Before Chalcedon
Hippo, North Africa
Latin West
Also: Augustine
Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, the most influential church father of the Western church. ⭐ An irony well worth remembering: as a young man he wrote On Free Will to defend freedom against the moral determinism of the Manichaeans; thirty years later Pelagius used that very work against the older Augustine. Later the two parties each took what they needed — those who held to synergism appealed to his early writings, those who held to monergism to his late ones. The same church father fed both opposing sides.
Below: first his own position, then the church’s verdict — kept separate. A rejected opinion keeps equal weight here.
His own position
His starting point was two convictions: that after the fall humanity is absolutely and totally depraved, and that God is absolutely and perfectly powerful and supremely sovereign. Original sin is seminal identity: as he puts it in the Enchiridion, “the whole race of which he was the root was corrupted in him”, and infants are born sinful. The human condition changed from posse non peccare (able not to sin) to non posse non peccare (not able not to sin). ⚠ He explicitly denied two conclusions, and neither may be left out. First, not that sin is absolutely necessary — as Olson summarizes him, sin and evil are the result of the misuse of freedom and have no metaphysical necessity; he insisted that what is compelled and what is merely certain are to be kept apart. Second, not that free will was entirely lost — after the fall humanity still has free will, only it is bound by sin and always leans toward disobedience. He defined freedom as doing what one wants to do. In his late On the Predestination of the Saints he set out what later came to be called unconditional election and irresistible grace. His reply to Vitalis, a learned layman of Carthage, is the crux of his whole position: as Olson gives it, grace, to be truly grace, must be wholly undeserved.
The church’s verdict
His anti-Pelagian position was adopted by Rome in 418 and by the Council of Ephesus in 431. ⚠ But his own radical monergism was never fully accepted — Olson notes that it was never fully accepted in the Western church, and that the Eastern church rejected it; at the Council of Orange in 529, as Olson puts it, both the most fervent supporters of Augustine and his strongest opponents lost, and the council gave no approval at all to predestination. After his death the popes made his theology semi-official, while theologians of the Eastern church questioned his orthodoxy. ⚠ Two sharp criticisms must be attributed clearly: Olson cites T. Kermit Scott's imperial myth thesis — that Augustine conceived of God after the image of the perfect Roman emperor; Olson's own judgment is that halfway through he lost his nerve and fled into mystery.
What was at stake for salvation
⭐ His concern for salvation has exactly the same structure as Athanasius's famous line. As Olson gives his argument: if anyone could attain righteousness by nature and free will alone, apart from the help of supernatural grace, then Christ died in vain — or, as Augustine himself writes in On Nature and Grace, “If righteousness come by nature, then Christ died in vain.” Any other view, he held, would weaken faith in Christ's death on the cross. That is: this is not metaphysical deduction but reasoning back from the practical consequences for salvation — the same kind of argument as thread 1's only God can save us; if the Son were a creature he could not save us.
Principal works
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On Free Will early
Written against the moral determinism of the Manichaeans — ⭐ the very work Pelagius used against him
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Confessions
Contains the prayer “give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt”, which was what set Pelagius off
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On the Spirit and the Letter 412
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On Nature and Grace 415
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On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin 418
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On Grace and Free Will 427
Written in reply to Valentinus and the monks of Adrumetum
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On the Predestination of the Saints 429
Set out what later came to be called unconditional election and irresistible grace
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The City of God c. 426/427
Begun in 413, completed about 426/427
Threads he belongs to
Grace and Free Will
Round 1 · The Pelagian Controversy Claim ⭐ An irony: the On Free Will that Pelagius used against him was one he himself had written as a young man.
Justification
The question arises Claim ⭐ Justification = making a person righteous — this reading was the foundation of Catholic teaching for the next thousand years. ⚠ This thread puts his side as the claim only because it came first and was the side being challenged, not because it is this site's position.