Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom

4. Freedom and Responsibility

66 chapter 4 Freedom and Responsibility a puppet cannot be held responsible for its actions, nor can a man who, by reason of mental incapacity, has no control over his will. To be fully human, one needs to possess a will and be able to command it. In everyday life we expect this of our fellows; indeed, if we could not, the fabric of any association would disintegrate. In secular society, the notion of punishment includes the expectation that the offender, remembering the correction which he has endured, will in the future take care to avoid the course of action which provoked it. In short, we assume that normal people have control over their actions and that those who fail to exercise their will are either abnormal or culpable. Conversely, those who exercise their will for the good of others, especially if it is to their own disadvantage, are seen as virtuous and exemplary. They choose to do right, and are honored for it, since they could have chosen otherwise. Such an approach, based on common experience, was that of Pelagius and his supporters. Pelagius, in his analysis of what constituted a good action, identified three elements: possibility, volition, and action. We must be able to do it; we must will to do it; and we must then do it. Possibility comes from God, volition and action come from ourselves. Thus in every good action there is praise for both God and man. It is of God alone that man is able to perform a good work; but it is for man to will the good work and to perform it.1 The essential element here, which distinguishes Pelagian from Augustinian psychology, lies in the 1. Grat. Christ. et pecc. orig. 1,3–4. CSEL 42,127; Jerome, Dialogus 1,28. PL 23,544. 67 will. For Augustine, to will requires the gift of grace for every individual action: God crowns His own gifts and not human merits. If human merit is from man himself, it is not from God.2 For Pelagius, although man’s power comes from God, he is left with his own initiative; he is, in Julian of Eclanum’s famous phrase, “emancipated from God”:3 God endows him with the initiative to act rightly. The word “emancipated” has a legal flavor: it recalls the ceremony by which a Roman son, or a slave, was released from the absolute power of his father or owner. But emancipation did not confer complete independence on the recipient. He was still bound to his parent or former owner by moral ties. The ferocity of the conflict between Augustine and the Pelagians can obscure the fact that their analyses of God’s action upon the human soul are not as different as appear on the first view. We may ignore Harnack ’s charge that Pelagius’s system was fundamentally “godless”4 —Pelagius , no less than Augustine, believed that God was the source of all human power. He differed from the mature Augustine in assuming that God gives each individual a personal power of free decision in life, which can be used for a moral or immoral end. This belief lies behind Julian of Eclanum’s definition of human freedom: “Freedom of choice, by which man is emancipated from God, exists in the possibility of giving way to sin or of abstaining from sin.”5 The difference between the Augustinian and Pelagian views of human choice was determined by their attitudes to Adam’s primal sin and its effect upon his descendants. The Pelagians denied the existence of any transmission of Adam’s guilt. Of Adam himself , they—or at least Julian—had no very high opinion. “Raw, inexperienced , rash, without experience of fear or example of virtue, he took the food whose sweetness and beauty had ensnared him at the suggestion of a woman.”6 Again, “Adam was made a rational animal, mortal, capable 2. Grat. et lib. arb. 6,15. PL 44, 890. 3. Op. imp. 1,78: “Libertas arbitrii, qua a Deo emancipatus homo est, in admittendi peccati et abstinendi a peccato possibilitate consistit.” CSEL 85/1,93. 4. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1910) 201. Bd 3, 6th ed. (Tübingen , 1960), 201: “Im tiefsten Grunde guttlos.” 5. Op. imp. 1,78. CSEL 85/1,93. 6. Ibid., 6,23. CSEL 85/2,373–4. freedom and responsibility 68 of virtue and vice, who...