7.3a. Motivating Impressions “Breathed Into” the Mind by God

Given that the condition of original sin is a determining habit, moral perception cannot be corrected merely by rehabituation. There is, primarily, a practical problem: because the innate habit is universal, all parenting and governing is dysfunctional, indeed morally corrupt and corrupting. So there is no way for children to be trained properly. In the second place, even if good parenting or governing were possible, the strength of the internal habit of the child is such that he will fail to assimilate the reasons why he should do the right kinds of deeds. Trying to educate such a child would be like taking someone whose habit of gambling is thousands of years old and attempting to make her fiscally prudent. Such a person, so long as she is kept under force or influenced by some powerful deterrent, might gamble little or not at all – and in this sense, habituation would be effective – but she would abstain from gambling for the wrong reasons, and likely turn to some other kind of high-risk, irresponsible behavior. So the habituation would have failed of its purpose as moral rehabituation.

By “moral” rehabituation, I allude to the fact that like Plato and Aristotle, Augustine thinks that there is a difference between “acting justly” in the sense of going through the motions out of fear of punishment, routine, social convention, or for a good reputation, and “acting justly” because one is just, which means not only knowing how particular actions conform to the definition of justice, but doing it for the sake of the fine (kalon/honestum), rather than for utility, pleasure, or avoidance of pain. “Just” acts done for any other reason than for the sake of the kalon are just acts by equivocation only. But original sin, as a set of dispositions in the soul, already determines us to view our own pleasure and utility as the goal of life. It is not that we are continually doing acts that are wrong in themselves, but that even our acts that appear good are really morally indifferent at best.³⁰ So Augustine’s accusation against the Roman Stoics is an accusation against fallen humanity. He accuses the Stoics of doing the right deeds, but for the wrong reason, namely the desire to be successful, or superior to fate.³¹ They have fake virtue, because they do not act for the sake of, from the love of, God (who is the kalon, now given a neo-Platonic metaphysical status). The same general point applies to human beings generally, who because they are fallen, do not act for the sake of the morally fine. Hence Augustine’s amusing analogy of an athlete running very fast, but not running on the track.³²

At the theoretical level, all this suggests a hopeless picture in which one’s own innate confusion about the proper goal of action, and the cumulative mistakes passed on through social customs and amplified through generations, are simply overwhelming. Meanwhile, at the empirical level, the existence of someone like Socrates, who was reputed to be morally superior to his own parents and the entire surrounding society, is problematic. How did he get to be the way he was?

The attempt to answer this latter question is not original to Augustine. Plato had said that if someone virtuous arose despite the lack of a virtuous republic – he was probably thinking of Socrates – this could only be explicable by divine fate (theia moira); ³³ but he did not elaborate on how fate would protect such a person.

For his own part, Augustine makes an inference similar to Plato’s, and then utilizes the Stoic-Platonic epistemological model we saw in Chapter 2 to explain how divine help makes someone see virtuous action as an attractive goal. If morally exemplary people, or sudden moral conversions, are to be possible then God must “breathe” motivating impressions “into” the human mind as gifts (graces). Thus, in the Replies to Simplicianus, when he raises the question that we saw earlier:

he answers as follows:

Here Augustine is commenting on scripture and talking about grace, but his description utilizes technical epistemological terms from Stoicism – the scriptural term “call” he glosses as “impression,” “obedience to the call” or “belief,” he renders “consent.”³⁵ He also makes reference to the Platonic elements of love and psychic delight.³⁶ As we saw in Chapter 2, he had supplemented the Stoic motivating impression with these two elements.³⁷ Clearly, he is saying that the poorly habituated cannot be motivated to act well (recte vivere, bene operari) unless they receive from God the kind of impression which stimulates impulse (tale visum quo voluntas moveatur); and as we saw in Chapter 2, this is the motivating impression.

So, Augustine agrees with the standard ancient observation that habituation determines perception, and he thinks that exceptionally virtuous people like Socrates or Job exist, and that others – like himself – experience moral conversions. Moreover, he thinks that these exceptional cases of motivation to act well must, like all human motivation, occur via the synthetic Stoic-Platonic model of motivation to which he subscribed. So, he believes that this combination of facts yields an evidential and philosophical argument for the position that prevenient grace is necessary for moral improvement, and that this grace must be in the form of a motivating impression.

7.3b. Recognizing Augustine’s References to Graced “Suggestions”: Differences from Jerome, Pelagians, and Jansen

Augustine’s literary imagination, cultivated by Seneca and other Greco-Roman literature, also prompts him to describe this motivational conversion in poetic terms. He says that God heals the overly sensitive “eyes,” that is, the mind that has grown sickly through bad habits,³⁸ analogously to the way that ancient playwrights describe the gods intervening to alter people’s visual perceptions.³⁹ Or else, grace is rain coming down from the sky, the heavens dripping⁴⁰ – a comparison probably remotely associated in Augustine’s imagination with Zeus showering down into the lap of Danae.⁴¹ But the metaphors are precise, in that they consistently refer to the same epistemological item: a motivating impression, a suggestio, given from God who is transcendent and hence “above.”

In a number of other texts, Augustine alludes mainly to the delight that supervenes on the motivating impression. This is because of scriptural texts that allude to sweetness, as in “God will grant sweetness.” But Augustinian grace is not merely delight, and it would be incorrect to say that Augustine thinks that a moral conversion is simply succumbing to pleasure.⁴² “Inspired sweetness” is a term of art for the inspired motivating impression. What he means is that grace is God’s action on the mind, whereby the intellect apprehends the beauty and goodness of virtue, and as a result formulates sayables, including an imperative, in the discursive reason. This is the motivating impression. The delight is the affective consequence of this impression, in the interior sense.⁴³ But in shorthand, God inspires delight. “God therefore teaches sweetness by inspiring delight (Docet ergo Deus suavitatem inspirando delectationem) … [he] teaches that we may do what we ought to do, by inspiring sweetness (docet ut facienda faciamus, inspirando suavitatem).”⁴⁴ “You have prepared in your own sweetness for the needy, O God.... in order that a good work may be done … from love.”⁴⁵

Strikingly, Augustine’s confidence that there are such divinely given impressions makes him disagree with the likes of Jerome about the most fitting translation of psalms where “sweetness” is at issue. He repeatedly and self-consciously chooses the less standard “sweet” and “sweetness” for the chrēstos and chrēstotēs of the Septuagint psalms 67, 105, and 118, even while acknowledging that a number of copies have the translation “God is good” rather than “God is sweet.”⁴⁶ Jerome rejects “sweet,” citing the Hebrew in support of “good” in a letter written to some monks.⁴⁷ But Augustine has his own reason for selecting this translation:

Clearly, he does not doubt that Jerome’s translation is saying something true when it asserts that God gives us good things. Yet he wants to focus on the manner in which someone becomes morally good, and so he reads it as a reference to motivating grace.

Similarly, Augustine’s disagreement with the Pelagians is not simply a theological argument about the proper interpretation of scripture, but a dispute about philosophical anthropology. Specifically, it is an argument about whether there are innate habits that interfere with our motivation to do good. Certainly, Augustine thinks that his position explains more scriptural passages than that of his adversaries; but as we have seen in Chapters 1, 4, and 5, it is Augustine’s understanding of human nature which often guides his interpretation of scripture.⁴⁹ Hence the Pelagians are defined by him as people who deny the need for inspired motivating impressions (suggestiones breathed into the mind by God).⁵⁰

7.3c. Back to Confessions 8.11.27

Now the fact that Augustine has just said that some motivating impressions are given by God does not in any way affect the conclusions we came to about the definition, function, and structure of motivating impressions, in Chapter 2. It would be an error to confuse the question of what something is, with that of whence it came. Indeed, we saw a large number of passages where Augustine uses the concept of the motivating impression without its having anything to do with grace, and that he is distinguished from his Christian peers by the comparative rarity with which he talks about otherworldly (e.g., demonic or divine) origins of “suggestions.”⁵¹ As he says, grace is like when God makes water flow from a rock:⁵² just as in that case it is still the natural substance of water that is flowing, so in a major motivational shift it is a human motivating impression that is being received, though it is being received from God.

In Chapter 2 we only addressed the question of what was going on in Confessions 8.11.27, and concluded that it described a motivating impression. So in fact we do need to ask about that passage: Granted that it describes Augustine’s experience of a suggestio of continence, what was its origin: natural or divine? The question arises because at that point in the narrative, Augustine says that he was strongly habituated to be incontinent.⁵³ He had dismissed his cohabiting partner and become engaged to be married; but during his engagement – which was to be two years long owing to the young age of the girl – he had gotten a third woman to tide him over until his marriage. How was it possible for him to perceive sexual continence as a good for him and hence motivating, given his habit? He tells us that he had previously been unable to see continence as anything other than tortuous for himself,⁵⁴ even though he had known about it. But suddenly he perceives this virtue as attractive, in an apprehension of the virtue’s kalon/honestum quality. Given his habituation, his sudden change in perception looks naturally inexplicable. Moreover, when he introduces the episode that provoked the impression (the story by Ponticianus), Augustine attributes what follows to the agency of God, saying, “Lord, my helper and redeemer, I will now tell the story … of how you delivered me from the chain of sexual desire.”⁵⁵ It seems that this “deliverance” refers to the occurrence of the motivating impression itself, rather than merely the providential arrangement of circumstances so that he can hear Ponticianus’ story about the monks.⁵⁶ For it is already a theme of Augustine’s in the Replies to Simplicianus (395/396) that two people can hear the same information, and one be moved but the other not moved.⁵⁷ The Confessions were written just after this (397–400/401), and so it seems likely that the Confessions text is intended as an illustration of the claim about graced perception that is made in the Replies. Thus, the “appearance” of continence in paragraph 27 should be understood as one of these inspired motivating impressions. Confessions 8.11.26–27 describes Stoic-Platonic motivating impressions. But paragraph twenty-seven in particular is about an instance in which that kind of thing is given by God.

7.3d. Notes on “Justification”

“Justification,” a scriptural term that Augustine glosses as the conversion from being oriented toward sin to being oriented toward virtuous action, we now see is a hybrid notion, combining adapted classical insights about habit and perception with a Christian theodicy in which grace comes from Christ. The term means to be put into interior order, made to see that virtue is more valuable than all temporal things, and therefore to be in the right relation to God,⁵⁸ who contains the criteria of all the virtues in his eternal mind. Grace is a necessary reorientation, the introduction of the correct goal (the kalon) into the mind, which makes virtue possible. It is an interior change in perception and motivation, thanks to God’s granting of a suggestio. And because the historical event which made this grace available was, in Augustine’s theodicy, the incarnation and redemption, becoming “justified” is also receiving a share of the holiness of Christ.⁵⁹ Christ is the means to virtue, though not a mere instrument;⁶⁰ converting grace “makes one into Christ,” taking on the perceptions, attitudes, desires, and sentiments of Christ, who is the incarnation of the eternal criteria of the virtues.⁶¹ (It is worth emphasizing this, because it means that trying to construct an Augustinian theology without this metaphysically grounded Christology will mean foregoing the claim that grace improves one morally; the latter is strictly dependent upon the former, per Augustine.)⁶²

Because grace is thus understood as the transfer of perceptions and their underlying habitual attitudes from Christ into the one who receives grace, grace is symmetrical with and medicinal for the set of habitual attitudes inherited as “original sin.” Hence, Augustine’s claim that we are either “in Adam” or “in Christ.” This model also serves as his way of answering in advance, as it were, questions that will arise in later medieval accounts of grace, such as the question of how an infused virtue can be a habit. It is a habit of Christ’s, in which the one being justified participates.

Paradoxically, when Augustine makes Christ the source of authentic moral goodness, it allows him to explain the intentionality of pagans who actually do aim at the kalon for the sake of the kalon, even though they do not know that the kalon is the Christian God. At first it looks as though he simply misses this distinction, and assumes that ignorance of trinitarian metaphysics or of the Christian dispensation must entail a lack of right intention. But he does in fact see the problem and addresses it by asserting that non-Christians,⁶³ when they act virtuously, do so because of the grace of Christ, whom they do not explicitly know:

This will, of course, make Augustine’s theory look rather circular: in order to establish that Christian grace is necessary for virtue, he points out that human society is generally corrupt and that non-Christians lack virtue; but when non-Christians do have virtue, he says it is owing to grace. Augustine’s response to this accusation of circularity presumably would be that his position is supported by empirical evidence in three areas. First, pagans who actually do act for the sake of the kalon are rare; the existence of such rarities does stand in need of some special explanation (namely grace). Second, the presence of grace in a society reduces wrongdoing,⁶⁵ but it does not eradicate it. This suggests both that there is an inextricable interior moral problem with human beings, and that grace does indeed have a medicinal effect upon it. Third, the same phenomenon is observable in the lives of individuals: the justified are significantly morally better than they were before conversion; yet still they commit small sins daily.⁶⁶

7.4a. One Grace or Two Graces in Conversion?

So, in the Confessions and the Replies to Simplicianus – which were written one after the other – consent is given by God. But there are in fact two different senses in which consent is “produced” by God. Our understanding of the epistemology which undergirds Augustine’s account now enables us to identify an important difference between the Confessions and the Replies to Simplicianus.

In the Confessions, consent is efficiently caused by God as a second grace, subsequent to the grace of impression which came in 8.11.27. We see this in the description of consent in 8.12.29. Augustine recounts that after receiving the impression of continence, he was helplessly unable to assent to the impression,⁷¹ but almost immediately after, in paragraph twenty-nine, his consent is effected when he reads words from the Bible that reiterate the sentential content of the impression of continence.⁷² This account seems to be saying symbolically that the act of consent was authored by God in and through Augustine’s power of consent. For Augustine believed scripture was God’s word, the human author being merely the secondary author. So the consent was given by the agency of God with Augustine exercising a secondary causality.⁷³ This would not mean that Augustine was not the subject of his consent,⁷⁴ but rather that because a human subject is an image of God, his decision, divinely given, to conform to the criteria of the virtues makes him more truly the kind of subject that he is meant to be.⁷⁵

In contrast, at the end of the Replies to Simplicianus (1.2.21ff.), there are not clearly two graces. Augustine says that God gives the motivating impression and consent, but he gives no indication that there is a time lag or possibility of rejecting the impression in between these two. Instead, the text reads as if Augustine is implying that the graced impression is self-evidently true to the perceiver⁷⁶ – Augustine probably had in mind the Stoic cataleptic impression⁷⁷ – and that therefore, cognizing the impression makes recognizing its truth value, or assenting, unavoidable. As soon as one understands the sentential content of the perception, one assents. So consent is not done by God in the person’s power of free choice, as in the Confessions model; but still the impression makes one assent.

So, the single grace of a self-evident impression explains cases like that of Paul, who was “suddenly converted by a very powerful grace.”⁷⁸ The account of two graces with the possibility of hesitation intervening, explains cases like that of Augustine in the Confessions. Augustine apparently thought that God gives grace in one way to some people, and in another way to others, for his own providential purposes.

7.4b. Grace and Freedom in a Related Early Modern Discussion

Now this is particularly interesting because it allows us to assess which side of a famous but inconclusive early modern debate between, primarily, Domingo Bañez and Luis de Molina, had the more accurate development of Augustine’s position – an unresolved question in the history of philosophical theology.⁷⁹ Though some of the parties to this debate about the relation between justifying grace and human free choice wrote commentaries on Aquinas and referred to themselves as Thomists, the debate dealt with questions not explicitly addressed by Aquinas, and in any case, the prevailing assumption on both sides was that Aquinas and Augustine substantially agreed on the theory of grace. For these reasons, references to Augustine are not uncommon in the texts of the controversy.⁸⁰

This so-called “De Auxiliis” controversy (c. 1582–1607) ranged over a number of topics, including the concurrence, providence, and knowledge of God. Our purpose here is not to compare Augustine to the early moderns on all of these issues, but to focus on the particular question of how grace is received by the human mind.

Augustine’s use of a Stoic epistemological framework (impression-consent) as the foundation for his account of conversion had set the terms for what became the accepted doctrine of grace in the west.⁸¹ His term “prevenient” grace, for instance, which became standard, was a reference to the fact that the impression must be given by God in order to initiate conversion. But by the time of the “De Auxiliis” controversy, the original epistemological context of this phrase was not necessarily familiar to the late scholastic theologians.

Both parties to the debate were committed to the claims that conversion is effected by grace, which must be prevenient, that is, coming before any movement toward God from the side of the human being. The prevenient grace was said to have a certain sufficiency in moving one toward consent. It was described by both sides in recognizably Augustinian terms, as “a divine inspiration,” or “a certain rapid illumination and exciting by God who is calling and inviting the soul to good … prior to the time at which he himself thought about adhering to God,” received merely passively (mere passive) by the human being before the exercise of human free choice in the matter.⁸² On the other hand, both parties were also committed to the claim that human consent, and therefore human responsibility, is a necessary ingredient in justification. Their attempts to reconcile these statements gave rise to two divergent psychological accounts.

Domingo Bañez, the first chair in theology at Salamanca and the representative for the Dominican party, which included such others as Herrera,⁸³ explained the axis of the disagreement thus:

The Jesuits, led by Molina but including others such as Bellarmine, held that the prevenient grace is the only one. They thought that God offers a calling which is custom-made to attract the recipient.⁸⁵ God knows by “middle knowledge” how a person would react to every possible manner of calling, and he offers to some people a call perfectly suited to their interior dispositions and conditions. This “congruous” grace is “sufficient” for one’s consent. God, however, does not cause the consent by an intrinsically efficacious gift of consent. Consent is left up to the human being.⁸⁶ The way that God acts on the soul in justifying grace is therefore by “moral causality,” that is, moral suasion or persuasiveness.⁸⁷ In fact, Molina allows that people who receive the kind of “illumination” that Paul received actually do dissent, though rarely (raro).⁸⁸ We might say that in this model, grace has its effectiveness analogously to the way that, for Locke, a substance “has” a secondary quality. An efficacious grace is a sufficient grace to which the recipient has reacted with consent.

The Dominicans took the position that an additional grace was needed after the prevenient grace, and that this second grace was intrinsically efficacious. As Bañez explains:

This second grace, Bañez elaborates in another text, constitutes a person in second actuality.⁹⁰ (This distinction has its roots in Aristotle’s example in On the Soul 2 (412a22–23) and Nicomachean Ethics 7.3 (1147a10–14), where the possession of knowledge is first actuality, the use of it second actuality.) The Dominicans also dubbed the second grace “physical premotion,” a rather obscure piece of terminology with a simple meaning: by “physical” they meant that efficient causality was being exercised directly on the soul by God (as opposed to the moral suasion of the Molinists), and by “premotion” they referred not to temporal priority, but indicated its origin in God, who is metaphysically prior, and who grounds the act as its cause.⁹¹

For Bañez, the ability to do otherwise than consent to the first grace is preserved by the possibility of “rebelling” in the brief time lag between the two graces. He says, for instance, that after (postquam) the prevenient calling, “We exercise our freedom. And this can happen in two ways. In one way, while that excitement that was completely prevenient still remains with him, he knowingly resists God who is calling and exciting him.”⁹² This person does not receive the second, efficacious grace of consent: “then the help of the grace of God is converted into anger, on account of the malice of the recipient.”⁹³ Whoever does not rebel, however, exercises freedom by consent.⁹⁴ What this means is that God rewards the soul with the second grace, the grace of consent. As we have already seen, the consent is given by God through direct efficient causality on the soul’s power of choice,⁹⁵ and therefore the consenting person has freedom of alternate possibilities only in what Bañez calls the “divided” sense – that is, in the abstract, considered apart from the actual circumstances of God’s action on the soul.⁹⁶

In contrast, as Bañez laments, the Molinists introduced a novel clause into the traditional definition:⁹⁷ “free choice is that which, with all the requisite things in place for the doing of an action, can do and not-do, or do one thing in such a way that it could also do the opposite.”⁹⁸ A person always has freedom of alternate possibilities in the composite circumstances. This is why a person can always dissent from congruous grace even while receiving it.⁹⁹ The Molinist account is therefore rooted in the view that human free choice makes it impossible for grace to be efficacious per se. It is not merely that God does not efficiently cause consent, but in fact he could not, given the natural power of free choice.

7.4c. Comparing These Early Modern Accounts to Augustine

Given that we saw both a one-grace and a two-grace model in Augustine’s Replies to Simplicianus and Confessions, how are we to assess these early modern accounts, which similarly speak of one and two graces? First of all, it is now clear that part of the reason why the early modern debate was inconclusive, was that each side insisted on only one account of justifying grace, whereas Augustine himself had two accounts. But there is more to say than that.

Neither Bañez’s nor Molina’s account is the same as Augustine’s in different words; each has captured some of the elements in Augustine’s account – especially Bañez – though they both differ from it. Bañez’s use of the first actuality-second actuality distinction in a two-grace model comes close to the details of Augustine’s foundational epistemology. The Augustinian motivating impression provides the perceiver with information about an action, hence, it can rightly be compared to Aristotle’s “possession” of information (first actuality); and assent can be compared to a kind of “use” of those propositions (second actuality). Another point of intersection is Bañez’s statement that prevenient grace provides information about the means to attain one’s proper end. As we have seen,¹⁰⁰ Augustine’s motivating impression of continence includes a reference to the means by which he can live this virtue. And because Augustine holds that virtue is constitutive of happiness, what is being perceived is the means to happiness, one’s proper end.

Moreover, Bañez’s understanding of why the second grace does not violate free choice is very similar to what we find in Augustine. According to Bañez’s conception, free choice is an instrumental power; its purpose is to choose the means by which the end desired may be achieved.¹⁰¹ For one can remain indifferent to various options (only) insofar as they are perceived to be means lacking a necessary connection to the end desired;¹⁰² once a necessary connection between means and end is discerned, indifference is lost, though one is “free” because of pursuing what one wants. A similar notion, though without the heavy Aristotelian emphasis on means-ends relations, is attested in Augustine’s corpus, as for instance in On Free Choice, where he stresses that liberum arbitrium is an “intermediate good” because it (like the power of thought) may be used well or badly, although its purpose is to be used for the sake of attaining the highest good.¹⁰³ Given this understanding of free choice, it is possible to maintain that an efficacious grace of consent is a free act of the human being, because in it God is moving the creature in accord with its nature, toward its happiness.¹⁰⁴ So, the grace of consent is merciful help, rather than the imposition of something radically unwanted, and does no damage or disrespect to the creature. As Augustine had put it in the Replies to Simplicianus, “free choice is most important; it exists, indeed, but of what value is it in those who are sold under sin?”¹⁰⁵ Molina’s claim that free choice is always able to do otherwise, even when being acted upon by God, is foreign to the principles of classical psychology and normative eudaimonism that are foundational in Augustine.

On the other hand, there are two points of intersection with Augustine’s view that we find only in the Molinist line. One, of course, is that justification can be effected by a single grace; as we have seen, Augustine does think that in the case of people like Paul, there is only one (cataleptic) grace. Nevertheless, this similarity is only skin-deep owing to Molina’s insistence on autonomy. As we have seen, the grace is not self-evidently true to the perceiver in Molina’s world, because people actually do dissent from it.

As an interpretation of Augustine, the Molinist account looks textually defensible by means of a portion of the Replies to Simplicianus (1.2.12–13), though again this is only skin-deep. Here Augustine considers the possibility that the calling (impression) is efficacious of good will (si vocatio ista est effectrix bonae voluntatis) because it is adapted to the needs of the individual, a case of God calling someone congruently (congruenter). The human part would be to “follow” the calling (presumably, to consent). However, this passage is not Augustine’s final position on the matter within this work. The Replies are a written record of Augustine unravelling the problem of conversion, and proposing various models.¹⁰⁶ He is figuring out what he thinks as he writes, and later in the same work it becomes clear that he thinks we do not have autonomy in following or not following the congruous call. With a tone of finality, Augustine makes the stronger claim noticed above, that in a conversion our actual will to perform actions is “granted” by God (1.2.21). Thus, though we “follow,” we cannot dissent, any more than we could to any other self-evident proposition.

The second main intersection of Molina with Augustine is Molina’s notion that God tailors grace to the individual. If this be taken as a general principle, and applied in a way that Molina himself does not apply it – namely, to mean that God will show a person the kalon quality of whichever virtue she particularly dislikes – then this allows us to retain an important piece of the Augustinian account that we see in the Confessions. In contrast, Bañez gives the impression that the grace of conversion in an adult is the same for everyone who receives it – being the introduction of a supernatural end. With this absence of particularity, something important drops out of the picture.

Finally, it should be noted that neither Bañez nor Molina retains Augustine’s dominant emphasis on grace as “medicinal” for moral conversion to natural virtues like temperance. There is implicit in Bañez’s approach – owing to his greater use of the Aristotelian-Thomistic teleology – the idea that grace corrects moral vices and bestows the cardinal virtues. But it is not the main focus of his attention. For Molina, too, the purpose of grace is the introduction of a supernatural end, and the ancient background of a need for rehabituation does not inform his account even implicitly; he does not treat the case of virtuous action as different from other kinds of nonevil free acts, for instance, but focuses on issues of necessity in God’s knowledge of free acts generally (being engaged with Ockhamist and Scotist discussions of these types of questions).¹⁰⁷

7.4d. The Ability To Decide Otherwise in Augustine’s Two-Grace Account: Entertaining an Impression, Repenting, Invoking God

As we have seen, Augustine’s cataleptic grace model only allows for freedom in the normative sense during the receipt of grace, that is, liberty to attain true happiness, whereas the two-grace model allows a window in which to exercise freedom of alternate possibilities, in between impression and assent.

An interesting question therefore remains, which is: How does Augustine think that this freedom of alternate possibilities is exercised in the two-grace account? Our method of looking to the sermons for details of epistemology and moral psychology pays off yet again, in answering this intriguing question. For here we uncover material that moves us beyond Bañez’s model, in which the only two possible responses to the prevenient impression were (1) rejection of the impression, and (2) consent, given by God, to the impression. We can also explain the significance of Confessions 8.12.28, which we have not yet addressed.

The first thing to notice is that, unlike the subject of grace in Bañez’s model, Augustine in Confessions eight performs acts in between his receipt of the impression and the divinely efficiently caused consent. After God makes continence seem attractive by touching Augustine’s mind with a suggestio, Augustine does not reject or refuse to consider the impression, but says that he was “moving toward a decision,” telling himself inwardly, “let it be now, let it be now,” although he could not bring himself to actually consent.¹⁰⁸ He compares his own present moral character to the attractiveness set forth in the impression of continence, and he sees his ugliness: “At that moment, the more ardent my affection for those [continent] young men of whom I was hearing … the more was the detestation and hatred I felt for myself in comparison with them.”¹⁰⁹ Then, he repents of his past life, weeps, and calls on God to help him come to a decision: “‘How long, O Lord? How long, Lord, will you be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities.’ For I felt my past to have a grip on me.”¹¹⁰

What exactly are these acts, and is this narrative in the Confessions representative of a general account of how freedom can be used positively in the two-grace model? Let us first ask a preparatory philosophical question: what is it that could happen in between an impression and assent, given Augustine’s epistemological theory?

It seems that it should be an “entertaining” of the suggestio. Augustine uses this notion of entertaining, when he speaks of temptations; it is a familiar notion to us, and a common experience. An idea occurs to us to do something, which seems attractive, yet we are not convinced it is right or in our true best interest. Nevertheless we dwell on the idea for a moment, and wish it were in our best interest to do it, because doing it appeals to us. Augustine describes this kind of mental act in the On the Trinity and the sermons: it is an act in which the mind “holds and fondly turns over” (tenens et volvens libenter) the content of an impression, without yet having consented to it.¹¹¹ Notice that because entertaining is an act, it presupposes the consent to entertain, though not consent to the sentential content of the temptation itself. (Entertaining is affirming that it is fitting “to consider doing” the act proposed, rather than affirming that it is fitting “to do” the act.) It follows that entertaining a temptation can be morally evaluated: it is itself wrong, although less seriously wrong than consenting to do the act.¹¹²

Does Augustine think it is possible to similarly “entertain” a suggestio that comes from God? If he does, then his two-grace model will perhaps be comparable to other accounts on offer about the relation between grace and free choice, such as Stump’s “quiescence of the will” or “failing to refuse grace,”¹¹³ and Maritain’s “not nihilating a weak grace”;¹¹⁴ and it will be interesting to tease out the differences and similarities as we proceed.

Here we need to scout around in Augustine’s sermons for material that will help us answer this question. In fact we do find that in the context of justifying grace, he says that it is possible to “avidly taste” (gustare aviditate) the sweetness, as opposed to being “unwilling” (noli) to savor it.¹¹⁵ Other references also look like they refer to entertaining a suggestio from God: “Eagerly listening” (studio audire) to and “holding onto” (tenere) God’s interior prompting (excitatio) to do some action.¹¹⁶ Here we have something that looks like it corresponds to Augustine’s “moving toward a decision” in Confessions book eight.

Unlike the case of entertaining a temptation, however, Augustine links willingness to taste or listen to God’s suggestio with another concept, namely repentance. The idea seems to be that lingering on the suggestion allows space for a comparison of the proposed behavior to one’s own present kinds of behavior. But given that one is not yet virtuous, the beauty of the proposed behavior contrasts with the ugliness of one’s present failures, causing compunction. (This comparison, we have noticed, is an explicit part of the Confessions narrative.) So, God’s interior suggestion has as a natural consequence “confession”:

We are to yield by pausing and listening to the divine enunciations, by which God suggests something to us. In other words, when God inspires a motivating impression with its imperatival sayable content, we should entertain it. The use of the word “yield” here is interesting, for in the City of God and sermons he alludes to yielding “in order to” or literally “toward” consent to sin (cedere ad consentiendum), as if to indicate that consenting can be the result of yielding. Yielding means weakening one’s resistance to the temptation, and it makes consent more likely.¹¹⁸ Thus, yielding bears comparison to the “holding and fondly turning over” a temptation, described in the On the Trinity. It would appear here that motivating impressions given by grace, are also the kind of thing to which one could “yield” as preparatory to consent, and that such yielding to or pausing to consider (“listen to”) the content of the graced impression provokes repentance.

This again corresponds to the Confessions narrative, when, after receiving the suggestio of continence, and entertaining it, Augustine compares his own behavior to the impression of continence, feels revulsion for it, and cries over it, unhappy that it is displeasing to God.

But repentance is not a stand-alone item in Augustine’s sermons; he consistently links it with “invoking” God, which is calling on God in order to be filled by God.¹¹⁹ So, in response to grace “raining down,”¹²⁰ so that one may “bring forth” good actions by love, one should “grow weak” (infirmari; compare “yield”), and the natural progression is then crying out for assistance, or calling on the Lord’s name:

Here God first “excites” a person, which is presumably a reference to motivation, and the recipient then invokes God. The same idea is found when Augustine speaks of entertaining or “avidly tasting the sweetness”; that, he says, results in being “humbled” and crying out to the Lord, acknowledging one’s inability to act well without additional divine aid.¹²⁴ And again, this corresponds to the Confessions when, after the impression of continence but before consent, Augustine’s repentance is accompanied by a crying out for mercy and help: “How long O Lord? Do not be angry ...”

I earlier used the term “receptivity” to describe entertaining and the confession of sin and invocation which follow from it, and this indicates the main difference between what Augustine describes, and the more recent accounts in Stump and Maritain. Stump’s quiescence of the will is passivity and a suspension of judgment; Maritain’s is similarly the mere absence of an act of rebellion. But Augustine does not think that doing nothing is possible: one must either allow the impression to remain, which is a kind of giving countenance to it (entertaining), or one must eject it from one’s mental field. And given that the impression is a motivating rather than a merely epistemic kind of impression, it will be difficult to explain how quiescence of desire can be an option. It is nevertheless true, of course, that in relation to consent, entertaining is a state of suspense;¹²⁵ and in this it is like the model Stump proposes.

It is ironic that Bañez develops no account of these receptive acts, given that he at one point quotes a passage from a text by the pseudo-Augustinian On Predestination and Grace,¹²⁶ which does give “lamenting” (ingemuere) for sin as the contrary of rebellion against the first grace of impression.¹²⁷ “Lament” can easily be identified as a reference to repentance; and it is set in opposition to “fighting against” God, which is precisely how Augustine sets up the dichotomy in the sermons. The significance seems lost on Bañez, however, and this is understandable. The pseudo-Augustinian text makes no use of the concept after briefly mentioning it, and it is not to be expected that Bañez would have recognized it as representative of a general account unless he had made a thorough survey of Augustine’s writings, especially the commentaries on the psalms, and the other sermons, in conjunction with the Confessions and On the Trinity.¹²⁸ He evidently did not have the opportunity to do this. Reading Bañez, one has the sense that he is working off of a (sizable) list of proof texts. He does not cite the portion of the Confessions, or sermons, which contain the impression-yielding model.¹²⁹

Philosophically, there is something in Augustine’s model of preconsensual receptivity that should be attractive to those who want some freedom of alternate possibilities (in the composite circumstances) to be operative in conversion. An intrinsically efficacious grace of consent (a Bañez-style consent) is no longer an unprovoked compelling grace, given that invocation has occurred after the impression. Invocation is the acknowledgment that one needs more aid from God. So, God’s granting consent does not constitute God’s doing something that the person has not wanted (antecedently) to have done to him. For even if, in invocation, one does not foresee how one is to be brought to moral health – does not explicitly petition that consent be given as a grace – in these acts of self-abandonment one gives God a generalized permission to “save” one from one’s present condition.

7.4e. The Dialogue Model of Conversion and Its Theodical Interest

Famously, the next event in the Confessions is that Augustine hears a voice¹³⁰ instructing him to read scripture, and his reading of it effects consent to the impression of continence. This is the grace of consent. So, it looks as though Confessions 8.11.27–8.12.29 represents a “dialogue” model of conversion. The giving and receiving of grace is apparently a conversation: God initiates contact, and subsequently grants consent or does not, depending upon the recipient’s reaction to the impression. This would make sense given Augustine’s ethical analysis of “entertaining,” for recall that Augustine thinks that entertaining is an act for which one is responsible; a “reward” in the form of an additional grace (consent) would therefore be fitting.

Indeed, the sermons indicate that repentance and invocation are followed by justification: “Christ has begun to dwell in the inner man through faith, and has begun when invoked to possess him who confessed.”¹³¹ Again: “The Lord will give sweetness, and our earth will give its fruit … It [the earth, i.e., soul] grew weak. Let it not, then, be so presumptuous as to rely on itself, let it cry out, weak as it is, to the Lord, Convert us, God of our healings. So it continues there: And it grew weak; you, however, have perfected it. Why have you perfected it? Because it grew weak itself, because it understood it couldn’t be perfected by itself.”¹³² We find the elements of the dialogue model also in the following sermon, where God “cries” to the soul inside the soul, enjoining the person to live well, and then there is compunction:

Now Augustine elaborates on the possible answers one might give to the initial call. One can refuse to listen to it altogether:

But the ideal “answer” of consent or justification¹³³ is done by God in us:

So again we have the conjunction of calling as a being stirring up interiorly by God, followed by repentance and crying out for mercy (invocation), with God granting the actual justification (consent).

More generally, the dialogue pattern matches the general principle, enunciated in the sermons, that God gives (additional) grace to those who humble themselves, and refuses it to those who do not.¹³⁵ The principle applies also to those already converted but not yet completely perfect;¹³⁶ apparently all moral progress is a conversion, of greater or lesser degree.

Recognizing the Confessions as a three-step model of (1) impression, (2) entertaining, repentance, invocation, and (3) consent, also brings a fresh perspective to some obscure passages of the anti-Pelagian texts. In the Against Julian, when Augustine insists that “grace came first and touched the heart so that it would ask God for the good that would make it truly happy,”¹³⁷ this “asking” looks like the invocation of the Confessions and the sermons. Again, in Letter 157, we find:

Other works seem to contain similar allusions to this model.¹³⁹

The early modern problem of how to reconcile divine efficaciousness with human free choice thus seems a bit less intractable given Augustine’s dialogue model. In his dialogue model, Augustine’s prevenient grace is “sufficient” in the sense that it provides all that is needed for entertaining, repentance, and invocation to occur; and these acts, if performed, will be rewarded by God with an efficacious grace of consent. The Jesuits can assert that God initiates justification by a sufficient grace tailored to the individual, and the Dominicans can uphold their authentically Augustinian claim that the consent to this grace, effective of justification, is an intrinsically efficacious grace.

Philosophically, there is of course a theodical benefit to this model, which was first pointed out by Augustine himself at the time of Question 68 of his 83 Questions (dated to just before the Replies to Simplicianus and the commencement of the Confessions).¹⁴⁰ Namely, the dialogue model mitigates, though it does not eradicate, the problem of apparent arbitrariness on the part of God in making some people, but not others, righteous.¹⁴¹ (Because all of the players in this drama – Augustine and the parties of the De Auxiliis debates – want to save the scriptural stipulation that “many are called, but few are chosen,”¹⁴² universal justification, which would also remove any arbitrary distinction among people by God, is not an option.) By building in voluntary acts of entertaining, repenting, and invoking, Augustine can give a somewhat more satisfying answer to the question, “Why does one person receive the second grace, whereas another is denied it?” Some people entertained the graced suggestio, repented, and invoked God, whereas others refused to entertain it.

That having been said, there will still be a mystery remaining in Augustine’s account of grace, even when receptivity is counted as a positive act. For instance, Augustine does not assert that the grace of impression is given to everyone. He even bypasses an opportunity to so interpret a scriptural passage that might seem to assert this very thing.¹⁴³ Thus, God looks arbitrary in the giving of this first grace, or as Augustine would prefer to put it, if some people are given this first grace but others are not, that will be owing to the inscrutable (but just and right) judgment of God.¹⁴⁴

Moreover, Augustine’s account leaves it unclear why some people entertain the first grace, a grace that is sufficient for one’s entertaining, repenting, and invoking God, but others do not. Here his account must fall back on his claim that creatures are prone to entropic lapses away from God even when they have enough going for them to make the right choice, because they are created from nothing, or because, as other than God, they are capable of distraction away from God to self-worship – even while “seeing” the beauty of God (in this case, seeing the beauty of virtues which have their criteria in God). These are the explanations he offers for the falls of the angels and the first parents, who had sufficient grace; and so his account of “failure to entertain a sufficient grace” will be symmetrical with his account of original sin, although there will remain a certain inexplicableness about the pull of evil.¹⁴⁵