Inner Grace

Abstract

Abstract Rather than constituting a break with his Platonism, Augustine's doctrines of grace and free will are formed from the beginning by Platonist conceptions of happiness, wisdom, intellect, virtue, purification, conversion, faith, and love. Divine grace is inner help for the will, and our need for it expands “outward” over the course of Augustine's career, being required originally for attaining the happiness of wisdom (i.e., the intellectual vision of God), then for rightly ordered love (i.e., charity), and eventually for Christian faith. Reading the apostle Paul, Augustine emphasizes the difficulty of willing and loving the good, and eventually concludes that even the human choice to believe depends on grace, though this comes to us in the external words of a “suitable call,” which does not directly change the will from within. However, in his later polemics against Pelagianism, Augustine reconceives grace as wholly inward, a divine inner teaching that turns our will and causes us to believe. Since God foresees how he will give the gift of grace, this raises questions of predestination and especially election: why does God choose to bring some people rather than others to conversion, faith, and ultimate salvation? A more biblical and external doctrine of election, in which the chosen people are a blessing for those outside them, would avoid the anxieties of Augustine's doctrine of predestination.