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CHAPTER VIII

ST. AUGUSTINE’S ACHIEVEMENTS AND MISTAKES

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. - 1 Thessalonians 5:21

       The two principal alternatives to the biblical view of sin have been described: the simple moralism which conceives sin as the mere breaking of taboos, and the ubiquitous doctrine, especially among philosophers and aesthetes, that the mere fact of human existence itself constitutes an intolerable stigma. Each view is the product of an attempt to fit the facts of idolatry into a framework prescribed by pagan categories. Though neither can thoroughly digest these facts, each retains a garbled fragment of the truth. The first appreciates the necessity for some objective reference in the exercise of freedom, though conceiving it statically, in terms of law. The second understands that sin is prior to individual acts of choice, but traces it to a defective human nature rather than to misplaced allegiance.

       Unfortunately Christian thought has not sufficiently distinguished the biblical from these two pagan views, but instead has often confused it with one or the other. On two historic occasions the Church was rocked to its foundations by disputes over the nature of sin. In their struggle against Pelagius and against late medieval Catholicism, respectively, St. Augustine and the Reformers formulated for all time and in unmistakable terms Christianity’s case against moralism. The tragedy, however, was that in doing so they fell into the opposite error. They did not consistently oppose moralism with a biblical view of sin but lapsed instead into a disparagement of human nature.

       They thus provide a classic illustration of how controversy perpetuates itself. One party first discerns a conspicuous error in the other’s thinking. Aware that fallacious theory gives rise to destructive practice, he feels obliged to assail it with all his might. No one, however, can confine himself merely to negative criticism. Every criticism implies a positive affirmation (excepting only the case of purely formal logic). The philosopher or theologian cannot object to his opponent’s position without saying why. And the moment he states his reason he willy-nilly endorses an alternative answer to the

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question at issue. He may not be aware of this; he may even disclaim any positive view whatever. But this only means that he takes to himself a bedfellow whose credentials he has not examined.¹ Any inadequacy in his unconscious premise is sure to be exploited by his opponent. A vicious circle thus begins in which each side is right in what it negates but wrong in what it affirms. Each sees the other’s error so clearly that he can attribute it only to willful blindness. What began as a serious discussion of a live issue degenerates into a treadmill of mutual recrimination. This is what happened in the debate between St. Augustine and Pelagius. As will be shown subsequently, the biblical alternative can combine the strength and avoid the weakness of each side.

       The situation of St. Augustine, and also of the two principal Reformers, is not unlike that of the Western Allies in World War II. In desperation to defeat a manifest evil, they did not ask too many questions of their comrades in arms. So also the historic opponents of moralism. They concentrated so exclusively on the job at hand, the demolition of the belief in “sanctification by works,” that they were not too particular about their intellectual alliances. Their victory was achieved with the help of a doctrine which is quite as alien to the biblical outlook as the ones which they overcame: the view that sin is intrinsic to human nature. They thereby bequeathed to future generations the still unfinished task of winning the peace.

THE CHURCH’S INDEBTEDNESS TO ST. AUGUSTINE

       St. Augustine rendered the Church an invaluable service by exposing the dangers which lay hidden in the persuasive arguments of Pelagius. Not until Luther’s time did anyone again so fully appreciate or so eloquently expound the pitfalls in a legalistic conception of sin. He brings to bear all the biblical arguments against it. He pointed out the lovelessness of a scheme in which each individual concentrates on establishing his own perfection. He was quick to discern the demon of self-righteousness and spiritual pride waiting at the top of the ladder of moral achievement.² He saw that a definition of righteousness in terms of what the individual could do for himself

¹A prime example is the theology of Karl Barth. By steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the positive implications of his far-flung negations, he unwittingly allies himself with a metaphysic that is far more neoplatonic than Christian.

²The metaphor is Archbishop Temple’s. See his Basic Convictions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), p. 50.

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diverts attention from that aspect of his behavior which is beyond his immediate control: his motives. And to disregard motives, of course, is to miss the entire point of the moral problem. If the sole criterion of conduct were mere external correctness, we could all become paragons of virtue simply by putting our minds to it. This prospect of an easy sainthood accounts for the perennial appeal of Pelagianism. It also explains why the moralist is driven by his very moral ardor to become the agent of evil. For to exempt a man’s motives from judgment is to throw the door wide open to hypocrisy. If the motives behind his “good works” are tinged with resentment, envy, or moral competitiveness, his crusade against evil will only result in the poisoning of human relations. Unknown to himself, he has become an agent of the devil’s fifth column. And finally, Augustine argues that, if man by his own good works could pile up sufficient merit to establish a claim against God, then it would be man who called the tune. The Almighty would be relegated to the role of a mere means to man’s beatitude.

       The Church will always be indebted to St. Augustine for the insight and the zeal with which he exposed these errors. This does not mean, however, that his counteraffirmations are beyond criticism.³ Throughout his thought two incompatible strands are inextricably interwoven. The first is the view of sin as intrinsic to human nature and, second, a genuinely biblical train of thought. This involves him in inconsistency and thereby reduces his philosophical effectiveness, but it also helps to redeem him personally from some of the unfortunate implications of his doctrines. The following pages give an account of some of the unhappy measures by which he sought to refute Pelagius and of their continuing influence on some Protestant theology. These criticisms themselves, however, are heavily dependent upon the “happy inconsistencies” which impart to Augustine’s thought a leaven of health not always present in that of his successors.

SIN MADE INTRINSIC

       In search of a bulwark against the self-righteousness of Pelagius’s moral giant, Augustine took refuge in the famous doctrine of original sin (originale peccatum). Entirely absent from the Bible, and sig-

³Not all of Augustine’s errors can be explained as due simply to the exigencies of controversy. The main outline of his position was already clearly stated in his

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nificantly rare in pre-Augustinian writings, this phrase owes its currency among the theologians of Western Christendom almost entirely to Augustine. (The Eastern Church, suspecting from the start that neither Augustine nor Pelagius had successfully stated the true Christian position, never committed itself to either side of the dispute.) Modern reinterpretations of it, notably that of Reinhold Niebuhr, have gone far toward ridding it of some of the objectionable connotations which it has acquired in popular thinking. Responsibility for these connotations, however, must be laid at the door of Augustine himself. He expressly held that, as a result of Adam’s first sin, the entire human race was a “lump of perdition” (massa perditionis), standing under a double curse. By a so-called “seminal identity” with Adam it inherited a full share of his immeasurable guilt (reatus), though it had no part in his original transgression. By the process of generation each individual was infected with unruly and inordinate passion (concupiscentia) which both confirmed his guilt and at the same time constituted a partial punishment:

       Then, after his sin, he [Adam] was given into exile, and by his sin the whole race of which he was the root was corrupted in him, and thereby subjected to the penalty of death. And so it happened that all descended from him, and from the woman who had led him into sin, and was condemned at the same time with him - being the offspring of carnal lust on which the same punishment of disobedience was visited-were tainted with the original sin, and were by it drawn through divers errors and sufferings into that last and endless punishment which they suffer in common with the fallen angels . . . .

       Thus, then, matters stood. The whole mass of the human race was under condemnation, and was lying steeped and wallowing in misery, and was being tossed from one form of evil to another, and . . . was paying the well-merited penalty of that impious rebellion.⁴

       In the later Middle Ages Augustine’s version of original sin was gradually modified. Although the Roman Catholic Church never endorsed Pelagianism as a theory, and in fact continues to uphold the doctrine of original guilt, it did not develop a third alternative to the Augustine-Pelagius dilemma, but settled down into the “semi-Pelagianism” which it holds to the present day. By the time of the Protestant Reformation its practice had succumbed to many of the

De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, written some years before he had ever heard of Pelagius. See Norman P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London: Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., 1927), pp. 326-35.

⁴St. Augustine, Enchiridion, Chapters 26 and 27.

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abuses against which Augustine had fought. The subtleties of scholastic speculation, which in theory might skate around Pelagianism, had not prevented its recrudescence in the everyday usage of the Church. The system of penance and indulgences had tended to make salvation a thing for sale and virtue a matter of almsgiving and telling beads. The symbol of this attitude was the treasury of merit. The theory was that the saints, by their excessive good works, had accumulated more merits than the minimum necessary for salvation. Under the auspices of the Church, withdrawals could be made from this stockpile and applied to the accounts of ordinary mortals to cover their moral overdrafts.

       In revolt against the abuses which this system encouraged, the Reformers intended simply to return to the original beliefs and practices of the early Church. Naturally enough they found their strongest ally in St. Augustine, who had already fought a similar battle before them, and whose words even seemed to anticipate such a situation as they now confronted. Naturally, too, since they were risking their lives against the mightiest power in Europe, they applied his doctrines with less restraint and more ruthless consistency than he. Where he had been content to speak of a general corruption of human nature, Calvin coined the phrase “total depravity” (though he occasionally appears to deny it, as in The Institutes, book 2 chapter 2, paragraphs 13-16; and chapter 3, paragraph 3). Despite important differences between himself and Martin Luther, on this point they are in essential agreement. The “formulary of concord” speaks for both when it says:

Into the place of the image of God which had been lost there has succeeded an intimate, grievous, most profound and abysslike, inscrutable and indescribable corruption of the whole nature and of all the powers of man, most chiefly of the superior and principal faculties of the soul, a corruption which infects the mind, intellect, heart, and will. Wherefore after the Fall man receives from his parents by heredity a congenitally depraved impulse, filthiness of heart, depraved concupiscences and depraved inclinations.⁵

Luther and Calvin allied themselves even more carelessly than Augustine with the view that sin is something intrinsic to human nature. If this view is epitomized by sentiments like that of the Spanish poet Calderón, “The greatest crime of man is that he ever

⁵Ibid., p. 430.

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was born,” it finds a close parallel in the following utterances of Martin Luther:

It is the essence of man to sin.
Original sin is that very thing which is born of a father and a mother.
Man, as he is born of father and mother, is with his whole nature and essence not merely a sinner but sin itself.⁶

       Variations on this theme continue to recur in Protestant thought. In Sören Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, for example, it is strongly implied that finite existence necessarily entails sin, and that human freedom is the result of man’s fall from grace, a suggestion endorsed by Paul Tillich’s contention that human freedom is the point where creation and “the fall” coincide.⁷ The most concrete statement is Karl Barth’s celebrated dictum, “Before God, man is always in the wrong.”

       Assuming, for the sake of argument, that such a doctrine could achieve its purpose of precluding self-righteousness, it nevertheless prompts a question which orthodox Protestantism can never satisfactorily answer; namely, how can this conception of human nature as essentially depraved be reconciled with the biblical affirmation of the goodness of creation? Paul Tillich is apparently quite willing to face the implications of the Lutheran doctrine of sin and to grant frankly that finite existence is an evil.⁸ Other contemporary Reformation theologians, instead of confronting this difficulty, often seek to circumvent it. This is usually done in one of three ways. The first asserts that self-contradiction, though an embarrassment to the philosopher, is actually a credential of theology, a proof of its transhuman origin. The second contends that the “human nature” which God created was indeed good but bears no resemblance to the “human nature” which we now know. This is in effect a merely verbal solution to the problem. The third seeks to frighten the questioner into silence by branding his inquiries as a mark of intellectual pride. Devices like these, though invoked in defense of God’s honor, have the effect of exempting the theologian from the ordinary rules of

⁶These expressions were collected by J. A. Quenstedt, Theologia Didactico-Polemica (Wittenberg, 1691), Vol. 2, pp. 134f., and quoted by N. P. Williams, op. cit., p. 429.

⁷See Sören Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie (Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 41, 97; and Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, pp. 255f.

⁸See ibid., and also Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948) , Chapters 2 and 8.

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discourse. The “theological license” which he thus pre-empts imparts to some Protestant orthodoxy a censorious and even pontifical tone which contrasts unfavorably with the more reasonable tenor of the Roman Catholic.

       Originally a pagan doctrine, the conception of sin as intrinsic to human nature imparted an air of pessimism, otherworldliness, and futility to the pre-Christian Gentile world. When combined with the sense of guilt and responsibility as it was in India, it produced the belief that all the world’s evils were no more than a just punishment of wicked souls. And this in turn meant that any attempt to alleviate suffering constituted a rebellion against the eternal justice of the universe. The resulting constitutional reluctance to take arms against existing evil, so characteristic of the Hindu, is not without a parallel in Luther. Although he emphatically endorsed a rather rigorous ethic in private life, he taught that great social and institutional abuses, especially by the civil government, were to be patiently endured as the instruments of divine punishment. The powerful grip which this teaching had upon the German mind, and the great difficulty with which some Lutherans finally abandoned it, were dramatically illustrated during the Hitler era.

FREEDOM DENIED

       Having tried to put an end to self-righteousness by convicting all men of original sin, Augustine aims another blow at Pelagius’s moral hero. He divests him of the power to better his condition by his own effort. His aim, of course, is to deny that man can establish a claim against God. His method is to insist that the situation of man after “the fall” is that of being unable not to sin (non posse non peccare). Fallen man, he says, is subject to the “hard necessity” of sinning. His bondage to sin is so great that of himself he can do nothing good.⁹

       This denial of human freedom is a perfect illustration of a theory which is propounded in order to combat an error, rather than on its own merits. A spokesman for Pelagius had said that, by the possession of free will, man is emancipated from God.¹⁰ In his radical opposition to such a view Augustine declared that any good deed is due entirely to the “prevenient” grace of God, rather than to one’s own will. This

⁹N. P. Williams, op. cit., pp. 364-70, presents a conclusive analysis of the extent to which Augustine did not hesitate to deny the existence of human freedom in any significant sense.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 356.

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grace, moreover, must be “irresistible.” Otherwise man would possess a veto over the will of God. As Augustine proceeds step by step to follow the implications of his premises, man becomes more and more the hapless plaything of a capricious deity with a perverted sense of humor. The final upshot is the famous doctrine of predestination, the view that in the counsels of God some men are foreordained to salvation, and others to damnation, and that there is nothing they can do to alter the divine decree. This seemed to Augustine the only way to insure against man’s usurping the divine prerogatives. And, just to make sure that nothing human causes God to choose as he does, Augustine admits and even insists on the arbitrary, inscrutable, and even irrational character of divine election: “Forbear to set God the Judge in comparison with human things, that God whom we must not doubt to be just even when He does what seems to men unjust, or what, if it were done by a man, would actually be unjust.”¹¹

       Once this position has been stated, its adherents have no choice but to face up to some of its awkward implications. Chief among these, for example, is the radical denial of human freedom. Since, as the Pelagians were quick to point out, the conception of responsibility is meaningless apart from freedom, Augustine hesitated to follow where his own logic led. The result, however, is only some verbal jugglery which, while purporting to solve the problem, in fact only evades it. As N. P. Williams has pointed out, “If we disregard verbal subtleties and concentrate our attention on realities, we shall find that the Augustinian system implies the negation of free-will in any except a highly recondite and unnatural sense of the term.”¹²

       The Reformers also joined St. Augustine in the denial of human freedom, without which the conceptions of responsibility and guilt are meaningless. With less reserve than he, they championed the doctrines of predestination and the bondage of the will. Thus Luther in his Treatise on the Bondage of the Will:

Accordingly this doctrine is most chiefly needed and salutary for the Christian to know that God foresees nothing contingently, but that He both foresees, determines, and actually does all things, by His unchangeable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt the whole idea of free-will is smitten down and ground to powder . . . . All things which we do, even though they may seem to us to be done mutably and contingently . . . in reality are done under the stress of immutable necessity if regard be had to the will of God.¹³

¹¹Ibid., p. 381.

¹²Ibid., p. 370.

¹³Cited by N. P. Williams, op. cit., pp. 433f.

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The utter irrationality of such a deity is not only acknowledged but insisted upon:

In the things of God we must not hearken to reason.^l4

This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that he is just who at his own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that, as Erasmus says, he seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched, and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and iniquity, could be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith . . . .¹⁵

CHRISTIANITY REDUCED TO A DISCLOSURE -

       There is still another unfortunate corollary of this pre-Christian conception of sin. It forces its adherents to minimize or deny any fulfillment in this life. If sin could be overcome here and now, if agape could become a reality of present experience, this would mean that human nature is not incapable of goodness; it would contradict the definition of sin as intrinsic to it. The more tenaciously a theologian clings to this definition, the more radically he will repudiate any palpable effects of Christianity upon human character. He thereby unwittingly puts himself in the position not only of letting theory dictate to fact but of setting arbitrary limits upon the power of God to overcome evil. Symbolic of this tendency is the Reformers’ treatment of love. Whereas the Bible, the early Church fathers, and the Roman Catholic Church (including Augustine) unanimously place love at the pinnacle of Christian life, both Luther and Calvin subordinate it to faith. The significance of this inversion lies in the fact that faith can be interpreted (albeit unbiblically) as a special kind of knowledge. As Luther says, “Faith, therefore, is a certain obscure knowledge, or rather darkness which seeth nothing, and yet Christ apprehended by faith sitteth in this darkness.”¹⁶ Or, as John Burnaby observes in the case of St. Augustine:

It cannot be denied that faith, in Augustine’s general usage of the term, has predominantly the intellectual connotation of the definition which he gave at the end of his life - “to believe means simply to affirm in

¹⁴Cited by H. Grisar, Luther, translated by E. M. Lamond, edited by Luigi Cappadetta, Vol. 1 (London: Kegan-Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., Ltd., 1914), p. 216.

¹⁵Cited by Preserved Smith, Erasmus (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), p. 350.

¹⁶Martin Luther, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, a revised and completed translation based on the “Middleton” edition of 1575. Edited by

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thought” . . . “the certitude of faith is a kind of beginning of knowledge.”¹⁷

       The whole of Christianity is thereby reduced to a divine disclosure, a special kind of knowledge concerning the “last things.” This amounts to little better than a frankly gnostic belief in salvation by knowledge. Its strongest contemporary statement comes from Karl Barth, who declares that any fulfillment beyond mere disclosure, any real transformation of human life, is not only impossible but positively undesirable. In fact, it would “spoil everything.”¹⁸ All it would really spoil, what, in fact, it does spoil, is Karl Barth’s definition of sin. The most devastating rebuttals of his doctrine are the books of C. H. Dodd, who shows conclusively that the early Church stakes its claim on the present experience of the new reality, agape.

GOOD WORKS IMPUGNED

       Another untoward consequence is the devaluation of good works. Augustine must deny any correlation between an outward act and true goodness; otherwise good works would be “meritorious” and therefore constrain God’s favor. In the legitimate effort to guard against the notion that God could be “bought,” he resorted to the dubious device of declaring that the divine honor would be offended if anyone but Himself could do good. It is one thing to deny that works are the sole measure of goodness and quite another to declare them irrelevant to goodness. Although Augustine was more reluctant than the Reformers to take the latter position, it follows inevitably from his premises. Goodness becomes solely an inward thing, a matter of “faith alone.”¹⁹

       From here it is only one more step to “antinomianism,” the theory that it makes no difference what one does as long as one has faith. Since the Christian could scarcely endorse such a position, it is not

Philip S. Watson (London: James Clarke & Co., Ltd., 1953). p. 134 Reformation theologians from Luther’s time until the present have struggled manfully to avoid the reduction of faith to a kind of knowledge. When the actualization of love as a present experience is denied, however, this is the only remaining alternative, despite all protests to the contrary. This tendency of faith to slide over into knowledge in Reformation theology is an appropriate symptom of its connection with that unchristian outlook which exalts knowledge per se as self-justifying.

¹⁷John Burnaby, Amor Dei (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), pp. 74, 78.

¹⁸Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God, translated by G. T. Thompson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 180.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 375.

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surprising that Augustine recoiled from it. He, like the Reformers, insists on the importance of good works. The point, however, is not whether they personally urged good works upon their fellow Christians, but whether they did so consistently with the whole tendency of their theology or in defiance of it. As will be argued more fully later, Augustine finds room for good works by insistence only and not by argument. Those who will try to defend him against the charge of antinomianism are always obliged to appeal to his indisputable personal concern for good works, rather than to his doctrines and their fateful import. A more biblical theology, while giving him full credit for his inconsistencies, provides an intellectual framework in which good works have a place de jure and not simply de facto.

       Undoubtedly the Reformation’s greatest single embarrassment is its attitude toward good works. Not that the Reformers did not advocate them. On the contrary, they insisted on them. But they would not have had to rely on dogmatic insistence if their own logic had not cut the nerve of good works. Where their opponents made the mistake of implying that mere external observances were a sufficient criterion of righteousness, they themselves fell into the opposite error. They transferred all questions of goodness to a wholly inward realm, a “vertical dimension” in which the soul encountered God, and from which the merely “horizontal” dimension, the external world of space, time, material objects, and friends, was excluded. This cleavage is the basis of Luther’s famous distinction between the “two realms” and even of the doctrine of justification by “faith alone.” Since the Bible gives equal importance to both inner and outer realms, it nowhere uses the phrase “faith alone.” In his own translation of the New Testament, Luther inserted the word “alone” gratuitously.

       The primacy of the inner world entailed an overwhelming emphasis upon sin as a state. Individual sinful acts, being only a reflection of this state, are of little importance. N. P. Williams correctly describes this facet of Reformation thinking when he says that for Luther,

in the last analysis, original sin, the sin of universal human nature as such, apart from the actual sins of individuals, is the only real sin that exists. Actual sin is regarded as being merely an epiphenomenona - a loathesome efflorescence of which the foul root is the inherent sinfulness of humanity.²⁰

²⁰N. P. Williams, op. cit., p. 433.

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When the importance of individual acts of sin is minimized, so also, pari passu, is that of individual good works. Having once severed the connection between the two realms, the Reformers could never join together what they themselves had put asunder. Hence the famous teaching that law and good works are unnecessary for man’s righteousness and salvation.²¹ Good works, in fact, have no part in ultimate salvation. They pertain strictly to the sinful state. Luther goes so far as to say that insofar as a man has been made perfect he dispenses with good works. He tries to safeguard against the logical implication of this by hastening to add that in this life nobody is perfect and must therefore submit to the yoke of good framework in banished the so-called religious dimension to an exclusively inward realm, Luther is swept helplessly along until finally deposited at the logical terminus of the argument which he has started, the famous statement that if a man were not a Christian believer, “all his works would amount to nothing at all and would be truly wicked and damnable sins.”²³ When John Wesley encountered this and similar Lutheran utterances, he rightly observed, “Here (I apprehend) is the real spring of the grand error of the Moravians. They follow Luther, for better, for worse. Hence their ‘No works; no Law; no commandments.’”²⁴

       Luther’s contemporary defenders can readily point to numerous passages in which he explicitly enjoins good works upon his fellow Christians, such as his Treatise on the Ten Commandments. Sydney Cave, for example, cites Luther’s Preface to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in which he insists emphatically that works and faith are inseparable.²⁵ This kind of defense absolves Luther personally of “antinomianism,” but it does not absolve him of responsibility for the logical implication of his doctrines. Their ultimate import is simply that, since all men are essentially sinful, those who act the part at least have the virtue of being honest with themselves, whereas

²¹See Martin Luther, “Treatise on Christian Liberty,” in The Works of Martin Luther, English translation (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, Vol. 2, 1915), p. 319.

²²Ibid., p. 328.

²³Ibid., p. 331. The Anglican Church, which has managed on the whole to steer clear of the excesses of the Reformers, incorporated a similar sentiment in Article XIII of its Thirty-Nine Articles.

²⁴See Wesley’s journal for June 15, 1741.

²⁵Sydney Cave, The Christian Way (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1949), pp. 140f.

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those who try to be “good” are hypocrites seeking to hide from themselves and from the world their own true nature. Astonishing as such a doctrine is to Anglo-Saxon ears, it is part and parcel of the pagan theory of “salvation by knowledge,” in which the only thing to be saved from is ignorance. It has found expression in Germany, not only in the writings of Nietzsche, but in those of Max Scheler, Thomas Mann, and Martin Heidegger. According to Scheler, “the fact that he [the sinner] sins, when he already has a sinful heart, is not evil, but good.”²⁶ Thomas Mann speaks of “a capacity for sin so incurable that it makes a man despair from his heart of redemption - that is the true theological way to salvation.”²⁷ Martin Heidegger echoes the same attitude when he says that conscience, when truly understood, summons man to become guilty.²⁸

       It goes without saying that to flirt with such pagan notions was the farthest thing from Luther’s intention. The point is that they represent the ultimate outcome of a chain of reasoning which had been set in motion by two of his fundamental doctrines, the cleavage between faith and works and the definition of original sin. Short of repudiating these, there is no consistent escape from antinomianism. Unable to extricate himself by argument, Luther resorts to the bludgeon, pronouncing judgment upon those who would follow where his own logic leads. A more recent illustration of the same dilemma, and of the attempt to escape by recourse to epithet, is the following passage from Sören Kierkegaard:

Guilt, like the eye of the serpent, has the power to fascinate spirit. At this point lies the truth in the . . . notion of attaining perfection through sin .... On the other hand, it is a blasphemy to think that the principle should be carried out in concreto.²⁹

       When the first Roman Catholic missionaries arrived in Japan, they encountered the sect of Amida Buddhism. According to its teaching, all one need do to be saved is to call upon the name of the Buddha. So the Roman Catholics reported to Rome that the Protestants had reached the island before them with the doctrine of justification by faith alone. If one regards only one part of Reformation doctrine, their reaction was perfectly justified. It is an accurate con-

²⁶Quoted by Anders Nygren, op. cit., p. 72.

²⁷Cited by Robert W. Flint, “Thomas Mann and the Collapse of Bourgeois Humanism,” in Christianity and Society, Winter 1950-51, p. 24.

²⁸Martin Heidegger, op. cit., pp. 287f.

²⁹Sören Kierkegaard, op. cit., pp. 92f. My italics.

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clusion from that side of Luther’s thought which is symbolized by his ill-considered injunction, “Sin boldly.” The moral for Protestant theology is this: Beware the man who defines human nature primarily in terms of sin. Out of desperation to prove his point he may be tempted to illustrate it in his conduct. In which case he can readily persuade himself that he is only treating you like the worthless wretch which his doctrine declares you to be.

CONCLUSION

       Luther and Calvin, of course, would join St. Augustine in repudiating any such antinomian inference from their primary assumptions. However, if it does follow logically, particularly from the doctrine of “original sin,” something must be wrong with their formulation of the doctrine. Their opponents have sensed this, even if they have not often been able to pinpoint the difficulty. If Pelagius’s diagnosis never went deep enough, at least he never forgot, as his critics sometimes do, that nothing is more important in the sight of God than what men do with their freedom. The argument against Pelagius has all too frequently resembled the behavior of a physician who, correctly perceiving the difference between the cause of disease and its symptoms, forgets that the whole purpose of eliminating the underlying cause is to relieve the patient of the undesirable symptoms.

       The historic tragedy was that, while rejecting Pelagius’s doctrines, both Augustine and Luther forgot that the purpose of the cure extended to the whole man. At times they even treat Pelagius’s emphasis on good works and free will in cavalier, if not contemptuous, fashion. From the fourth century to the present this attitude has only served to stamp Christianity with a fatalistic and otherworldly atmosphere. This spirit is so thoroughly and obviously contrary to the Bible that it continually provokes the spiritual heirs of Pelagius to reassert his doctrines. The Church has thereby been saddled with a perennial dispute, as unnecessary as it is unproductive, between two false alternatives, “faith or works.” Each side has been encouraged to stick to its guns by the manifest inadequacy of the other. In these circumstances the only possible victory was a pyrrhic one.

       Historically, Augustinianism never has won a clear-cut victory on the level of reasoned argument. In Augustine’s own time its triumph was only achieved by the civil government’s active suppression of Pelagians. Nevertheless, since, in the absence of a third alternative,

St. Augustine’s Achievements and Mistakes 99

Western Christendom had to choose between Augustine and Pelagius, the former’s triumph was certainly fortunate. Pelagius’s superficial analysis would have undercut the very foundations of Christianity. The self-sufficiency of his moral titan would have made biblical Christianity irrelevant. According to Pelagius, any pagan might achieve perfection by resolutely performing the works of the moral law. Had this view triumphed, it would have meant the end of the whole biblical understanding of sin and, consequently, of its answer to the problem: agape. Within the thought of the Reformers, and especially of Augustine, there are redeeming strands of genuinely biblical thinking. It is these which, when disentangled from the web of pre-Christian ideas in which they are enmeshed, provide the basis for a fresh beginning in theology today.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC VERSION OF SIN

       The Roman Catholic Church, in seeking to avoid the errors of both Pelagius and St. Augustine, has developed a position midway between the two. The question remains, however, whether this is a genuinely biblical alternative, or whether it is merely a makeshift compromise between the two incompatible pagan views. It depends for its plausibility largely upon extremely subtle distinctions, double meanings of words, and a continual shift in perspective.

       It makes a significant departure from St. Augustine’s doctrine of the fall. Adam was originally endowed with certain spiritual gifts over and above those of a merely natural creature (donum superadditum) . When, as a result of the fall, this extra, sanctifying grace was lost, man then became a creature of the merely natural order. Then how “sinful” is he? Considered from the merely “natural” point of view, he simply belongs to the created goodness of the world. But there is also a higher, “supernatural” goodness. Considered as a creature who might have partaken of this “spiritual” realm, but who chose instead a lesser good, man is sinful. “The privation of this grace (that is, Adam’s original, supernatural endowment), even without any other act, would be a stain, a moral deformity, a turning away from God . . . . This privation, therefore, is the hereditary stain.”³⁰ Though

³⁰The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 11 Article on “Original Sin,” pp. 314f.

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logically vulnerable, this position does have a humanitarian merit. It provides a basis for the official doctrine that infants who die without baptism are sent to limbo, instead of being consigned to eternal damnation, as Augustine would have it.

       The attempt to explain how contemporary man can be responsible for an act committed by Adam makes use of similar ambivalence. “If the man, whose privation of original righteousness is due to Adam, is considered as a private person, says St. Thomas, ‘This privation is not his fault, for a fault is essentially voluntary. If, however, we consider him as a member of the family of Adam, as if all men were only one man, then his privation partakes of the nature of sin . .’ (De malo, book 4, part 1).”

       The contemporary position is that, although the man is not responsible in a “strict” sense, he is responsible in a “broad” sense. Similarly, he is not responsible for original sin “in the strict sense of the word but only in a broad sense. Considered precisely as voluntary, original sin is only the shadow of sin properly so-called. According to St. Thomas, it is not called ‘sin’ in the same sense, but only in an analogous sense.”³¹ The reader is left to decide for himself whether or not this is equivocal.

³¹Ibid.

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