Saint Augustine's doctrine on grace (1)

Abstract

During the 4th and the 5th centuries three great controversies troubled the Church: the Trinitarian and Christological controversies in the East and the Pelagian controversy in the West. The first two were, so to say, theoretical, and were about the notions of nature and person as applied to the doctrine of faith, while Pelagianism was about the relation between nature and grace, about man's free will and the infallibility of grace. Man is a Pelagian at heart, defending his personality and his social and moral conquests, and we can notice this in pagan literature: the Greeks and the Romans were, in their way, religious people, but, for example, Cicero to defend man's free will denied God's foreknowledge. "No one", says Cicero, "has received virtue from God and so no one thanks God for being good" and Horace adds that from the gods we receive honours and riches but not help in the performance of our duties.

This was the problem which Augustine had to solve in his controversies with the Pelagians: how to reconcile God's foreknowledge with man's free will. It is a problem with no easy solution so much so that it has continued to be discussed throughout the centuries to the present day. The unorthodox solution either denied free will to exalt grace, or denied grace to exalt free will, while truth lies in the veritatis medium as Augustine expresses himself. Stressing divine grace to the detriment of human free will we have Calvinism, Lutheranism and Iansenism; while at the other extreme we have Pelagianism, followed by Semi-Pelagianism, and their counterpart in the 19th century Protestant Liberalism and Modernism.