<i>Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom Diana Stanciu Gerald Bonner. Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 142. This is a comprehensive and well-argued book that manages concisely to summarize disputed questions concerning Augustine’s alleged incapacity to reconcile divine omnipotence and human free will. Both students of Augustine’s thought and general readers will find Gerald Bonner’s brief study extremely helpful in understanding the paradoxical nature of Augustine’s thought regarding predestination and human freedom as well as the relevance of his style (rhetorical rather than systematic, especially during his debates with the Pelagians), the role of his [End Page 270] sources in shaping Augustine’s view, and the differences between his early and late writings. With respect to divine predestination, these differences in Bonner’s view are clearly marked (43–44, 118), by Ad Simplicianum (396), which concentrates on explaining 1 Corinthians 4.7 and which is regarded by Augustine himself in his De praedestinatione sanctorum (428/9) and De dono perseverantiae (428/9) as a statement of his mature theology. Bonner insists that Augustine here ceases to acknowledge any role for human initiative in salvation and that Ad Simplicianum actually concludes a process which had developed in the bishop’s work for several years (43–44). If until 394 Augustine maintained that God gives grace to those whose future faith he foresees, later he insisted against the Pelagians that free choice for good requires the gift of a special grace, necessary for the fallen human condition and greater than the one of creation (68–69). The Pelagians are themselves theologically and historically reconsidered by Bonner, who seeks to offer an impartial view of the controversies between them and Augustine. He explains that while their error was an overestimation of the human capacity for free choice after the Fall in an attempt to defend human responsibility (ix), Augustine’s approach was an attempt to belittle human free will since he was more interested to defend divine omnipotence against Manichean dualism. Consequently, for Bonner, neither is Pelagianism such a shallow theology as its critics maintain, nor is Augustine’s predestinarian theology a doctrine of the universal Church (125). Furthermore, although Bonner warns against an overestimation of Augustine’s theory of grace and maintains that the bishop’s eucharistic theology or his emphasis on divine love and Incarnation are equally important (ix, 2), he also observes that the flaws in Augustine’s theology regarding predestination and free will actually appear in the entire Western theology, most especially in Calvin, and they arise from an emphasis on the theory of creation ex nihilo and on its consequences (21–24). Accordingly, beyond its obvious benefit of doing away with the Manichean dualism, this theory inspired by neoplatonic thought was itself the source of numerous problems since it made humans absolutely dependent on God and accentuated God’s wrath toward the disobedient. Moreover, beyond the theory of creation ex nihilo, Augustine borrowed from the neoplatonists the concepts of participation (metousia, metochē), of the restoration of the image of God lost by humans because of the Fall (30–31, 51–52, 61–62), and of the insubstantiality of evil, which is only a privation of goodness (71, 111). And if in Sermon 192, while commenting upon Galatians 4.5, Augustine extended the neoplatonic concept of participation towards a special union between humans and God, a deification (theosis) effected by divine adoption (51, 62), this view was not to endure. Later, Augustine maintained that after Adam’s Fall all that humans deserve is damnation since all created things exist only by participating in God, and once they cease to participate, they lose their existence (51–52). It is only God’s mercy that makes him chose a few elect to be saved (47). And here the neoplatonic inspiration is itself abandoned, and Augustine emphasizes divine grace (26) since in the system he constructed the regeneration of human beings and their return to God can be initiated only by God, who becomes human through Christ and restores human...