Augustine, on Faith, Love and Grace

1We now begin to examine Augustine’s doctrine of grace, which is his most important contribution to Western thought. We now examine the key concepts of faith (and related concepts such as Authority and Understanding) and Love (and related concepts such as Charity, using and enjoying Beauty, and Will) and look at grace as the inner connection between Faith and Love.

3. Define Charity, contrast it with other kinds of love, and distinguish it from almsgiving.

1. Happiness is beatific vision (literally “the seeing that makes happy”) which means seeing God.

2. Beatific vision is intellectual vision (i.e., seeing with the minds eye— understanding him.

3. Our problem is that the mind’s eye is weak, sick, and impure, not ready to see God.

2. Augustine’s motto here is “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”

4. Authority is opaque: it requires us to believe what we cannot yet understand, trusting in what we’re taught without being able to see it for ourselves.

1. Faith leads ultimately to Understanding, but first of all it leads to Charity or the Love of God.

2. The key biblical text here is 1^st Corinthians 13:13, which list Faith, Hope, and Charity as the key Christian virtues.

2. In contrast to modern usage, when Augustine speaks of “Charity” he means more than just giving to the poor.

3. Charity is obedience to Jesus’ twofold command of love: love for God and love for neighbor.

4. Charity is not the same thing as unselfishness: for Augustine, Charity is the way we seek ultimate happiness.

5. Charity includes love of neighbor— helping our neighbor find the same ultimate happiness we are seeking, i.e., God.

8. Love unites us with what we love; hence Charity, which is the love of God and neighbor, unites us with God and neighbor— and this is what Augustine means by “heaven.”

2. We should use temporal things to get eternal things— like using the road to get to a destination. We love the road (this earth, this mortal life) for the sake of the destination.

3. Enjoying means using with delight, clinging to something for its own sake, trying to find our happiness in it.

4. Cupidity means trying to find our ultimate happiness by enjoying something other than God. It makes us miserable, as the Confessions illustrates.

6. Love unites us with what we love: hence enjoying God means being united with Him.

7. We can enjoy our neighbors in God, i.e., being joined to them as one body joined to God (like spokes on a wheel all joined at one hub).

1. Augustine’s concept of Charity owes a great deal to Plato’s concept of eros in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, especially in the following respects.

d. Love is beyond the control of our will (as anyone who has ever fallen in love knows).

A. Justification by Grace (notice, in the Bible we are justified by Faith, so here we have a major departure from the Bible).

1. Definitions: justification(=being made righteous), righteousness (=justice),grace (=gift of God).

2. For Paul and Augustine^¹“means Charity (i.e., obedience to Jesus’ two fold command of love). ^²

3. Augustine’s key treatise on the doctrine of justification (i.e., on how we become righteous) is On the Spirit and the Letter.

4. The key contrast in this treatise is slavish obedience versus filial obedience, i.e., obeying God’s law out of fear or obeying God’s law out of love.

5. True obedience (=righteousness=Charity) is a gift of God’s grace, not a result of our efforts to obey (“works of law” as Paul called them”).

7. What God’s grace does is cause us to delight in obedience. (“Everything is easy for love” as Augustine says).

8. Using a metaphor from Romans 5:5, Augustine calls it “infused love” —it is as if God poured love into our souls from above.

10. Grace is a gift of the Holy Spirit—we come to love God because God’s own Spirit dwells within us in response to our prayer for grace.

11. The connection between Faith and Charity: in faith we pray for grace, and what we get is the ability to love God, which we couldn’t do before.

Augustine, like Plato thinks that love isn’t within our own power, but what about faith? Isn’t faith up to us whether we believe or not? In the late anti-Pelagian treatises Augustine answers “no.”

3. Troubling conclusions: if even Faith is ultimately a gift from God, then whether we are saved are not is ultimately up to God, not us. Some people find this conclusion comforting while others [including me] find it troubling. ^⁴

Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 1.1-15.42 (in Burnby, Augustine: Later works)

Burnby, Amor Dei, chapters 4 and 5 (famous critique of Augustine’s view of love).

Nygren, Eros and Agape, pp. 476-558 (famous critique of Augustine’s view of love as the Plationist).

1. What does “faith” mean to you? Is your concept of faith similar to Augustine’s.

2. Augustine thinks that we cannot love or be happy without the inner help of God’s grace. Is this a comforting thought or a troubling one?

1I don’t think this is a true statement but rather this mans opinion. For the apostle Paul, justification was not an act of what man does, but an act that comes from God. It is God who counts us righteous.

2Once again, this is not what the apostle Paul means at all by “righteousness.”

3 One might notice another departure in doctrine. We are never told in the Bible that justification by faith comes from grace. We are told that justification by faith (when we are counted righteous based on our faith) happens at baptism. In Col. 2:11-12, notice we are raised from the waters of baptism “by faith” in the works of God. What works do you think that God is doing while we are being baptized?

4If you believe Augustine, we then cannot believe that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated many years ago without God mysteriously coming to us and giving us the ability to believe in the death of Lincoln.