cooperative grace, a spiritual synergism between God and man that the Bible itself portrays again and again, and which the Bible’s reader re-enacts.
Augustinian predestination is not Calvinist predestination, at least as Calvin is usually understood. Augustine teaches that God wills the damnation of those who freely choose evil by choosing to reject His grace, but that is not to say that He wills them to choose evil. Doctrines of ‘strong’ predestination misconstrue Augustine’s argument. This notwithstanding, at the Council of Orange in 529 the Catholic Church itself eventually condemned Cassian’s reading as the “Semi-Pelagian Heresy,” a doctrine contradicting what the bishops took to be Augustine’s understanding of predestination, and of the understanding of grace propounded by the Apostle Paul. Post-lapsarian human nature being entirely depraved, no human being ever genuinely opens his soul to God. As an example, God’s Holy Spirit convinced Paul forcefully, by knocking him off his horse, duly impressing him with the limitations of the human will respecting salvation. But could Paul have refused even this divine command? Paul would say no, because by then the Holy Spirit had entered his soul and ‘turned’ it decisively to Himself.
Wherever the truth may lie in this controversy, it is undeniable that in Augustine we see the confrontation of Biblical religion and Platonic philosophy. It is the personal and creative character of the Biblical God that leads to such questions as free will and predestination, although the same problem can be seen to some extent in the tension between choice and ‘Fate,’ so prominent among the ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers alike. Philosophers look at nature, especially its forms and its purposes (‘the good’)—at one may be apprehended by ‘unassisted’ reason, which culminates in noesis. (‘Unassisted’ reason means reason unassisted by divine revelation, not unassisted tout court. That would be impossible.) Saints look toward God, the personal Creator of nature. Such a God can be known, but only as one knows a person and not as one knows an idea, or as one knows a physical object. A person can be known, intimately, but not fully in the way an idea, or a fact, can be known. God speaks to man from behind a cloud, or through His prophets, including His only begotten ‘Son.’
The personal, Creator-God encompasses a trinity: the Father (who is); the Son (who knows); the Holy Spirit (who wills). But this trinity is also a unity, because the Father’s being is coterminous with His knowledge and His willing. God is the Being who is knowing and willing; He is wisdom’s self, three ‘persons’ in one.
For Augustine, to philosophize or ‘love wisdom’ is to love God. As a person, not an idea or form, therefore not transparent and fixed, God rightly says “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” To love God properly is to love Him the way He loves you: with agapic love, not erotic or even ‘philiac’ love. Erotic love desires, seeks to acquire the beloved for the lover. Philos does not expect fully to acquire the object of its attraction, which is wisdom in the sense of theoretical knowledge, knowledge of the ideas, but neither does it suppose that the beginning of wisdom is fear. For the ‘philiac’ lover the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Agapic love wants the good for its beloved; it does not at all suppose that the beloved can be acquired. In this way it is ‘selfless.’ The marriage animated by erotic love alone won’t endure; the marriage animated by agapic love, by the mature and reciprocated fondness of husband and wife, can endure.
The Book of Genesis describes Abraham as the greatest man of his generation but also the most anav, the most humble. The humility of him animated by philosophic love, love of wisdom, consists in his acknowledgment that he will never fully possess the object of his love. The modesty of agapic love of Wisdom is that you do possess the object of your love—you do know God—but in a limited, if intense, way: the way in which one knows the best person you have ever loved. This is why Augustine prays before he philosophizes. He exercises his reason, while knowing that his reason will go only so far as “God grants us to see the light,” as a Bible-reading statesman once said.
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