It is easy to perceive the two main modern manifestations of the Augustinian dilemma (major strains of post-Tridentine Catholicism and Calvinism) in utero. Despite censure from the institutional Church through the Middle Ages, sacramental anti-realist position (usually, though not always connected with hard predestinarianism) manifested itself throughout the Middle Ages in the everything from the heresy of Berengar of Tours to the theology of the so-called proto-Reformers (Wycliffe, Hus, etc.).[1]
In giving a theological evaluation, it should be observed that the difficulty with both trajectories within the Augustinian tradition is that they destroy the biblical emphasis on the divine Word’s ability to enact salvation through the sacramental medium of human words. For Augustine, the word is not a divine deed that contains within it the coming of the reality of which it speaks. Rather, the word is a mere signifier that signifies things to be known more authentically through the experience of vision beyond them. As a result, according to the first option outlined above the elect are predestined by invisible grace, which merely coincides with the means of grace- but is not literally present in them. Therefore, the external medium of the word and sacraments do not enact salvation, they merely signify a salvation that God has already enacted in his eternal choice. Conversely, following the second option, if grace is contained in the word and sacraments, but not enacted through them, it logically follows that the means of grace come to function as a signifier that signifies the possibility of grace to be actualized by free will. It is not the Word of God that actualizes the redemption of the individual sinner, but free will accepting grace.
Ultimately, the competing sacramentalist and predestinarian trajectories fail to counteract the reality of sin as it is defined within the Augustinian tradition. For Augustine, sin is self-incurvature (incurvate in se) and self-orientation.[2] Grace must break this self-orientation and reorient the sinner toward God. Nevertheless, if the means of grace do not actually contain grace and God invisibly elects believers, then it is up to the individual to discern the signs of the presence of God’s grace within him or herself. In discerning God’s electing grace, they must necessarily return to their own self-focus and trust. Conversely, if the means of grace do contain real grace that one is expected to grasp with his own free will, then one will again turn inward to discern whether one has appropriately utilized one’s free will to take hold of the offer of grace. In either trajectory, the root of sin is ultimately not defeated, and the Augustinian tradition therefore fails to combat sin based on its own internal criterion.
[1] See the following: See Stephen Lahey, “The Sentences Commentary of Jan Hus,” A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. Ota Pavlicek and František Šmahel (Leiden: Brill), 147-9; A.J. Macdonald, Berengar and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930); Stephen Penn, “Wycliffe and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 241-93; John Adam Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the “Summa de Ente” to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Later Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961).
[2] Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 61.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).
Image “i dont (want to) see it : incurvatus se” by Rachel Telian (2015)