Augustine of Hippo

Daily Reading for August 28 • Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 430

In his system, [Pelagius] posits and distinguishes three faculties, by which he says God’s commandments are fulfilled, —capacity, volition, and action: meaning by “capacity,” that by which a man is able to be righteous; by “volition” that which he wills to be righteous; by “action,” that by which he actually is righteous. The first of these, the capacity, he allows to have been bestowed on us by the Creator of our nature; it is not in our power, and we possess it even against our will. The first of these, the capacity, he allows to have been bestowed on us by the Creator of our nature; it is not in our power, and we possess it even against our will. The other two, however, the volition and the action, he asserts to be our own; and he assigns them to us so strictly as to contend that they proceed simply from ourselves. In short, according to his view, God’s grace has nothing to do with assisting these two faculties which he will have to be altogether our own, the volition and the action, but that only which is not in our own power and comes to us from God, namely the capacity; as if the faculties which are our own, that is, the volition and the action, have such avail for declining evil and doing good, that they require no divine help, whereas that faculty which we have of God, that is to say, the capacity, is so weak, that it is always assisted by the aid of grace.

The apostle, however, holds the contrary, when he says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” [Phil. 2:12]. And that they might be sure that is was not simply in their being able to work but in their actual working that they were divinely assisted, the apostle does not say to them, “For it is God that worketh in you to be able,” as if they already possessed volition and operation among their own resources, without requiring His assistance in respect to these two; but he says, “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to perform of His own good pleasure” [Phil. 2:13]; or, as the reading runs in other copies, especially the Greek, “both to will and to operate.” God works within us those two very things, even “willing” and “operating,” which [Pelagius] so determined to be our own, as if they were in no wise assisted by the help of divine grace.

From On the Grace of Christ by Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From Its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation, by William C. Placher (Westminster / John Knox, 1988).

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