Per Caritatem

Commentary on Ingalls’s Essay by Dave Belcher

First of all, I’d like to thank Jason for his thoughtful reflection, and for the opportunity to offer my own brief questions to Matt Jenson’s thought-provoking book. Matt was an interim teaching pastor at my church for a time, and I had the chance to hear him preach a sermon on Wendell Berry, social justice, and such matters a while back-truly magnificent. It is likely that most of my questions here will be directed at Jenson’s own argument, since that is mostly what Jason has honed in on in his own post, and of that only his reflections on Augustine.

Let me start by saying that I think that the general point Jenson is making, as Jason has assessed it, is correct: that is, that Augustine’s account of sin and the human person is essentially relational and thus has much to offer contemporary theological reflection (a significant corollary being that harmartiology is always intimately linked with soteriology, and is thus only ever manifest in its relation to Christology.

I wonder, however, if Jenson is being sufficiently attentive to the development of Augustine’s thought with respect to sin. Although it is true that Augustine placed heavy emphasis on the respected “autonomy” of the self – on human “freedom” – in the early Pauline commentaries, and thus placed “the origin of evil in the will,” he nonetheless later proposed that the human will is utterly bound to sin – such that concupiscence (though voluntary) gave over to customs that bound the will. It was amidst the controversy with the Donatists – who adhered to a notion of a “pure” communion untainted by wicked bishops – that prompted Augustine to respond that not even in baptism is one freed from all sin. I think that a failure to attend properly to these dynamics – and especially to the ways in which Augustine’s conception of sin (not only grace) was reconceived in terms of caritas battling against flesh in the later controversies beginning with the Donatists – easily lends to a picture of an Augustine who fails to be sufficiently “objectivist” and “extrinsic.” I think this picture is incorrect, however.

I should also say that I am not exactly clear on how “objectivist” is being distinguished from “extrinsic,” since they seem to be performing the same critical function – viz., the suggestion that “the individual” has some sort of sufficiency in its “interiority,” and thus need not look to Christ. As Jason paraphrases Jenson, “A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ.” This definition to me seems more so to indicate “extrinsicism” than “objectivism.” Augustine would fail to be objectivist if sin were not a power under which humanity was kept in thrall (i.e., were it merely voluntary), or if the merits of Christ’s death and resurrection somehow did not win victory once and for all over such an objective power. Even the indictment of a failure to focus the individual “outside of him- or herself on Christ,” though, seems somewhat dubious. If the issue is that Christ’s mediatorial status only serves to instrumentalize the incarnation (or “fleshly nature” of the God-man) toward the goal of participation in the divine life, or that it is a “‘short-cut’ to participation in Christ’s divine nature,” it is still the case that the individual is being focused outside of him or herself, and even on Christ (not to do so would be precisely to remain “homo incurvatus in se“!). The issue of course is whether a “Christ” who sloughs off his humanity in the eschaton is truly Christ – or “Christian” enough (a consequence of a line of Origenism, actually). I believe that this tendency is certainly present even in Augustine’s later writings, though it must be properly placed in its Neoplatonic context; Augustine seems to have increasingly understood Christ’s “divine nature” to rule over the “human nature” as the soul rules over the body (this became exceedingly clear in Augustine’s later writings), but whether he ever believed that the hypostatic union would somehow be dissolved in a truly Platonist fashion in the end to me seems to lack evidence – and attention to his later developed thought in controversy with the Pelagians suggests otherwise. It is true that in 11.2 of De civ. Dei Augustine will describe Christ’s humanity as “the way by which we go” to God; but in 21.15, Augustine reveals the true mystery of Christ’s personhood – which can never be separated from his humanity – and the true mystery of our salvation in Christ: “The one who is unique by nature, the Son of God, has in his mercy become, for our sakes, the Son of Man, so that we, who are by nature sons of men and women, might become, by grace, sons and daughters of God through him.”

Much more could be said here, but I think that a truly relational account of sin in Augustine must pay explicit attention to Augustine’s developing thought in the controversies with the Donatists and the Pelagians, and specifically the ways that participation in Christ comes by way of the “vinculum amoris,” the Holy Spirit who is the bond of charity and who inspires struggle against the flesh and concupiscence. Perhaps a relational account of sin and its destruction in Christ in Augustine is still quite “insufficient” if it fails to be sufficiently pneumatological…but I’m already way over my quota here.