Matthew Drever

Augustine’s late writings on grace and predestination raise myriad problems, among them what place the Bishop of Hippo envisions for ethical relations toward others. Where does the second great commandment -love your neighbor- fit into his account of grace? Does it find a constitutive place or is it drowned out by his claims on grace and predestination? This article takes up these enduring questions by examining the trinitarian framework in which Augustine develops his account of the body of Christ. Here we will see that our inclusion in Christ’s body involves not simply an outward reforming of our love toward the other but also a relocating of it within Christ’s body where the discrete separation between the other and myself is bridged and united through the Spirit’s love. Augustine’s model of the totus Christus offers here not only a proleptic eschatological vision of heaven to come, but also places an ethical demand on the historical church. We might say that our genuine humanity, which is being formed through our participation in Christ’s body, entails also a new and redeemed type of existence lived in and through our love of God and neighbor.

ABSTRACTAnders Nygren argues that Augustine’s adherence to a Platonist notion of eros undermines both his own and a wider Christian account of agape. On Nygren’s reading, eros, which is self-fulfilling love that originates in the soul’s movement toward God, stands in contradistinction to agape, which is self-denying love that originates in God and condescends to us through the sacrifice of Christ. While it is true that Platonism plays an important role for Augustine, he comes to interpret love through a lens of Christian doctrines on creation, Christ, and the Trinity that leads him to reshape the Greek ideal of love. In particular, Augustine reads human upward love of God as flowing out of God’s triune downward love of creation mediated through the incarnation. Nygren contends that Augustine’s connection here between eros and agape is contradictory, but this presupposes at least a medieval, if not a modern, distinction between natural and supernatural love. Augustine does not draw on eros to the exclusion of agape but rather sees in eros the inclusion of agape. That is, our natural love for God is always enabled by God’s supernatural love for us.

This paper addresses the question of human and divine agency in Augustine’s later writings through the Trinitarian lens that shapes his understanding of salvation and the human person. It focuses on the way Augustine draws on Christological and pneumatological claims to structure the relation between human and divine agency within his totus christus model. Here I examine how the relation between human and divine agency can be grounded on and understood through the predestination of Christ. This leads into a consideration of how we participate in Christ’s body through the power of the Spirit. In this I think we can discern a nascent eschatological social ontology: the body of Christ is not only an ecclesiological but also an anthropological metaphor signaling a new form of corporate embodiment, not complete until the resurrection, from which to understand the reforming of human agency through divine grace.