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CHAPTER IX

AUGUSTINE AND PELAGIUS: BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN

Be no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.

- Ephesians 4:14

       In their eagerness to build a doctrinal dike against any recurrence of moralism, Augustine and the Reformers sacrificed important elements of the biblical understanding of man and God. They developed the doctrine of “original sin” in order to prevent self-righteousness and to dispel the notion that a man could sit down at the bargain counter with God. But the consistent consequence of this teaching is the denial of human freedom, upon which the whole biblical philosophy rests, and of the transformation of men’s hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit, apart from which the Gospel is reduced to a disclosure of information about God’s plan for the future.

       The present chapter attempts to show how Augustine and his successors unwittingly became the victims of a sobering irony. Their costly measures do not even succeed in the purpose for which they were designed. Instead, by a curious inner logic, they lead by a roundabout route to many of the same errors which they were intended to combat. It is especially important to emphasize this point at the present day, when in certain theological circles any criticism of Augustine or the Reformers is apt to be greeted with cries of “Pelagianism.” The following pages will demonstrate that Pelagius and Augustine, despite their diametrically opposed starting points, turn out in many respects to be brothers under the skin.

       The exposure of an ultimate similarity between such apparently divergent positions will illustrate a principle which Christianity shares in common with philosophy and indeed with any sort of rational discourse: namely, the conviction that, since human reason is part of the created goodness of the world, it will sound the alarm whenever man’s thinking is based upon a falsehood. This built-in safety device is the law of noncontradiction: when what a man says in the morning cannot be reconciled with what he says in the afternoon, he must have been arguing from a false premise. The locus classicus for

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the systematic application of this principle are the earlier Socratic dialogues. To state it epigrammatically: no false theory can be consistently elaborated; this is the last laugh which the truth enjoys at the expense of all misconceptions of it. When this principle is applied to the issue under discussion, it means that if, in refuting one error, St. Augustine and the Reformers have fallen into another, they will be led in a circle to the moralistic doctrines they set out to avoid. The following pages will show that this is precisely what happens.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PELAGIANISM

       The same principle applies to Pelagius. An indirect proof that he, too, begins from a false premise is the fact that, however surprisingly, his position likewise tends to turn into its opposite. The moralist sets out to subdue his evil impulses. But it requires no philosopher to ask, “Where do the evil impulses come from? How did they get there in the first place?” This single question forces the Pelagian a long way in the direction of Augustine. He can only answer that he “came that way,” that these impulses are part of his nature. Although this is not yet a doctrine of “total depravity,” nevertheless, if the evil impulses are just as much a part of him as the good, then there remains no residual “pure” self which can claim exemption from them Thus a very direct, logical path conducts Pelagius from his own starting point to Augustine’s conclusion.

       It is nicely illustrated by some Jewish theology, which from a Christian perspective often seems to err, if anything, in the direction of legalism. The rabbinical tradition produced the theory that man has two equal and opposite natures, the so-called good and evil “yetzers.” Some rabbis are even willing to face the logical corollary of this, which is the Augustinian conclusion that God is finally responsible for evil (o felix culpa!).¹ The only conclusion consistent with this premise is a rather pessimistic attitude toward a world in which evil has the same status as good. Although Judaism is far too loyal to the biblical emphasis on the goodness of creation ever to allow such an academic consideration to color its positive outlook on the world, the same is not true of most Christian legalists. The Puritan, symbol of latter-day Pelagianism, is stereotyped in the common

¹See, for example, C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1938), p. 295: “Raba said: though God created the yetzer ha-ra (the evil yetzer), he created the Law, as an antidote against it.”

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mind as the stern executor of the judgment of God upon a wicked world. As R. H. Tawney has so eloquently described him:

Through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues toward the grave - a wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he must take his way alone . . . . Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic whose victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the counting-house, and in the market.²

Thus does Pelagianism, which appears at the outset so much more positive, hopeful, and optimistic than Augustine, metamorphose into an agent of gloom.

       In yet another way, when all the implications of Pelagius’s position are consistently drawn out, he lands in the same boat with Augustine. Despite all his protests to the contrary, he is no more able than his adversary to provide for human freedom. This grievous omission is less obvious in his case because he uses a different means to dissolve freedom. Where Augustine sacrifices freedom to determinism and necessity, Pelagius, straining in the opposite direction, reduces it to mere chance. A leading authority summarizes his position thus:

Free will is defined as consisting in a mere capacity or possibility either of good or of evil, that is, pure indetermination, in a mathematical point of uncontrolled and unmotivated spontaneity. We may compare this perfect equilibrium of the will, as the Pelagians conceived it, inclining itself neither to virtue nor to vice, with a balance of exquisite poise, of which the beam remained absolutely horizontal, yet hung with such tremulous delicacy that the faintest breath may incline it either this way or that.³

       Although at first glance this conception of chance, or indeterminism, appears to be the contrary of necessity, they are but two sides of the same coin. This point has been perceived more clearly by a historian, Arnold Toynbee, than by many philosophers:

Chance and Necessity are the alternative shapes of the Power which appears to rule the world in the eyes of those afflicted with a sense of drift; and, though at first sight the two notions may appear to contradict one another, they prove, when probed, to be merely different facets of one identical illusion . . . the two notions of Necessity and Chance are simply different ways of looking at the same thing.⁴

²R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Penguin Books, Inc., 1947), pp. 190-92.

³N. P. Williams, op. cit., p. 341.

⁴Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of Volumes I-VI, by B. C. Somervell (Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 444-46.

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Here is a perfect case of “les extrèmes se touchent.” The effect upon the individual is exactly the same, whether his freedom be exchanged for necessity or for chance. Thus does Pelagius set in motion a train of logic which does not stop until it has carried him into the Augustinian camp.

THE NEIGHBOR BYPASSED

       Even more startling is the fatal dialectic which likewise drives Augustine willy-nilly in a direction opposite to the one in which he intends to go. It is important to emphasize that the following illustrations from the writings of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are highly selective. It is equally important to emphasize that this in no way invalidates them, provided that the principle of selection is legitimate. The principle is simple. It merely asks, what follows consistently from Augustine’s starting premises; that is, from his definition of original sin and his attitude toward good works? An inexorable inner logic runs from these points of departure to conclusions similar to Pelagius’s. To be sure, neither Augustine nor the Reformers was willing to follow this logic consistently. One is only too glad to give them credit for their contradictions. If, however, they could not say what they wanted to say consistently with their own premises, then something is wrong with the premises. This, and this alone, is the point at issue.

       A principal cause of Augustine’s embarrassment is his failure consistently to define sin as the opposite of love (agape). He never rids himself of the predilection, derived from his saturation with neoplatonism, to think of perfection in terms of self-sufficiency. The clue to a man’s conception of the highest good is the way in which he speaks about God. For Augustine, “The Divine life - amans et quod amatur et amor - centers upon itself in ceaseless self-love and in blessed enjoyment of its own perfection.”⁵ For man to try to achieve a similar state for himself is, of course, sin. However, the reason why it is sinful is not that self-sufficiency is less than the highest good, but rather that it is inaccessible to finite man. The secret of human beatitude consists in throwing oneself upon God-an act of faith which paradoxically rewards the “believer” with a sort of second-degree self-sufficiency derived from God’s.

       The closest facsimile to God’s self-sufficiency which “finite man”

⁵A. Nygren, op. cit., pp. 553f.

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can achieve is conceived in terms of knowledge. It is absolute certitude. The demand for certainty as a secure possession underlies the position of both Augustine and Pelagius. Whereas the latter seeks it in terms of an achievable moral standard, the former’s conception of it is noetic. Since for him the image of God in man is “the little spark of reason” in him,⁶ he not unnaturally conceives human blessedness primarily as a state of perfect knowledge:

Give me what I love . . . . Give me, because I have taken upon me to know . . . This is my hope, this do I pant after, that I may contemplate the delights of the Lord.⁷

His moment of ecstasy with Monica at Ostia he describes as a moment of perfect understanding and speaks of heaven as “that intellectual heaven, where it is the property of the intelligence to know all at once.”⁸ Luther’s writings are permeated by the quest for certitude. One of his touchstones for the truth of a doctrine is whether it helps or hinders the certainty of salvation. Whether or not this ought properly to be called wishful thinking, it does strongly suggest that Christianity merely provides a supernatural way of attaining what the pagan world sought in vain.

       Part of the uniqueness of Christianity, however, is its contention that true fulfillment is to be found, not in the splendid isolation of the beatific vision, not in the self-contained certitude of contemplation, but-of all places - in a certain quality of relation between free agents (agape). In this relation assured possession gives way to confident trust. For Augustine, however, as for much Reformation theology, the state of “relatedness” is often regarded as a stigma of finitude, something which will be overcome as far as possible by “salvation.” The theologian is consequently embarrassed at how to work “the neighbor” into this scheme. He certainly finds no place in Augustine’s famous cry, “I long to know God and the soul.”⁹ St. John of the Cross only pushes this logic one more step when he declares that in the last analysis love for one’s neighbor only detracts from one’s love for God. By plainly correlating “dealings with men” with the burdensome and oppressive, indeed penal, “works,” Luther betrays an attitude not far removed from that of St. John of the Cross. Even at its best, this kind of thinking is unable to imagine

⁶Aurelius Augustine, The City of God, Book XXII, Chapter 23.

⁷Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter 22.

⁸See ibid., Book IX, Chapter 10; Book XII, Chapter 13.

⁹First Soliloquy, Chapter 7.

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love of neighbor for his own sake. The closest it comes is Augustine’s comment, “He who in a spiritual way loves his neighbour, what does he love in him but God?”¹⁰

       Augustinian thinking thus arrives by a different route at one of the principal errors of Pelagius. The latter’s moralist becomes so engrossed in winning merit for himself that he cannot love his neighbor. The more exclusively he concentrates on winning moral laurels, the more his good works are done out of utilitarian motives. As the Puritan moralist, Richard Baxter, quite frankly says:

It is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational creature to love anyone farther than reason will allow us . . . . It very often taketh up men’s minds so as to hinder their love to God.”¹¹

At best, the neighbor is merely the object upon which to exercise the virtue of “self-sacrifice.” Although Augustine took Pelagius severely to task for this, he fell into the same error himself. As Anders Nygren points out (with thorough documentation), “Love to neighbor is (for Augustine) the ladder on which we can mount up to God. Thus we ‘use’ our neighbor in order to enjoy God.”¹² This description fits Pelagius like a glove.

PHARISEE IN SPITE OF HIMSELF

       At a still more surprising point Augustine’s attempt to escape from Pelagius reverses itself and delivers him into the hand of his adversary. Despite the polemic by both himself and the Reformers against it, their own primary assumptions issue ultimately in a new legalism. A perfect symbol of this is his notorious contention that one could merit forgiveness of sins by giving alms to the poor. Although such a position seems irreconcilable with his criticism of Pelagius, there is a quite logical explanation. In his attack upon moralism, he concentrated upon the source of goodness. He was concerned to demonstrate that no man can do good of himself, but only as a result of the prevenient grace of God. Works done in consequence of such grace, however, he still regarded as meritorious, thus leaving untouched the root error of Pelagius, his definition of goodness in terms of prescribed duties.

       The same mistake is repeated by Luther and Calvin, notably in

¹⁰Which is not even a near miss. Cited by A. Nygren, op. cit., pp. 549f.

¹¹Cited by R. II. Tawney, op. cit., p. 202.

¹²A. Nygren, op. cit., p. 552.

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their doctrine that God imputes righteousness to the sinner. This is simply a variation of the Roman Catholic treasury of merit. It differs from it, inasmuch as the source of the transferred merit is Christ alone, rather than the saints, but this is secondary to the main issue. The primary objection to the treasury of merit, that which marks it as Pelagian, is that it conceives righteousness in terms of credits and debits. On this point, the doctrine of imputed righteousness has not broken with the medieval Church. It simply assigns all the credit to Christ and nothing but debit to man. Its righteousness may indeed “exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees,” but only in a quantitative sense. As Julian Hartt has recently pointed out, “‘exceeds’ [in this context] does not mean a more intense form of the same morality - it means a different kind of morality altogether.”¹³ It means that the entire merit system must give way to agape.

       Calvin, by contrast, is obliged to argue that God cannot love a sinner until he has first declared him righteous. Aside from involving God in make-believe, this mere “paper transaction” ignores the biblical account of a God who loves men while they are still in their sins. Whether the doctrine of imputed righteousness can be found in the Bible depends upon the interpretation of a few passages of St. Paul. Controversy over this point has too long a history to be dismissed in a paragraph, but the present writer would argue that these passages ought properly to be construed in continuity with the rest of the Bible, rather than in contrast to it.

       The reason why they are driven against their will in this direction is their severance of good works, and indeed of all outward action, from the realm of faith. In Luther’s emphatic words:

Wherefore since we are now in the matter of justification, we reject and condemn all good works: for this place will admit no disputation of good works. In this matter therefore we do generally cut off all laws and all works of the law.¹⁴

How can one argue, on the basis of such a statement, that good works ought to be done? This is the insurmountable problem of Reformation theology. Casting about desperately for an answer, they arrive, as a last resort, at a fateful and ironic conclusion. If the self deserves to be punished and scourged, what more effective way to do this than

¹³Julian N. Hartt, Toward a Theology of Evangelism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1955), p. 28, note. For an example of the legalism which pervades the doctrine of imputed righteousness, see Calvin, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 792ff.

¹⁴Martin Luther, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, p. 142.

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to saddle him with a set of burdensome rules to obey? In this way his will may be broken and he may learn humility. Hence Luther:

There are no better works than to obey and serve all those who are set over us as superiors. For this reason also disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft and dishonesty . . . .

[By obeying the first three commandments under parental instruction] the child’s own will is constantly broken, and it must do, leave undone, and suffer what its nature would most gladly do otherwise…¹⁵

Let no one remonstrate that the doctrine of “justification by faith alone” removes any criterion which might enable him to decide which “works” ought to be done. The retort is that it is “better for you” to do works without a reason than with one. Any reason which you might have would constitute an “ulterior motive.” Far more “self-denying,” therefore, to do them gratuitously.

       The result is a legalism far more grievous than that of Pelagius. He at least had a meaningful rationale for his good works and could draw an objective distinction between better and worse. But under strict Reformation doctrine there is no such rationale. The nature of the deed itself is irrelevant. You only do it because obedience is good for you. This glorification of obedience for its own sake, as a sort of spiritual cathartic, constitutes an open invitation to arbitrary, authoritarian rules. It even suggests that, like castor oil, the more unpleasant the rules, the more beneficial to the victim. According to Luther:

Therefore God must need take this maul in hand (the law I mean) to drive down, to beat in pieces, and to bring to nothing this beast [the beast, in this case, is resistance to the doctrine of original sin], with her vain confidence, wisdom, righteousness, and power, that she may so learn at length by her own misery and mischief, that she is utterly forlorn, lost, and damned.¹⁶

This whole line of reasoning bears a startling resemblance to the way in which the tyrannical caste system is justified in India. The argument is that, since ultimately actions done in this life are of no significance, nobody has any ground on which to object to submitting to the requirements of caste.

       Luther’s exaltation of obedience per se confronts him with a dilemma, for had he not also contended that “a Christian man, if ye

¹⁵Martin Luther, “Treatise on Good Works,” in Works of Martin Luther, Vol. 1, pp. 250-52.

¹⁶Martin Luther, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, p. 303.

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define him rightly, is free from all laws, and is not subject unto any preacher, either within or without…..?”¹⁷ He resolves his difficulty by means of the fateful distinction between the “two realms.” The outer, visible realm is the sphere of law and wrath, while the realm of faith is banished to a completely inner dimension of experience. This totally unbiblical dichotomy, the direct consequence of the fatal separation of faith from works, has persuaded vast numbers of continental Protestants to submit to oppressive external authority as a sign of their indifference to it.

       The same tendencies appear in Calvin’s thought. “It is of no importance,” he says, “what is our condition among men, or under the law of what nation we live, as the kingdom of Christ consists not in these things.”¹⁸ Calvin senses the fatal consequence of this cleavage between the realm of faith and the world of everyday life. Speaking of the “regulation of external conduct,” he says, “Though the nature of this argument seems to have no connection [sic] with the spiritual doctrine of faith which I have undertaken to discuss, the sequel will show that I have sufficient reason for connecting them together, and, indeed, that necessity obliges me to it.”¹⁹ Here, in a nutshell, is the dilemma which Augustine bequeathed to the Reformers. There is no sufficient reason, no necessity, between his doctrine of faith and external actions. It was no more their intention than his to impugn good works. But they accept uncritically his cleavage of human nature into an inner realm, where faith reigns, and the outer world where law prevails. Between these two provinces there is no logical connection. Unable, within this framework, to develop a rationale for good works, they simply dispose of the problem by insistence. To ask for a rationale is to betray stubborn pride. One should be answered not with explanations but with discipline, so that he may acquire the “habit of submission.”²⁰ When obedience is advocated as a good in itself, the objective value of the action can be ignored as it was by Luther:

Now, if it is most reasonable that we should prove ourselves in all things obedient to our heavenly Father, we certainly ought not to deny him the use of every method to accustom us to practice this obedience.²¹

¹⁷Ibid., p. 138.

¹⁸John Calvin, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 771.

¹⁹Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 770.

²⁰John Calvin, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 433.

²¹Ibid., p. 769.

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From this follows a justification of authority per se and a submissive attitude toward social abuse, quite similar to Luther’s: “We must obey, because it is unlawful to resist; we must patiently suffer because impatience is a rebellious opposition to the justice of God.”²² Fortunately there is another strand in Calvin’s thought which was effectively used to justify resistance to oppression. The present purpose, however, is not so much to observe these inconsistencies as to note where he is led by the logic of his primary assumptions.

       Calvin went one step beyond Luther in reforging the chain of legalism. Possibly out of a sound suspicion that he had not succeeded in connecting faith with deeds, he added a further incentive to good works. This is the famous theory that, although works have nothing to do with salvation, they are the consequence of it and can therefore be taken as signs that the person who does them numbers among the elect. Though he added a warning against counterfeit, in practice this doctrine hastened the return to a legalism far more strict and relentless than that of Roman Catholicism.

       The Reformers are completely unlegalistic in their doctrine of grace, insisting that God in his mercy need not require retribution of the sinner. But what does God forgive: the failure to love, or the disobedience of impossible commandments? Though they are happily not consistent, Luther and Calvin sometimes speak of sin in the latter, legalistic terms. To be sure, this is the very error against which they themselves inveighed. The point is that they did not succeed in articulating a theology which avoids it. G. Ernest Wright calls attention to this discrepancy in Reformation thinking and cites as an illustration question 14 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which describes sin as “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”²³ He points out that, whenever sin is defined in such a forensic way, the biblical understanding has been obscured. In the biblical view sin is not against a formal, legal postulate, but “is primarily a violation of our personal relationship with God.”²⁴

       Actually the tendency to conceive sin as intrinsic to human nature turns out, under analysis, to be only a special instance of legalism. It amounts to no more than the injunction: “Measure up to a norm which by nature you are incapable of fulfilling.” This, at its simplest, is the reason why Augustine and Pelagius are brothers under the skin.

²²Ibid., p. 775.

²³G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), p. 93.

²⁴Ibid.

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They agree in conceiving righteousness as a work which man ought to achieve by his own efforts, differing only as to whether he is in fact able to do it. The violence of their disagreement on this issue has obscured the far more important fact of their common departure from the biblical conception of goodness as the bilateral relation of love. Augustine’s hidden kinship with the very legalism which he combated was inherited by the Reformation. It is beautifully illustrated by the words with which Harriet Beecher Stowe paraphrases the New England Calvinist Jonathan Edwards:

There is a ladder to heaven . . . through which the soul rises higher and higher . . . and changes . . . into the image of the Divine . . . He knocked out every round of the ladder but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to the world, “Go up thither and be saved!”²⁵

       Another similarity between Augustinianism and the position it purports to refute is the repressive attitude of both toward the natural appetites. One thinks of the moralist as engaged in a constant warfare against evil bodily impulses, while the Augustinian and Reformation tradition holds to the insight that sin is spiritual rather than biological. However, the emphasis on humbling the self, when combined with the notion that sin is something which permeates the whole of one’s being, easily results in a negative view of physical desires. An easy and practical way to punish the self, and thereby punish sin, is to frustrate them. This is particularly evident in the matter of sex. While Augustine’s psychological peculiarities may explain some of his morbid notions on this subject, they cannot account for them all. Though he could scarcely have denounced matrimony and remained a Christian, and in fact praises it, he nevertheless declares that sex and sin, though distinguishable, are not separable. What inevitably corrupts sex is the desire which accompanies it.²⁶

       By contrast, Pelagius always insisted that the natural appetites as such were neither good nor evil, but neutral. He saw nothing wrong with ascribing them to Christ himself. This thoroughly biblical attitude was unfortunately submerged in subsequent theology. Calvin, though he praises marriage, suggests that it is a concession to human frailty and advises, “Let everyone refrain from marriage as long as he

²⁵Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing (A. L. Burt Co., n.d.), pp. 49f.

²⁶See, for example, St. Augustine, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin, Book 2, Chapters 40-42. Sören Kierkegaard betrays the same bias in The Conceit of Dread, p. 44.

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shall be capable of supporting a life of celibacy.”²⁷ Although Luther’s attitude is somewhat more robust, it is never wholly clear that he does not advocate marriage as a duty to be resolutely performed instead of escaped.

For in God’s sight it is a precious and noble good work to train and educate children, to rule wife and servants in a godly manner, and earn one’s living in the sweat of one’s face, and to endure much misfortune and many difficulties in the person of wife, children, servants, and others . . . How good it is for the soul, although it is an evil for the flesh and its lusts.²⁸

       The joyous affirmation of the goodness of the present life, so essential to a biblical outlook, could scarcely flourish in such an attitude. Here again the Augustinian position boomerangs. Logically one might expect Pelagius to be the gloomier of the two, considering his unrelieved, humorless preoccupation with self-discipline. Actually, however, it is his opponent’s name which has been memorialized in the epithet “Gloomy Gus.”

       The same fate overtook the Reformation. It began with an outburst of grateful rejoicing in the recovery of “the liberty wherewith Christ hath set us free.” Although Luther, despite his gloom, did manage to retain a certain earthly zest for the simple pleasures of life, his over-all estimate of this life is not fundamentally different from Calvin’s:

The mind is never seriously excited to desire and meditate on the future life, without having imbibed a contempt of the present. There is no medium between these two extremes; either the earth must become vile in our estimation, or it must retain our immoderate love. Wherefore, if we have any concern about eternity, we must use our most diligent efforts to extricate ourselves from these fetters.²⁹

Neither official Roman Catholicism nor Pelagianism was ever like this.

THE NEW LEGALISM: SELFLESSNESS

The faux pas in Augustine’s reasoning, like that of many another philosopher, consists in setting up a double standard of goodness, one for God and another for man. To tell a man, “For God the highest good is self-sufficiency, but for you it is love toward your neighbor,”

²⁷Calvin, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 439

²⁸Martin Luther, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 423 (“An Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order”).

²⁹John Calvin, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 778.

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only has the effect of daring him to storm the heavens. Applying the old saw, “What is good for the goose is good for the gander,” he finds it more adventuresome, creative, and “courageous” to live by God’s standards. It then becomes necessary to scold him for his presumption. He cannot be refuted in argument, because he is, after all, only appealing to the “highest good,” that of “God” himself. Since reasoning is futile against him, the only alternative is to suppress him by force or the threat of force.

       In biblical Christianity, on the contrary, this problem does not arise. God applies to men his own norm of goodness, agape. The thought of Augustine and the Reformers, however, accentuates it, in so far as they insist upon a disparity between God’s goodness and man’s. It is therefore not surprising to find in their thought a corresponding resort to threats and obloquy instead of reasoned argument. Their invective is directed particularly against the “pride” of man. There is, of course, a sense in which pride properly pertains to sin in the biblical sense, the sense which Reinhold Niebuhr has so vividly brought to modern man’s attention. This is the pride of the man whose aim is self-sufficiency. The word can be extended, however, to include any thought or action in which there is the slightest regard for oneself. If sin is defined as “pride” in this sense, it is quite easy to prove that all men are essentially evil. No human act is without some self-reference, if only because it is necessarily the act of an individual self. By means of this definition some contemporary theologians are having a field day pointing out to “prideful modern man” the universality and totality of his sin. As Anders Nygren says, following Luther, “Even the very highest which man can seek to obtain . . . is polluted by the egocentricity which is inherent in everything human.”³⁰

       This definition also enables Luther to say, “Man, as he is born of father and mother, is with his whole nature and essence, not merely a sinner, but sin itself.”³¹ This equation of selfhood with sin makes a virtue of masochism. The way to attack sin is then to mortify the self and its desires. In fact, the poor self stands under a double condemnation. It deserves punishment both for being by nature finite, “related,” and dependent, and for having any reference to itself in its actions. To cite Calvin:

For I do not call it humility if you suppose that we have anything left. . . we cannot think of ourselves as we ought to think without utterly

³⁰A. Nygren, op. cit., p. 714.

³¹N. P. Williams, op. cit., p. 429.

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despising everything that may be supposed an excellence in us. This humility is unfeigned submission of a mind overwhelmed with a weighty sense of its own misery and poverty; for such is poverty . . ³²

       Here is another parallel with Pelagius. Ordinarily it is the moralist who is generally thought of as a man at war with himself, continually striving to subordinate rebellious impulses to a sovereign will. Since he is his own worst enemy, the victim of his moral triumph is himself. Hence the self-negation, self-punishment, and self-contempt which modem psychoanalysis has discovered in the psychology of the legalist. Erich Fromm describes this kind of “virtue” as “watchdog morality.” Significantly, however, his illustration of it is taken, not from Pelagius, but from Augustine and the Reformers. For if man is inherently evil, then the way of virtue is to flagellate himself. In providing a rationale for such self-destructive behavior, Augustine goes Pelagius one better. The distinction between the “city of this world” and the “city of God,” he says, is that the one is characterized by love of self to the contempt of God, the other by love of God to the contempt of self.

       This sort of thing, in the thought of both Augustine and Pelagius, is the source of that woeful counterfeit of Christian goodness, the ideal of “selflessness.” To erect selflessness into a virtue is to betray the pagan origins of one’s theology. It is not only a new and more tyrannical legalism but is based on the assumption that any action in which there is so much as a suspicion of self-reference is wicked. This is obviously an unchristian bias, for it denies the goodness of creation. Any action by a free agent has some reference to self, simply because it is motivated by “my” intentions, “my” purposes. To call this “bad” is really to find fault with selfhood as such. The Buddhist and the Hindu quite frankly grant this. Their acknowledged goal is consequently the extinction of the self, for “thine own existence is itself a sin.”

       This thoroughly unchristian outlook has so widely displaced biblical conceptions in contemporary thought that one theologian recently wrote: “The unqualified and unmixed selflessness required by Jesus’s own demand and exemplification of love is both expressed and denied in every ethical act. The pure fulfillment of the love commandment is a trans-historical possibility and hope.” When selflessness is thus used interchangeably with love, and the conditions of human existence are consequently declared incompatible with it, the biblical

³²John Calvin, op. cit., Book 3, Chapter 12, paragraph 6; Chapter 7, passim.

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standpoint has been left far behind. This grievous distortion issues in the so-called “tragic view of life,” so much in vogue nowadays, which current Christian theology is in danger of swallowing whole. According to this view, life is so set up that, in the very nature of the case, one’s every action, in so far as it is one’s own action, is to that extent sinful. It is just such an attitude which would lead a man to say, with Martin Luther, “Sin boldly”- since you cannot help sinning, far better to acknowledge the fact than to affect a hypocritical squeamishness.

       The favorite proof text for “selflessness” is the passage about turning the other cheek, in the Sermon on the Mount. Before jumping to conclusions, however, one does well to consider what else occurs in the Bible, passages like:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be those of his own household (Matthew 10:34-36).

Other similar passages concern the expulsion of the money-changers from the temple; the tongue-lashing reserved for the Pharisees; and the weeping and gnashing of teeth which awaits those who reject the good news. There is simply no room in the Bible for a “door-mat” morality, which would have a man reduce his selfhood to the vanishing point.

       The Bible takes far too serious a view of evil, and of man’s responsibility for preventing it, ever to regard indiscriminate self-surrender with anything but suspicion. If personal compliance were in itself a virtue, one would have no leverage against the sacrifices which Hitler required of the Germans. If turning the other cheek meant simply yielding at all times to the demands of another, it might better be called by a shorter name: appeasement. “Selflessness,” in short, is less of a virtue than a rationalization for irresponsibility. It offers a convenient way of avoiding the tough, real-life questions of right and wrong. And, of course, it provides an exquisite instrument for bullying others. If a man can be made to feel guilty for every act which is not “selfless,” he can easily be fashioned into a perfect “yes man.”

       The Christian never allows any such preconceived rule of thumb to dictate his actions. Rather, he assesses each situation on its merits and acts accordingly. In the service of God there are no extremes to which a man may not be called upon to go. He may very well have to

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turn the other cheek and submit to the will of another. If so, he will not do it for submission’s sake. On the other hand, he may be obliged to oppose a given evil with all his might, though not for destruction’s sake. Whichever one is called upon to do, to take action against popular evil, or to turn the other cheek, each alternative has its own special pitfalls. Action can be taken with vindictiveness or with the secret intention of simply furthering one’s own private ambitions; the other cheek can be turned while one mentally heaps coals of fire upon the offender. It is the motive that counts, as well as the deed, before the God who searches the hearts of men. There are no prescribed Christian responses for all possible occasions.

       Another way in which self-contempt plays into the hands of the devil has been vividly portrayed by C. S. Lewis. His imaginary Screwtape, undersecretary to the devil, gives the following advice on how to prepare a soul for the kingdom of hell: “You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own place and character.” The devil rejoices in such opinions if they “keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.”³³

       Perhaps the worst aspect of an ethic of selflessness is its complete misunderstanding of what the Bible means by love. If self-assertion in any form is evil, it is plausible to conclude that love for one’s neighbor excludes the love of oneself, that a Christian is to love his neighbor instead of himself. Although Augustine emphatically refused to draw this inference, the Reformers make it explicit. According to Luther, “To love is the same as to hate oneself.”³⁴ The contemporary theologian Anders Nygren cites this statement as a great improvement on St. Augustine! According to him, true Reformation theology insists upon the progressive diminution of all self-reference until nothing remains of the individual but “merely the tube, the channel, through which god’s love flows.”³⁵

       At this point Reformation theology collides head on with the brute facts of clinical psychoanalysis. Karen Horney, for example, has shown that self-contempt, far from excluding pride, actually accen-

³³C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1944), p. 72.

³⁴Cited by A. Nygren, op. cit., p.711.

³⁵Ibid., p. 735.

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tuates it: “Self-hate is pride’s inseparable companion and he [the patient] cannot have one without the other.”³⁶ Pride and self-contempt are but two sides of the same coin, and the name of the coin is hardness of heart. Granted that the conceited man cannot love, Erich Fromm provides convincing evidence that the same is true of the self-rejecting man. If you do not love yourself, he concludes, you cannot love your neighbor either-unless you redefine love beyond recognition, as some Reformation theologians are not unwilling to do.³⁷ Love requires that a man be more of a self, not less; and it gives him the power to do it. It does not require that a man accord his neighbor the power of veto over him. Agape has teeth in it. As an English theologian has said, “God is not merely tender, sympathetic, velvety. In God’s love there is an ultimate center and core of rock on which every opposition is smashed to atoms.” The “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is a distortion. The real Jesus, as he is so unmistakably portrayed in the Gospels, stands for something. Only because he does is his love worth having.

INVERTED SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

       The final and crowning irony of the Augustinian position is that it issues logically in a self- righteousness not less repugnant than that which it opposes. It is an example of what Reinhold Niebuhr has called by the telling name, “ideology of conscience”; that is, the attempt to insure virtue by means of a dogma. If only, reasons Augustine, we define human nature in sufficiently unflattering terms, then no one will ever again presume to vaunt himself. Actually pride is no respecter of theories. It applies to the person who states a proposition, not to the content of what he says. The truest theory in the world could be held with a secret pride. If it purports to be a sure defense against sin, the result is as predictable as it is ironic. Let a man become convinced that a particular dogma insures him against self-righteousness, and he will brandish it with all the fanatical fervor of the Pelagian flaunting his moral virtue. To fight pride with a theory actually plays into the hands of the devil. It is startlingly instructive

³⁶Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950), p, 341.

³⁷See Erich Fromm, op. cit., Chapter 4, section 1. Ironically, Fromm, too, is finally obliged to redefine love in such a way that it can be achieved by a unilateral effort of will. What finally emerges is simply a thirst for unitive knowledge (eros).

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to note how regularly the proponents of Augustinanism, both ancient and modem, avoid refuting Pelagius on rational grounds and resort instead to epithets like “arrogant,” “presumptuous,” or “blasphemous.” The plain inference, of course, is that “our position is the only un-arrogant, un-presumptuous, and un-blasphemous one.” Or, to put it still more baldly, “to disagree with us is in itself a sin.” Thus does the campaign against pride end by compounding it with intellectual tyranny.

       The man in the street, being innocent of such debates, has no difficulty in perceiving the insufferable self-righteousness of the man who indiscriminately declares the sinfulness of all men. This is really a special form of the pride of knowledge. The theologian is “holier than thou” because he knows something about you which you deny. And the cards are so stacked that every denial only “proves” his point. As Reinhold Niebuhr observes, “The recognition in the sight of God that he [man] is a sinner can be used as a vehicle of that very sin . . . the instrument of an arrogant will-to-power against theological opponents.”³⁸

       Not that the theologian exempts himself from the blanket indictment. On the contrary, self-incrimination may become an inverted “good work,” his badge of membership in an elite who pride themselves on their acknowledgment of guilt. Erich Fromm discovers exactly this tendency on the part of both Augustine and the Reformers:

Augustine, Luther, and Calvin have described this good conscience in unmistakable terms. To be aware of one’s powerlessness, to despise oneself, to be burdened by the feeling of one’s own sinfulness and wickedness are the signs of goodness. The very fact of having a guilty conscience is in itself a sign of one’s virtue . . . The paradoxical result is that the . . . guilty conscience becomes the basis for a “good conscience” while the good conscience, if one should have it, ought to create a feeling of guilt.³⁹

       These clinical insights were reduced to the level of everyday experience by a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine. Two convicts in the corner of a prison yard are whispering about a third, who is sauntering past with a definitely superior air. Says the first convict to the second, “What I can’t stand about him is his guiltier-than-thou attitude.” Thus does the Augustinian doctrine of sin amount in the end to self-righteousness in disguise. Because of its ostensible opposition

³⁸Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), p. 202.

³⁹Erich Fromm, op. cit., p. 150.

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to Pelagianism it can become an even more virulent form of the same thing.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE REFORMATION

       The present chapter set out to apply to Augustinianism the principle that no false theory can be consistently elaborated. The Christian here shares common ground with the philosophic faith that any false proposition will ultimately encounter the nemesis of self-contradiction. This fate has overtaken the position of Augustine and the Reformers on original sin and salvation by “faith alone.” Something must therefore be wrong with these doctrines. The trouble is not far to seek. It consists in the attempt to validate a statement, not on the basis of its truth or falsity, but on moral grounds. This is merely the converse of a fallacy already observed, the attempt to achieve blamelessness by means of a theory. When assent to a proposition becomes a mark of virtue, the net result is the destruction of both truth and virtue. As C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape advises his protégé in the art of destroying men, “The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than the truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make- believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue . . . . Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason. That’s the game.”⁴⁰

       Contemporary theologians of the Reformation school look askance at the historical development of orthodox Protestantism. How, they ask, could a movement which began as a protest against legalism and a mechanical conception of virtue have so quickly degenerated into a sterile moralism? Can it be explained as an unfortunate historical accident, or as the failure of later generations to grasp what the Reformers really meant? If the foregoing analysis is correct, such explanations are inadequate. The deterioration of Protestant orthodoxy was due neither to chance nor to human fallibility, but was rather the predictable outcome of the way in which Luther and Calvin formulated two of their principal doctrines: original sin and salvation by “faith alone.”

       Designed to prevent man from making any claim upon God, these two doctrines severed the realm of external action from the inward, so-called “religious dimension.” The effect of this cleavage was to remove any reasonable basis for distinguishing “good” works from “bad.” Confronted by the implicit antinomianism of this position,

⁴⁰C. S. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 72, 120.

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the Reformers appealed in desperation to obedience per se as a propaedeutic for humility. The result was to fasten upon their followers a legalism quite as grim as the one from which they had delivered them. An uncritical return to the Reformation will therefore be less apt to overcome the ills of Protestant orthodoxy than to exaggerate them.

       The truth of this contention is confirmed only too readily by much of the “neo-Reformation” theology in Europe today, where the historic about-face of Protestantism is being repeated. Side by side with the attack upon moralism in the name of original sin and “faith alone” is the dismal reassertion of obedience as the mark of the Christian.⁴¹ When agape is mentioned at all, it is often completely recast in singularly loveless terms. Anders Nygren’s brilliant but unbalanced work on this subject has distorted the thinking of nearly an entire theological generation.

       Nevertheless, the foregoing criticisms would be impossible without the current recovery of the spirit of the Reformation, and without the positive contributions of Luther and Calvin to Christian life and thought. These contributions were made under the guidance of their twofold motto, “scripture and reason.” Despite their disparagement of reason in some contexts, they both extolled it as an instrument of liberation from oppressive dogmas. They applied it with particular success to the rediscovery of the riches of the Bible and the early Church. It is only in collaboration with his unfettered reason that Luther could say, “Scripture is more ancient and counts for more than all councils and all fathers.”⁴²

       By continuing to apply reason to scripture, the heirs of the Reformation can develop a genuinely biblical theology, a positive alternative to the pitfalls into which both Augustine and Pelagius were betrayed. The seed which the Reformers planted might thus come to full flower.

NOTE

       N. P. Williams has shown with convincing finality that, of the five biblical verses usually recited in support of the Augustinian doctrine of sin, three have been regularly mistranslated and the other two interpreted with considerable liberty. See N. P. Williams, op. cit., pp. 378f.

⁴¹For only one example of many that could be cited see Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative, translated by Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947), p.49

⁴²Martin Luther, An Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order, in op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 414.

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