While many scholars have argued that Augustine’s theology of grace underwent a shift around 418, making the grace of faith more inward, Chapter 5 proposes that instead, Augustine’s vocabulary of faith simply expands to encompass hopeful and loving faith, which are due to inward graces. Augustine’s expanded vocabulary can be seen especially through his distinction between three different senses of credere (believing). Credere Christum – believing truths about Christ – is necessary for true virtue, since faith orders actions to their ultimate end, but is not sufficient for it. Credere Christo – believing Christ – justifies when motivated by hope. Hope is both the desire for the grace to love and the first beginning of love by grace. Hope therefore explains many puzzles in Augustine’s mature theology of grace. Lastly, credere in Christum – believing in Christ – is a synecdoche for faith, hope, and love. It signifies not merely the means to righteousness but participation in Christ and the very essence of human righteousness.

Chapter 3 begins with how the Donatist controversy shaped Augustine’s theology of justification by faith because the Donatists represented the real possibility of having faith without charity. The chapter then turns to the key features of Augustine’s theology of justification formed by the Pelagian controversy, especially participation in Christ’s righteousness. Both controversies pressed Augustine to consider how justification is by faith if faith sometimes fails to justify, as in Donatists, lax catechumens, and impenitent Christians. In both de spiritu et littera (The Spirit and the Letter) and his sermons, Augustine addresses this through a deeper psychology of faith: faith only obtains the grace of justification when it is motivated by hope and fails if it is motivated primarily by fear. The chapter concludes with de fide et operibus (Faith and Works), exploring Augustine’s understanding of faith, works, and charity, his criticism of sola fide (faith alone), and his development of a new terminology for justifying faith: fides Christi (faith in Christ).

Through an analysis of his Pauline exegesis in the 390s, especially Romans 7, Chapter 2 demonstrates that Augustine develops a consistent interpretation of Paul on justification: faith justifies because it trusts God to give the grace of charity to fulfill the law by the Holy Spirit in baptism. The chapter situates this interpretation within the predominantly baptismal theology of justification in Ambrose and North Africa. This context unlocks how Augustine’s account of faith justifying by obtaining grace is intended to interpret the catechumen’s reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism; in Augustine’s own analogy, faith is the conception of grace, and baptism is its birth. Turning to ad Simplicianum (To Simplician), Augustine’s changed view on election preserves this interpretation of justification by faith. The chapter concludes by applying Augustine’s interpretation of Paul to his conversion in confessiones (Confessions), though this also reveals Augustine’s need to explain why faith sometimes fails to obtain grace.

Grace and providence, much like the sacraments (which are instruments of grace), are pervasive in the Confessions. Yet we learn about them, not from any explicit theorizing or argumentation on Augustine’s part, but by examining their role in the dual narrative: the personal narrative of Augustine’s life and the cosmic narrative of creation and redemption. This chapter considers how grace (God’s unmerited favor) and providence (God’s directing of the course of events in the service of his own ends) shape, but do not determine, Augustine’s life. Although there is no explicit consideration in the Confessions of the relationship between grace and free choice, the overwhelming message of the work seems to be that grace is indispensable but not irresistible: God makes Augustine into the kind of person who can accept grace, but not someone who cannot help but accept it.

This chapter discusses the definitions of the virtues employed by early scholastic authors and examines their systems for classifying the virtues, as well as their accounts of specific virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

This chapter discusses the early scholastic debates on predestination and merit, which were influenced by Augustine as well as Peter Lombard. In particular, scholastics sought to explain the compatibility of contingent temporal actions and eternal predestination.

In a political system based on monarchy it is misleading to equate governance (the active and legitimate exercise of social control) with politics (the public debate surrounding that practice), for the basis of power and authority in late medieval England lay overwhelmingly in the personal rule of the king, and ‘public debate’ over how he did so was very rarely conducted in the open, though, as we shall see, it certainly could – and did – occur. For most of the time, however, there was very little ‘politics’ but an awful lot of ‘governance’. The basis of a king’s right to exercise governance over his subjects lay in the theoretically unimpeachable notion that he had been appointed by God to protect and advance the common interest of the kingdom.

The aim of the translation is to provide an English text that is both scholarly and accessible. The referencing system resembles the familiar biblical chapters and verses; sections are provided with titles that identify their key theme and bring to light the structure of a work often regarded as diffuse and repetitive.

The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

This chapter examines the sort of happiness Aquinas thinks we can have on earth with the help of God’s grace, namely, graced imperfect happiness. In keeping with the Enjoying Good Activities Reading, it argues that, according to Aquinas, happiness is constituted exclusively by engaging in and enjoying some suboptimal genuinely good activity, animated by God’s grace. After introducing Aquinas’s understanding of grace, the chapter works through Aquinas’s reflections on the Fruit of the Holy Spirit and the Beatitudes. From those reflections, it becomes clear both how Aquinas thinks about graced imperfect happiness generally and how he thinks about its basic varieties. The chapter closes by reflecting on graced imperfect happiness’s place between the perfect happiness of heaven and the natural imperfect happiness of those on earth living apart from God’s grace.

Generosity and gratitude are prime examples of gracious traits – traits of concern for the other for the other’s sake. They are virtues of direct caring. They are complementary dispositions, readying their possessors to occupy reciprocal roles in gracious transactions. Their grammar contrasts with that of virtues of requirement such as justice and the sense of duty. Gratitude and justice both involve debt and obligation, but in different senses of ‘debt’ and ‘obligation.’ Certain cases of genuine gratitude in which the subject doesn’t believe the reason for his gratitude confirm the superiority of the view of emotions as concern-based construals over judgment theories. The concepts of gratitude and generosity specify, in their grammar, reasons that are internal to (definitive of) gratitude or generosity, but they can also be incited by reasons that don’t belong to their grammar, as long as such external reasons can trigger internal ones.

The anthropology and soteriology of western Christianity were radically reinterpreted in the fifth century CE by Augustine of Hippo, who constructed a fictional ‘Pelagianism’ to delegitimise opposition to his new theology of original sin, an absolutist account of prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment. This chapter gives an outline of the issues involved in this attempt to relocate orthodoxy, the course of events relating to Pelagius and his defence of eastern ascetic Christianity, and the afterlife of controversy over this new account of the anthropology and soteriology of Christianity.