Conversations with Augustine: Commentary on Cary’s Essay
Commentary on Dr. Cary’s Essay
by Dr. Joel Garver,
Professor of Philosophy,
LaSalle University
Professor Cary’s paper helpfully explains the relationship of Luther to Augustine, particularly Luther’s notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise, communicating what it signifies and offers. As Cary notes, this marks a shift away from Augustine for whom the alternative to the Law’s condemnation is faith’s working to receive the grace to seek righteousness. Moreover, according to Cary, Augustine has no notion of an external sign that gives what it signifies. But this raises a couple questions in my mind.
First, is Augustine so monolithic concerning signs as Cary suggests? Perhaps Cary’s recent book addresses this in greater detail, but it seems to me that Augustine’s view of signs shifts some from De Magistro to his later writings. Moreover, there are places where Augustine’s language suggests to me something more like the instrumentality of signs in conferring what they signify. I think here of his discussion of baptism, especially of infants (e.g., In euangelium Ioannis tractatus 80.3) or his eucharistic doctrine with its notion of the sacrament’s virtus for those who receive it rightly.
At least, I imagine Augustine could be read and received that way, whatever Augustine himself actually intended. The medieval period leading up to Luther was far from monolithic. In seeing sacraments as disposing the subject towards grace and as occasions for granting inward grace, Bonaventure arguably held to a doctrine of signs more closely aligned with the one that Cary attributes to Augustine. Yet other sorts of sacramental theories developed, likewise appealing to Augustine, but with a strong tendency toward affirming the instrumental efficacy of the sacramental signs themselves. If Cary is correct that Luther’s notion of signs is closer to Aquinas than Augustine, then what are we to make of the reception history of Augustine that allowed both Aquinas and Luther to see themselves as fundamentally Augustinian?
3 Responses so far
8:38 am
Thanks, Joel. You’ve identified quite accurately the agenda of my new book, Outward Signs! The subtitle indicates the thesis: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. For an indication of the arguments I make there, see my reply to the comment by David Belcher, which follows my paper (via the link above).
As for why Luther and Aquinas thought of themselves as Augustinian, the broad answer is: nearly everybody in the West claimed to be heir of Augustine, and fought for the right to make that claim, even when they diverged from him in significant respects. More specifically, both Luther and Aquinas are heirs to a crucial development in the Augustinian tradition, registered succinctly and with great elegance in the first chapter of the 12th century Summa Sententiarum, which teaches that “a sacrament not only signifies BUT ALSO CONFERS that of which it is the sign.” This is language Peter Lombard picked up on when he spoke of sacraments conferring the grace they signify, a point on which he is followed by Aquinas and Luther, but not Calvin and the Reformed.
Here Augustine is on the opposite side of the divide from Luther and Aquinas, because for him sacraments often do signify grace, but cannot possibly confer it. This is precisely because sacraments are signs, and for Augustine all signs are external–and no external thing has power to confer an inner gift. This latter point is not arbitrary, but follows from Augustine’s ontology, as I try to show in the book.
4:02 pm
Dear Dr. Cary et al,
Apologies in advance for my intrusion into this tremendous gathering of great intellects on things Augustine (I am but an ignorant student in these matters and only wish to learn from more gifted thinkers), but isn’t the whole notion of ex opere operato (i.e., the idea that a Sacrament actually confers grace regardless of the status of the minister of the sacrament) one that came originally from Augustine? If so, how can you then say “for him sacraments often do signify grace, but cannot possibly confer it.”
9:14 am
The short answer, dear Aristodes, is that for Augustine a sacrament is valid ex opere operato but not efficacious ex opere operato. That is, even an unworthy minister can confer valid baptism, but that baptism does not have salvific effect if it is received unworthily, in deceit or unbelief or with no intention of living a Christian life. This distinction between validity and efficacy is crucial to Augustine’s whole approach to the Donatist controversy (as I argue at length in Outward Signs, chapter 7) and is correlated with his sacramental semiotics: the unworthy minister confers the valid external sign (i.e. the baptism itself), but the inward grace it signifies is received only by the faithful recipient–not ex opere operato.
There is a kind of exception to this rule in the case of infant baptism, but there Augustine makes clear–as I argued in response to Dave Belcher’s comment on my paper–that the efficacy of the sacrament resides not in the external sign (i.e. not in the baptism itself) but in the “groans of the one dove” i.e. the inner unity of the church, bound together in love and praying for grace.
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