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Conversations with Augustine: Essay #3, Augustine and Luther
Published by Cynthia R. Nielsen August 8th, 2008 in Augustine, Luther
Per Caritatem’s first annual Augustine Blog Conference is now underway! Below is the first of a series of posts bringing Augustine into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The format of the conference is as follows: an essay will be posted for approximately two days, then a short commentary on the essay will be posted and will remain on the site for two days or as long as (good) discussion continues.
AUGUSTINE AND THE REFORMATION
Dr. Phillip Cary
Professor of Philosophy
Eastern University
Augustine and Luther
In a modification of the Augustinian heritage that had an immense impact on Western Christianity, Luther shifted focus from Law and grace to Law and Gospel. The meaning of the shift becomes clear when we look at what Luther did and did not find in Augustine’s key anti-Pelagian treatise, On the Spirit and the Letter. This treatise is a recurrent reference point in Luther’s early lectures on the letter to the Romans (1515-1516), where he was groping for a doctrine of justification that would take seriously the quandary of sinners like himself who had nothing good to offer God, not even good intentions.
What Luther found in On the Spirit and the Letter, to be brief, is an account of the Law in which we sinners cannot be helped by being told what to do (for love and the inward obedience of the heart do not come that way) but need to be terrified by the threats of the law so that “in faith we flee for refuge to the grace that justifies and, delighted by the sweetness of righteousness by the gift of the Spirit, we escape the punishment threatened by the letter.”[1] Thus for Augustine grace is a gift of delight given by the Holy Spirit, making it sweet for us to love God with our whole hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, which is the righteousness demanded by the Law. This is an inner gift that cannot be given by the Law, which is “the letter that kills” (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6), serving to mortify our pride and alarm us in our complacency so that we flee to the grace which alone can make us truly righteous.
The problem is: how does one flee to grace? “In faith,” Augustine says here, and to spell that out he proceeds to speak of prayer. In a passage of great significance for Luther, he contrasts the law of works, in which God says to us, “Do what I command you,” with the law of faith, in which we reply by praying, “Give me what You command.”[2] This picks up on a leitmotif of Augustine’s doctrine of grace going back to the Confessions, where he prays, “Give what You command, and command whatever you will.”[3]
For Luther this turned out to be insufficient. Of course he thoroughly agrees with Augustine’s teaching that the righteousness of God comes to us by faith as a gift of grace, not by our efforts of obedience to the Law. That is the common Augustinian heritage of the West, and Luther does nothing new when he heartily endorses it. The problem is that Augustine’s “law of faith,” by which we pray for grace, is something we have to do–a good work, in Luther’s terms. And in young Luther’s late medieval context, where penitential works of prayer had become a requirement of preparatio evangelii in which the penitent must earn grace by the merit of congruity (essentially doing your best, facere quod in se est, by eliciting an inner act of loving God above all things–and all before receiving the gift of justifying grace![4]) the pursuit of grace had become a long, drawn-out work of anguish that had no end.
What we find in Luther’s Romans lectures, accordingly, is a doctrine of justification in which justifying grace is something we are “always seeking. . . . never possessing.”[5] From Augustine’s requirement that we pray for grace, Luther draws the conclusion that the life of faith is “nothing else but prayer, seeking and begging.” These are not works of the law but they are indeed works, “works which are performed in order that we may seek justification. . . . no longer the works of the Law but of grace and faith.” Thus Augustine’s “law of faith” produces what Luther in these lectures calls “works of faith,” which are distinguished from the works of the law because they are done not because they are righteous, “but that they may seek righteousness.”[6] The result–a very strange result in light of Luther’s later theology–is that that justification by faith alone means our lives are wholly devoted to works. For “the people of faith spend their whole life seeking justification,”[7] and the way to seek justification is by works of faith.
The reason why seeking justification must never become finding stems from the penitential setting of Luther’s “works of faith.” We seek grace by accusing ourselves, which is a work of faith because it means believing God’s word of accusation: “by faith alone we must believe we are sinners. . . . we have to stand under the judgment of God and believe His words with which He says that we are unrighteous.”[8] To believe this word is “to blame ourselves, to judge, condemn and hate ourselves.”[9] The most we can do to seek justification–in effect, Luther’s version of facere quod in se est–is hate ourselves deeply enough to desire sincerely to be damned so as to affirm the justice of God’s condemnation: only this is sufficient to guarantee our justification.[10] What we must never do, in any case, is have the presumption to believe we are justified and righteous in God’s sight. This is clearly not Luther’s mature doctrine of justification! It is in fact a vivid dramatization of what Luther would later describe as the torment of conscience he endured as a monk.
What is striking about this horrifying piece of spiritual masochism (I have never understood why some Lutheran scholars admire it) it that it already contains a doctrine of justification “by faith alone” based on the righteousness of God, which is not “the righteousness by which He is righteous in Himself but the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God,” a concept that he found in Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter.[11] The crucial difference from his mature view is that the word to which we must cling by faith alone is not a word of grace but a word of condemnation. We seek the righteousness of God by agreeing with one who is our accuser and our enemy,[12] and for this very reason we must never believe we have found the justification we seek. We are always to stand before God confessing our guilt, never believing we are righteous.
What gets Luther past this is a change in the word we are to believe in, from a word of condemnation to a word of grace–a promise of God in which he gives the grace he promises, which is the kind of word Luther later has in mind when he uses the term “Gospel.” What this adds to Augustine is a specific place to turn when one flees to the grace of the Spirit. Instead of fleeing by prayer, a human word that seeks grace, one flees by clinging to the Gospel, a divine word that promises to give us Christ and all his grace. And that promise is efficacious: it gives what it promises. Hence in his later work, Luther modifies Augustine’s contrast between law of works and law of faith into a contrast between two forms of God’s word, Law and promise: “For the Law demands, ‘Do this!’ The promise grants: ‘Accept this!’”[13] Similarly, he modifies Augustine’s prayer for grace, “Give what You command, and command what You will,” into good news about where grace is to be found: “the promises of God give what the commandments of God demand.”[14]
It is worth thinking about why Luther did not find everything he needed in Augustine. To begin with, the late medieval context had made praying for grace into a far more elaborate piece of work than Augustine ever envisioned. Augustine was confident that our prayers for grace would normally get answered, even if they were not perfectly sincere.[15] But medieval developments of the practice of private confession could make the sinner’s prayer for grace into an introspective battleground, a fight for sincerity and un-self-centeredness that became an agony of terror for scrupulous consciences like Luther’s. The very act of seeking to be justified, as Luther saw it, was just one more example of self-seeking, of a self so “curved in on itself” that even its desire to love God was only a desire for its own justification and salvation.[16] Luther’s early theology was a perfect double-bind of his own making, all set up so that he just couldn’t win.
Where does such a mercilessly introspective conscience go to find the grace of justification? What Augustine does not give Luther is a place to find what he seeks. Augustine does not have the notion of an efficacious divine promise, an word of grace that bestows the gift it speaks of. There are systematic reasons for this, rooted in Augustine’s semiotics. For Augustine words are external signs that never give us the thing signify, but rather serve as admonitions to look elsewhere to find it–which means, for spiritual things, to turn in a more inward direction.[17] Thus in On the Spirit and the Letter, the contrast between Law and grace is a contrast between outer and inner, as “the letter that kills” threatens us with words written externally in human language, driving us to seek the sweet delight that is possible only when “the Spirit that gives life” writes directly on the inmost heart.[18] So the best an external word can do for us is admonish us to go looking for grace within.
An inward turn is precisely what Luther’s introspective conscience did not need. Looking within his own heart is what young Luther did far too much of, until he found that he could cling to an external word of grace by which God gives the love and obedience that He demands. With such a Gospel, “justification by faith alone” comes to mean believing that God gives the righteousness he promises, so that we are justified in his sight, not just believing that God’s accusation is true, so that we always remain sinners. (The fact that both accusation and promise remain true results in Luther’s famous affirmation that every believer is both righteous and a sinner at the same time, simul justus et peccator.[19])
But if Luther did not find the notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise in Augustine, then where did he find it? It turns out that he had been hearing the word of grace all along and not really believing it. For all his focus on penitence, Luther had given very little thought to the sacrament of penance. In particular, he had scarcely mentioned the word of absolution in his writings until the controversy over indulgences, sparked by his posting of the 95 theses in November of 1517, made the sacrament of penance into a focus of intense scrutiny. As Oswald Bayer has shown, the first time in Luther’s writings that he identified an efficacious promise of grace was when explaining why penitents are required to believe the word of absolution spoken by the priest in the sacrament of penance, when he says: “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”[20] To believe this word, on the strength of the promise of Christ in Matt. 18:18, is to believe precisely what Luther had been saying two years earlier one must never believe: that one is righteous before God. One has a right to believe this precisely because one has an obligation to believe it, lest one call Christ a liar. The external word of promise thus required Luther to embrace the good news of justification which otherwise his introspective conscience would not permit him him to believe.
This is a point of some ecumenical significance. For Luther the Gospel promise can give what the commandments of the Law require because it has a sacramental efficacy: it is an external word, which is to say a sign, that gives the grace it signifies. In a Christmas sermon in 1519 he is explicit about this: he teaches that “the Gospel words and stories are a kind of sacrament, that is a sacred sign, by which God effects what they signify in those who believe,”[21] and proceeds to hold out the infant Christ for his hearers to receive, as the gift which is given through the Gospel story.
All the more striking then, that Augustine has no such concept of Gospel. He does not want us clinging in faith to external signs such as words and sacraments, which signify a spiritual gift that must be sought within. The difference between his sacramental semiotics and the medieval view taken up by Luther is indicated succinctly in the 12th-century Summa Sententiarum attributed to Hugh of St. Victor, which teaches with Augustine that a sacrament is a sign of grace, but then adds that it “not only signifies but also confers that of which it is the sign.”[22] What the medieval author and many theologians after him did not realize is that in Augustine’s view, external things may signify but not confer an inner grace.[23] The striking consequence is that Luther’s faith in the power of the Gospel to save us is fundamentally much closer to Aquinas’s teaching than to Augustine’s.
[1] On the Spirit and the Letter 10.16.
[2] Ibid. 13.22. Quoted in Luther’s Romans lectures on Rom. 3:21, LW 25:243. LW = the standard American edition of Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. J. Pelikan et al. (St. Louis: Concordia and Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-1976).
[3] Confessions 10:29.40.
[4] For this late medieval theology of grace cf. H. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Durham NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983), esp. pp. 131-160 (= chapters 5.2 and 6.1).
[5] On Rom. 3:27 (LW 25:251f). This and the next two quotations follow hard on the heels of Luther’s quotation from Augustine on “the law of faith.”
[10] On Rom. 9:3 (LW 25:381-384).
[11] On Rom. 1:17 (LW 25:151f). Luther quotes here from On the Spirit and the Letter 11.18, though 9.15 is even closer to his thought, where Augustine speaks of “the righteousness of God, not that whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He justifies the ungodly.” One should not be distracted by scholarly fuss over the nature and date of Luther’s so-called “tower experience” (cf. LW 54:193f, as well as LW 34:337), when the key conception of the righteousness of God was ready to hand in his favorite author (also in Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26:1).
[12] For the recurrent theme of “agreeing with the accuser,” see LW 25:54, note 16 (where the term “Gospel” means, in effect, “Make friends with your accuser”) as well as pp. 217 and 236 (”God. . . is not a Father but an enemy. . . one must agree with this enemy and . . . . thus He becomes a friend and a Father”).
[13] From the 1535 Galatians commentary, on Gal. 3:18 (LW 26:303).
[14] From the epochal 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian, LW 31:349. If any single text deserves to be called the founding document of Protestantism, this is it.
[15] The key example of this is Augustine’s conversion narrative, with its famously half-hearted prayer for grace: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” (Confessions 8:7.17)
[16] Cf. the famous analysis of the sinner incurvatus in se in the lectures on Romans, on Rom. 5:4 (LW 25:313) and on Rom. 8:3 (LW 25:345).
[17] A crucial lesson of Augustine’s semiotics; see esp. On the Teacher ??33-36.
[18] On the Spirit and the Letter, 19.32.
[19] See especially the 1535 Galatians commentary, LW 26:232f (on Gal. 3:6).
[20] See O. Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971), especially ch. 4. The first text in which Luther’s new understanding of absolution is worked out is a little-known set of theses written in 1518, Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-1993) 1:630-633 (henceforth cited as WA, the standard abbreviation for Weimarer Ausgabe). I know of no English translation of the theses, but most of them are incorporated into the little 1519 treatise on The Sacrament of Penance found in LW 35:9-22, which thus provides English readers with their best view of Luther’s new understanding of the Gospel in its earliest form. See also Luther’s 1518 explanation of the 95 theses, where the explanation of thesis 38 (LW 31:191-196) presents the new understanding, which the earlier explanation of thesis 7 (LW 31:98-107) has not quite reached.
[21] WA 9:440. This Latin sermon is found in a set of manuscript notes that had lain forgotten and unpublished until late in the 19th century; I have not found it in English.
[22] Summa Sententiarum, 4:1, Patrologia Latina 176:117.
[23] For a full-scale argument in support of this claim, which is not uncontroversial, see Cary, Outward Signs: the Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially chapters 4 and 8.
Dr. Cary,
I wonder about this statement with respect to Augustine’s semiotics: “So the best an external word can do for us is admonish us to go looking for grace within.” Is this really the case, though? Does not Augustine’s interiority direct the self outward? The point of the beginning of The Confessions, that God is nearer to me than I am to myself, is not that grace is already found inwardly, but that there is already an exteriority to the interiority of the self, opening the self outwards. Even a disordered amor sui is the result of the homo incurvatus in se…true self-love is instead a result of an exterior direction of the interior — the intentioning aim of the self outside of itself (so that the self is restless until finds rest in God) precisely to Christ the Mediator.
I am simply uncertain that any such duality between exterior and interior can hold with respect to Augustine’s concept of the way in which grace operates in and on the self. Furthermore, even if such a duality is found in places earlier in his writings, the later development of his thought — especially his social thought in the later controversies — seems to me to necessitate a complete overhaul of any strict divide between interior and exterior with respect to grace (and here perhaps a development in Luther’s thought needs to properly correspond to a development in Augustine’s own). For instance, in the Donatist controversy — both in Contra ep. Parm. and in De Bapt. — the “efficacy of the sacrament,” or conferral of grace, is not dependent on the moral performance of the minister, but instead — truly — on the complex of relations with respect to the “intentionality” of the baptizand….such that the “interior” witness of the Spirit, the love of God shed abroad in the heart of the self moves the self outside of itself by the gift of an intentionality towards communion with Christ, who is the true minister of the sacrament. There is thus both an objective element (or “exterior,” in the work of Christ as minister) as well as subjective element (or “interior,” in the work of the Spirit as bond of love)…and it is the interrelation between an interiority that points outward and the exteriority where the true gift of grace — in Christ! — is received that the recipient of the sacrament is truly united with Christ and thus also the catholic church, the head and the body of Christ.
Just some thoughts on semiotics and grace in Augustine…I really appreciated the rest of the article. thanks.
Dear David,
Sorry to be so long replying. The conference came in the middle of my vacation.
In my book, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self (chapter 3), I focused attention on the movement “in then up” that you get in key passages in Confessions, such as 7:10.16 and 7:17.23. God certainly transcends the self, but not by being found outside it. God is there among external things, of course, since he is omnipresent, but he is found by turning away from them and finding him both within the soul (because he is not external and corporeal) and above the soul (because he is its Creator). The soul’s inner space is not like a private dark room (as in modern thinkers like Locke) but like the interior courtyard of a palace with no roof, open to the sun shining above (imagery suggested by the treatment of memory as inner space in Conf. 10). It’s as if to say: outside, it’s always cloudy. If you want to get a clear view of the sun, you have to enter within inside and look up. This language of turning inward and looking upward can all be traced back to Augustine’s Neoplatonist heritage, but which he uses in new ways.
I deal with Augustine’s anti-Donatist sacramental theology in my new book, Outward Signs, where I point out that for Augustine the power of the sacrament is found in the inner unity and peace of the church, especially its prayers, “the groans of the one dove” (De Bapt. c. Donat. 3:22). There is certainly sacramental efficacy here, but it is not external, as if outward signs could have power to confer an inner grace. Rather, the efficacy is that of a community, which for Augustine is an unity of souls bound together by common love.
This takes some getting used to, for us moderns: for Augustine, true community is found in the inner dimension, not externally. The inner is not necessarily or inherently private, as in modernity. This is because in true community it is souls, not bodies, that are joined–by the souls’ power of love (as we can see in the social theory he develops in the City of God). For Augustine this does not make the life of the community “subjective” (a modern term which has no equivalent in ancient thought) because the inner realm of the soul is closer to intelligible Truth than bodies are. (In Platonist terms, bodies belong to the sensible realm of “opinion”–the closest ancient thought gets to the modern notion of “subjective”). The Church is that true community which is bound together by love of eternal Truth, and precisely in the power of that love becomes an efficacious INNER means of grace.
So even in the sacraments, Augustine does not want us clinging to external things. That’s the key sense in which he is closer to Calvin than to Luther. Calvin can agree with other Swiss Reformers that we “must not cling too tightly to mere external signs” (Inst. 4:14.16), whereas for Luther, both Gospel and sacraments are external signs to which we cling for our salvation, the same way we cling to Christ in the flesh.
Dr Cary, I wonder if you might elaborate on your thesis with regards to question of the objectivity of Christ in the Eucharist and particular in or with the elements. Would it be fair to say that he would not have been able to make much sense of Thomistic and Lutheran construals of the real presence? Yet he also does not seem to read easily in Reformed categories either. What are your thoughts? TIA.
Good to talk with you again, Fr. Kimel–and about the Real Presence again! It is not a topic we easily tire of.
There have been many debates about whether Augustine taught a doctrine of Real Presence. In his sermons (especially those to the newly-baptized on Easter) he uses very realistic language, e.g., when he says, “The bread which you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ” (sermon 227).
What’s odd (and causes a great deal of the confusion in the debates) is how little Augustine says about the salvific power of this body. He quickly moves to direct his hearers’ attention back to themselves as the ecclesial Body of Christ, which is always for Augustine the fundamental res sacramenti, the thing signified in the sacrament. We are to BE what we have received, the body of Christ–and that, rather than the literal flesh of Christ, is the body that he would have us focus on in the eucharist.
This ties in with the theme of the inner unity of the Church as the true means of grace and channel of sacramental efficacy, which I mentioned in my reply to Dave Belcher, above. Hence in the same sermon Augustine proceeds to say: “The sacrament of the Lord’s table is set forth: we who are many are one bread, one Body. Commended to you in this bread is how you are to love unity.”
In Outwards Signs, toward the end of chapter 8, here is how I proposed to interpret this odd situation. (1) Augustine speaks as a sacramental realist (pointing to the bread and calling it Christ’s body) because this is how the church speaks, and he will always speak in accordance with the church, even when he does not quite know what to make of how she speaks (this is the principle that faith comes before understanding, and authority before reason). (2) What Augustine lacks, in order to understand why the church speaks thus, is a way of attributing salvific power to the literal flesh of Christ. He is missing the concept of Christ’s life-giving flesh, which was to become an official teaching of the magisterium through Cyril of Alexandria in the 3rd ecumenical council, held at Ephesus in 321, the year after Augustine’s death. (3) The underlying problem is that Augustine’s Platonist ontology does not have room for any external things, even Christ’s flesh, to have spiritual power. (4) Hence his eucharistic piety is not a form of devotion to the Real Presence of Christ’s flesh, even though he is willing to say that Christ’s flesh is present right there on the altar. It seems likely that he believes in the Real Presence but doesn’t know what to do with it. So his eucharistic piety instead focuses on the inner unity in love of the ecclesial body of Christ.
Dr. Cary,
I just now caught wind of your most recent comments…so forgive me for not responding sooner. I may try to pull something of a response together, but I am slammed trying to finish a paper for a conference and I’m not sure it’s time for me to come up for air yet. Thanks again for the engagement. Peace.
dave b