Who was the true heir of Augustine, Luther or Erasmus?

This year we celebrate the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s book On Bound Will, in which he made his strongest case for the sovereignty and grace of God in opposition to the Romanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who had opened their contest with On Free Will. Though primarily a debate about the role of the human will in salvation, this was also a feud between two men who had been Augustinian friars. The question of how to interpret St. Augustine of Hippo’s writings was central to their disagreement, as it was to the Reformation as a whole. For Luther more than Erasmus, their literary duel was over who was the true heir to Augustine.

Augustine’s Position on Free Will and Salvation

Augustine’s understanding of the will’s role in salvation cannot be separated from his teaching on how man is made righteous before God. Although he acknowledged the law of God to be good and holy, he emphasized the Apostle Paul’s distinction between what man can do by nature and what can be accomplished by God’s grace. As Augustine wrote in On Nature and Grace, “This righteousness of God, therefore, lies not in the commandment of the law, which excites fear, but in the aid afforded by the grace of Christ, to which alone the fear of the law, as of a schoolmaster, usefully conducts.”[1]

For Luther more than Erasmus, their literary duel was over who was the true heir to Augustine. Share on XThe convicting power of the law was for Augustine the beginning of man’s salvation. “This is the faith to which the commandments drive us, in order that the law may prescribe our duty and faith accomplish it.”[2] No man could fulfill the law by nature, for nature had been perverted in the Fall. Righteousness would now come through God himself working in man. “It is He who sends the Holy Ghost that is given to us, through whom that love is shed abroad in our hearts whereby alone whosoever are righteous are righteous.”[3] This amounted to spiritual resurrection.

For Augustine, the will after the Fall is bent and bound by sin. It cannot choose the righteousness of God and has no power to work it. “But that free will, whereby man corrupted his own self, was sufficient for his passing into sin; but to return to righteousness, he has need of a Physician, since he is out of health; he has need of a Vivifier, because he is dead.”[4] To declare that man could be righteous by his own free will was to declare Christ’s atonement was unnecessary.

Augustine did believe man’s will is involved in salvation, but not as an efficient cause: the power or agency to turn toward God did not belong to the will itself. “When God says, ‘Turn ye unto me, and I will turn unto you,’ one of these clauses—that which invites our return to God—evidently belongs to our will; while the other, which promises His return to us, belongs to His grace.”[5] In this way, Augustine distinguished between the themes of law and gospel in the Scriptures. It is not man’s will but God’s grace that “accomplishes the fulfilment of the law, and the liberation of nature, and the removal of the dominion of sin.”[6]

Augustine helpfully summarized this principle. “It is certain that it is we that will when we will, but it is He who makes us will what is good….It is certain that it is we that act when we act; but it is He who makes us act, by applying efficacious powers to our will.”[7] As for why God chooses to perform such a work in some and not others, Augustine deemed it a mystery. “He turns them whithersoever He wills, and whensoever He wills, to bestow kindness on some, and to heap punishment on others, as He Himself judges right by a counsel most secret to Himself, indeed, but beyond all doubt most righteous.”[8]

As Matthew Levering writes, Augustine’s emphasis on the grace of God as the sole power behind human good works moved the debate over God’s predestination from hand wringing toward adoration. He “focuses the debate away from the difficulties caused by the fact that God does not predestine all persons—although Augustine readily acknowledges these difficulties—and toward the praise of God for curing our pride by his gift of love and thereby enabling our intimate participation in the trinitarian life.”[9]

The Late Medieval Reception of Augustine

The millennium between the death of Augustine and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation was by no means a dead time in the Church when it came to the study of Augustine’s theology. His position as the preeminent theologian of the Western Church was solidified, but given his enormous corpus of writings, it was inevitable that the true nature of Augustine’s legacy would be debated as scholars focused more on certain aspects of his thought than others.

For Augustine, the will after the Fall is bent and bound by sin. It cannot choose the righteousness of God and has no power to work it. Share on XThis allowed multiple schools of thought to emerge by the late medieval period, all claiming descent from Augustine. Heiko Oberman notes this was particularly relevant to the consideration of man’s justification before God, with the nominalist school of thought (related to William of Ockham) believing it was just as faithful to Augustine as the realist school (related to Thomas Aquinas).

The later Middle Ages are marked by a lively and at times bitter debate regarding the doctrine of justification, intimately connected with the interpretation of the works of Augustine on the relation of nature and grace. We have tried to show that the outer structure of the nominalistic doctrine of justification is intended to safeguard the Augustinian heritage and to neutralize the Pelagian dangers of an emphasis on the moral responsibilities of the viator. Our conclusion that nominalism has not been able to avoid a Pelagian position should not obscure the fact that nominalism was fully involved in the ongoing medieval search for the proper interpretation of Augustine.[10]

Martin Luther encountered nominalism during his time at the University of Erfurt, particularly as it was developed in the writings of Gabriel Biel. Here the emphasis on God’s free action (a characteristic of the related philosophy of voluntarism) had resulted in a more positive view of man’s natural abilities now often deemed “semi-Pelagian,” though the nominalists themselves believed they were upholding Augustine’s legacy, as Oberman notes. The nominalist school included such figures as William of Ockham, Robert Holcot, and Pierre d’Ailly. It was also known as the via moderna in opposition to the via antiqua of the realist school.

Another stream of thought which some have termed High Augustinianism or the Schola Augustiniana Moderna also emerged at this time and prioritized Augustine’s understanding of God’s grace as the sole efficient cause that works righteousness in man. Here we find the theologian most associated with the realist school, Thomas Aquinas, but also a host of others including Thomas Bradwardine, John Wycliffe, Gregory of Rimini, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, and Laurentius Valla.[11]

This divide was not strictly by monastic order, university, or political region. It was among the chief theological fault lines in Western Christendom at the dawn of the sixteenth century. As Diarmid MacCulloch has noted, “When Martin Luther and other theologians in his generation recalled the Church to Augustine’s soteriology, western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of his thought mattered more: his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church or his discussion of salvation….So from one perspective a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of long-dead Augustine.”[12]

The stage was therefore set for clash between these opposing interpretations of Augustine by two of the greatest minds of the Reformation period: Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther.

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Endnotes

[1] St. Augustine of Hippo. On Nature and Grace in The Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Benjamin B. Warfield et al (Altenmünster, Germany: Jazzybee Verlag, 2017), 175.

[2] Augustine, Nature and Grace, 181.

[3] Augustine, Nature and Grace, 205.

[4] Augustine, Nature and Grace, 184.

[5] St. Augustine of Hippo. A Treatise on Grace and Free Will in The Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Benjamin B. Warfield et al (Altenmünster, Germany: Jazzybee Verlag, 2017), 508.

[6] Augustine, Treatise, 516.

[7] Augustine, Treatise, 519.

[8] Augustine, Treatise, 523.

[9] Levering, Matthew. The Theology of Augustine: An Introductory Guide to His Most Important Works (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 71.

[10] Oberman, Heiko. The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 427.

[11] The definitions of these schools of thought and placement of theologians in one group or the other varies between scholars of late medieval scholasticism.

[12] MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 111. Internal citation – Warfield, Benjamin Breckenridge. Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: P&R Publishing, 1956), 332.

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