The Atmosphere of Election: Augustinianism as Common Sense

Abstract

The Atmosphere of Election:Augustinianism as Common Sense* J. Patout Burns (bio) Augustine's teaching on gratuitous divine election, with its supporting doctrine of inherited guilt and necessary grace, challenged the established interpretation of Paul's teaching in the Western Church. These innovations quickly achieved widespread acceptance in Africa but were questioned or rejected in Italy and Gaul. The difference in response can be correlated with contrasting social settings of the churches. The continuing conflict between the Donatists and Catholics in the towns of Roman Africa over the efficacy of baptism and the necessity of belonging to the proper eucharistic communion created uncertainty about the functioning of the Christian economy of salvation. As a result, behavior was disconnected from salvific effects and God's governance appeared arbitrary. Under these conditions, a doctrine of election without regard to merit could take root and flourish. When Prosper wrote to Augustine in 429 to report on the opposition to his theory of predestination then solidifying in Provence, one charge detailed was that Augustine was reading the letter to the Romans in a way that no Christian had ever read it before, including its author and original addressees.1 Vincent of Lerins' principled denunciation would certainly have applied: this doctrine had not been taught always, everywhere, and by everyone.2 In a fifth-century perspective, Augustinianism was innovation or, more likely, aberration. Aberration, of course, occurs regularly, and some of it is recurrent. Innovation, however, takes hold; it addresses a new situation effectively [End Page 325] and designs the future. Paul's teaching on the Mosaic Law and the gospel of Christ provides an instance of innovation. The complex of ideas which comprise Augustine's theory of election—the inheritance of Adam's guilt, the impotence of fallen and even created nature, the necessity and gratuity of divine grace, divine control of human decisions—constitutes what can also be recognized as a genuine innovation. When Augustine was reborn in Christ, this was not Christian doctrine; by the time he died in Christ, most of it was generally accepted, at least in Africa.3 A hundred years later, it had begun to pass from doctrine to dogma, at least in the Western Church.4 Augustine's intellectual biography has been carefully researched. The genesis of his new reading of Romans and its elaboration into a coherent doctrine of divine operation have been chronicled. The inner workings of his intellectual development have been traced and the way one idea led to another and the whole was constructed has been mapped.5 Yet the very success of this intellectual history raises a different sort of question which cannot be answered by these techniques—why a radically new idea or worldview takes root and flourishes, while another remains tucked away in a treatise, waiting to be ferreted out centuries later and displayed as a curiosity. Augustine's theory of predestination was nearly such. He reached a new understanding of Romans in his response to Simplician's questions, finished about 396.6 He then used that reading to shape the narrative of conversion in the Confessions7 but otherwise said almost nothing about it for the next twenty years.8 Then during the last decade and a half of his life, he not only promoted but insisted on this radically different understanding of the relations between divine governance and human freedom. A whole segment of the Christian world, moreover, agreed with him. Augustine's own sudden shift might be explained in terms of some new intellectual development, such as the abandoning of the notion that the soul entered the earthly body by sinning, or the demands of [End Page 326] the controversy with the Donatists and Pelagians.9 But these hypotheses do not account for the idea taking hold in the North African church and spreading north across the Mediterranean. So the question of the social context of the doctrine of divine election forces itself forward: in what type of world would Augustinianism be plausible and become the common sense? The following analysis is totally dependent upon the theory of social organization proposed by the British cultural anthropologist, Mary Douglas.10 The reader will, however, be spared a full...