Play, Learning, and Religion

[Vouthon]

I have not verified this myself, but I once heard from one of my professors, Thomas Helms, that the theologies of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli were on almost every key point in agreement

Your professor made a cogent and sound argument here (sounds like he must have been a fascinating lecturer!).

Certainly, in terms of soteriology - 'salvation theology' of divine grace, freewill and predestination as opposed to ecclesiology (theology of the church, where Augustine is clearly Catholic in orientation, I mean he was a bishop himself) - the Reformers were heavily coloured by Augustinianism and indeed political Augustinianism also featured quite heavily in the social dimension of their writings (as it did in the 11th century Papal Revolution under Pope Gregory VII).

It's interesting but I would agree that Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were much more faithful adherents of elements of his salvation schema than were post-Augustinian Catholic theologians, such as the medieval scholastics (very Aristotelian), early modern Jesuits (very casuistic and humanist), even less so the Franciscans or Carmelites - all of whom either moderated or just point-blank departed from some of his more contested doctrinal interpretations, which were at odds with the consensus opinions of his contemporaries among the church fathers of east and west.

On this from a Catholic perspective see:


Library - Most Theological Library

Augustine is called the Doctor of Grace, and rightly, for he made some great advances in that area of theology. At the same time, he made some regrettable errors. We will examine both.
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I don't believe Augustine totally denied freewill and human agency, however, to the same extent as Calvinist 'double predestination' and the Protestant Reformers neglected the most important facet of the Augustinian system: his incredibly profound mysticism and rich interior life as set forth in his Confessions, the earliest of the modern-style 'autobiographies', which is foundational to Catholic spirituality in a manner completely alien to mainstream Protestantism. Does the Augustine who relayed the following mystical experience at Ostia....

"If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed the sense impressions (phantasiae) of earth, sea, sky; hushed also the heavens, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self transcend self; hushed all dreams and revelations which come by imagery; if every tongue and every symbol, and all things subject to transiency were wholly hushed: since, if any could hear, all these say: 'We made not ourselves, but He made us who abideth for ever.'

If then, having uttered this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears to Him who made them; and He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, so that we may hear His word, not through any tongue of flesh nor angel's voice nor sound of thunder, not in any similitude, but His voice whom we love in these His creatures may hear His Very Self without intermediary at all as now we reached forth and with one flash of thought touched the Eternal Wisdom that abides over all: suppose that experience were prolonged, and all other visions of far inferior order were taken away, and this one vision were to ravish the beholder, and absorb him and plunge him in these inward joys, so that eternal life were like that moment of insight...

'We made not ourselves, but the Eternal One made us.' If, after this word, all things were silent, and He Himself alone would speak to us, no longer through them, but by Himself: if then our soul, lifting itself on the wings of thought up to eternal wisdom, could retain unbroken this sublime contemplation: if all other thoughts of the spirit had ceased and this alone had absorbed the soul, and filled it with joy, the most intimate and the most divine: if eternal life resembled this ravishment in God which we experience for a moment: would this not be the consummation of that word: 'Enter thou into the joy of Thy Lord'?" ​

....surface in Calvin's Institutes? I think not and yet St. Augustine's mystical theology is sublime.

But his massa damnata theory (rejected by the Council of Trent in 1547 as heresy, in the form of Calvinist understanding of predestination) and teachings about the body marred by original sin (which he took as identical to concupiscence or sensual desire, whereas post-Scotian Catholicism redeemed sensual desire as not being sinful in and of itself), are much closer to traditional Protestant theology than they are to Catholicism - which came to adopt the Franciscan Scotian position:


Total depravity - Wikipedia

In opposition to Pelagius, who believed that after the fall people are able to choose not to sin, Augustine of Hippo argued that, since the fall, all humanity is in self-imposed bondage to sin...

Duns Scotus, however, modified this interpretation and only believed that sin entailed a lack of original righteousness. During the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers took Scotus's position to be the Catholic position and argued that it made sin only a defect or privation of righteousness rather than an inclination toward evil. Martin Luther, John Calvin and other Reformers used the term "total depravity" to articulate what they claimed to be the Augustinian view that sin corrupts the entire human nature.[11]

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(continued....)

 

[Vouthon]

Augustinianism reigned supreme in Latin Christendom from circa. 500 - 1200, even though his doctrine of grace against the Pelagians had not been - even back then in the golden age of his pre-eminence - embraced in its entirety by the Catholic church (and was rejected almost entirely by the Eastern church, which developed into the semi-pelagian Eastern Orthodoxy).

Around the 1200s, Catholicism became much more 'humanist' in focus and ethos, spearheaded by St. Francis of Assisi (who became the paragon of virtue in Catholic countries), and also 'this-world' oriented rather than strictly neo-Platonic as with the Augustinian system:


Duns Scotus’s Christology: Foundations for Franciscan Christian Humanism in: The English Province of the Franciscans (1224-c.1350)

In his seminal essay, ‘Medieval Humanism’,1 Richard Southern distinguishes two senses of the term humanism: on the one hand, there is that humanism which is a revival of classical literature and, on the other, there is a humanism that proclaims the key ‘humanist’ ideals of human dignity, moderate rule, peace and self-restraint. While the former type of humanism clearly belongs to the Renaissance, the latter can be found in an earlier age, Southern argues, and most notably in the thirteenth century. This earlier humanism emerged as part of the movement of Christian moral education and pastoral care initiated by the fourth Lateran council. The texts related to it belong to the ‘pastoral revolution’ that this council provoked.2

English friars played a significant role in this pastoral revolution. One of them, as I hope to show, played a particularly important role in laying the metaphysical foundations for its success. While the imago Dei imagery from Genesis 1:26 has often been used to ground human dignity, Franciscans would be particularly captured by the fuller imago Christi insight.3 John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) would use Christ as the foundation for a threefold metaphysical grounding: in creation, in human nature and in human destiny.​

http://old.upjp2.edu.pl/download/ThR2.pdf

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor links the movement towards the self-sufficing ‘exclusive humanism’ characteristic of modern secularism with a reallocation of popular piety in the thirteenth century.1 During that period a shift occurred in which devotional practices became less focused on the cosmological glory of Christ Pantocrator and more focused on the particular humanity of the lowly Jesus.

Taylor suggests that this new devotional attention to the particular human Christ was facilitated by the recently founded mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, both of whom saw the meekness of God Incarnate reflected in the individual poor among whom the friars lived and ministered. In this context, a new spiritual attention to the human individuality of Jesus was manifest, whether in the realism of the paintings of Giotto (so deeply associated with Franciscan spirituality), or in the new liturgical feasts centred on the suffering body of Christ, such as the feast of the Five Wounds and that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (both of which were first celebrated in the thirteenth century by German Dominicans).

Following the provocative study of Étienne Gilson,11 a diverse company of theologians have come to identify Duns Scotus as a transitional figure in the move towards a ‘proto-liberal’ or ‘proto-secular’ construal of created being and the exigency of the creature to act autonomously
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The Fathers are viewed as being particularly authoritative witnesses to sacred tradition where they agree about something. This is one of the main ways by which we are able to separate learned (perhaps true) but fallible opinions from orally transmitted divine revelation (we aren't a sola scriptura church remember). We call this the sensus fidelium (sense of the faithful): "the supernatural appreciation of faith on the part of the whole people, when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 92)

St. Augustine - despite his genius and unrivalled rhetorical skills - had a few rather "out-there" beliefs that my church hasn't embraced but our Calvinist brethren, historically at least, did. Augustine adhered - most infamously - to that novel and (I personally feel) disturbing massa damnata theory of original sin, which held that the whole human race by original sin became a massa damnata et damnabilis: God could effectively cast the whole damned race into hell for original sin alone, without waiting for any personal sins with only the predestined 'elect' saved through divine grace. Thankfully the Eastern Fathers, absolutely all of them, and Westerners before Augustine, and also after him, understood that there is no reprobation except in consideration of demerits.

The massa damnata was condemned by the Second Council of Orange (in 529 A.D.), without imputing it to Augustine (even though the Reformers later, correctly, identified it in his writings and said to us Catholics, "hey, your Augustine is a heretic just like you say we are!"):

"We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrennce that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema”​

All scholars today recognise that Augustine's interpretation of the original sin doctrine was coloured in part by Manichaeism (he was a convert to Catholicism from that gnostic-dualistic religion which regarded physical creation as evil and the body/sensual desire as base). This unfortunately infected elements of his otherwise brilliant theological synthesis and the Catholic church was right, in my opinion, to spurn it in the long run.

 

[Vouthon]

Have you had a chance to crack open Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion?

I have indeed had the pleasure.

Other than his soteriology and understanding of original sin (which, as you'd likely expect, I would have to politely but fundamentally disagree with as a Catholic), I discovered much that was beneficial and compelling in his works, particularly in terms of his 'Two Kingdoms Doctrine' with its proto-secularism, the priesthood of all the faithful with its proto-democracy, the later Puritan resistance theories to arbitrary royal authority that were built upon dimensions of his thought and his more representative and egalitarian 'ecclesial' structure (Presbyterianism).

He is undoubtedly a seminal thinker in the Western intellectual canon and in the Christian theological tradition as a whole.

However, his understanding of human nature - original sin, especially - and salvation are admittedly very alien to my own.

 

[Sunstone]

However, his understanding of human nature - original sin, especially - and salvation are very alien to my own.

A much abridged version of his Institutes was required reading for my "Birth of Protestantism" class. At the time I took that course, I was heavily into studying logic so the inevitable happened and I became hypnotized by Calvin's skills as a logician. I ended up concluding you'd best not grant him his first few premises, because then it just gets harder and harder to argue with him.

About Helms. He was a third generation professor, so he had the art of the lecture in his pocket. He could make ideas vivid and accessible. I never came across another professor so adept at communicating abstractions. He was something rather rare in America at the time. A professor way more interested in teaching undergrads than in publishing. He was a gift to us. Much more astonishing, so many of us students knew it!

By the time I was a junior, Helms was pushing me to go to Harvard Divinity. By "pushing", I mean what good salespeople do -- they assume you have already decided to buy their goods even though they know you have not. "Phil, when you get to Cambridge, you'll want to...".

At one point, he had me convinced I was going. Then some unexpected events ruled it out of the question even to apply. Looking back, I think I was lucky. Why? Because, knowing me as I do today, I would have ended up feeling stifled by a career in academia. I would have loved most of it, but not enough of it to overcome certain of its few disadvantages.