'changed in the flesh of the Lord, taking the place of human sense',28 and states the positive teaching of the Church in — The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396

The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396–430 (continued)

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Damasus' two repudiations of Apollinarianism are found in his Epistle 9 and the Tome issued after the council of Rome in 382. The former, written against Vitalis' perpetuation of Apollinaris' heresy, anathematizes those who hold the Word was 'changed in the flesh of the Lord, taking the place of human sense',28 and states the positive teaching of the Church in counterattack:

We are to confess that Wisdom, the Word and Son of God took a human body, soul and sense: that is, Adam in his entirety; and, if I may say more emphatically, the whole of our 'old man' without sin. Thus confessing that he took a human body, we do not thereby connect the human passions of vice with him; in the same way, saying that he took the soul and sense of humanity, we do not say that he was subjected to the sin of human thoughts.

Confitendus ipse sapientia, sermo filius Dei humanum suscepisse corpus, animam, sensum, id est, integrum Adam, et, ut expressius dicam, totum veterem nostrum sine peccato hominem. Sicuti enim confitens eum humanum corpus suscepisse, non statim ei et humanas vitiorum adjungimus passiones: ita et dicentes eum suscepisse et hominis animam et sensum, non statim dicimus et cogitationum eum humanarum subjacuisse peccato.29

The Tome details more specifically what is lacking in the Apollinarian Christ: 'We anathematize those who say that, in place of a rational and intelligible human soul, the Word of God was changed in human flesh; for the Son and Word of God was not in his body in place of that rational and intellectual soul, but took up our soul (rational and intellectual) without sin, and saved it.'30 Viewing the two texts together, Apollinarianism posits a change in the nature of the Word when Incarnate, in order to take the place of a human soul in Christ's human nature. It is therefore difficult to see how Augustine's soteriological estimation of the mens/anima distinction could be rooted in these texts as Studer maintains, since they say nothing about it that is explicit. Grillmeier further confirms my argument:

What Damasus does not realise is that the Apollinarian teaching is intended to be a solution to the problem of… sinlessness in Christ…Damasus merely stresses that for Christ to have taken a human rational soul does not mean that he was exposed to the sins of the rational soul. For the taking of a body by no means signifies subjection to its vices and passions. Here Western anthropology has its place in the picture of Christ and allows the problem of sinlessness to be put in a still more pressing way. No attempt is made at a solution.31

Thus, even if Augustine had taken from Damasus a clear delineation of anima from mens (and I do not believe he did), this would not have advanced his grasp of the Apollinarian approach to Christ's sinlessness or any alternatives to it.

I turn next to Studer's claim that Augustine's perception of Apollinarian monophysitism is rooted in the works of Ambrose. While De Incarnationis Dominici Sacramento does not name the Apollinarians as the object of its discussion, it is clear from its account of monophysite heretics that they are in mind. By contrast with them, Ambrose describes the Arians as 'more tolerable', as Apollinarianism reduces to theopaschy when God suffers on the cross (p.153) in the one nature of Christ.32 Without understanding the precise configuration of Word, soul and flesh proposed by Apollinaris, and in the light of the Nicene settlement, it is not difficult to see how Ambrose can misconstrue Apollinaris' very different understanding of the relationship between Christ's person and his one nature. Ambrose's second attack on Apollinarianism deserves full quotation, as an attempt to address the problem neglected by Damasus:

If you take it literally, so that you think 'The Word was made flesh' means 'the Word was changed into flesh', can you deny what is also written about the Lord, that 'he committed no sin, but was made sin for us'? Was the Lord then changed into sin for us?…You marvel that it is written, 'The Word was made flesh', that flesh should be assumed by God the Word, when it is also written that he was made sin, which he did not possess? This is to say: he assumed for us the taking up of the carnal body of sin, subject to its weakness, not by the nature or working of sin when he was made the likeness of the flesh of sin, but so that our sin might be crucified in his flesh. They http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 7/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship should desist from saying that the nature of the Word was changed into the nature of the body, lest the nature of the Word should seem to have been changed into the contagion of sin by a parallel logic. It is one thing that does the assuming, and another that is assumed. Power came into the Virgin, and for this reason the angel told her, 'the Power of the Most High will overshadow you'. His body was born from the Virgin, and thus there was a certain heavenly descent; but it was a human conception. For he could not otherwise have been simultaneously of the nature of the flesh, and of divinity.

Quod si secundum litteram vos tenetis, ut putetis ex eo quod scriptum est quod verbum caro factum est, verbum dei in carnem esse conversum, numquid negatis scriptum esse de domino quia peccatum non fecit, sed peccatum factus est? Ergo in peccatum conversus est dominus?…Miraris ergo quia scriptum est verbum caro factum est, cum caro adsumpta sit a deo verbo, quando de peccato, quod non habuit, scriptum est quia peccatum factus est? Hoc est: non natura operationeque peccati, utpote in similitudinem carnis peccati factus, sed ut peccatum nostrum in sua carne 'crucifigeret', susceptionem pro nobis infirmitate obnoxii iam 'corporis peccati' carnalis adsumpsit. Desinant ergo dicere naturam verbi in corporis naturam esse mutatam, ne pari interpraetatione videatur natura verbi in contagium mutata peccati. Aliud est enim quod adsumpsit et aliud quod adsumptum est. Virtus venit in virginem, sicut et angelus ad eam dixit quia virtus altissimi obumbrabit te. Sed natum est corpus ex virgine et ideo caelestis quidem descensio, sed humana conceptio est. Non ergo eadem carnis potuit esse divinitatisque natura.33

Ambrose's defence of the Catholic position is striking. He uses the interwoven exegesis of Romans 8:3 and Luke 1:35 established by Origen to address the (p.154) problem of Christ's sinlessness.34 The central point of his attack is clear: any suggestion that Christ has only one nature leads to a suffering God. However, his criticism focuses on the nature/person configuration that is the outcome of Apollinarianism, without investigating its root cause, in Apollinaris' understanding of the nature of Christ's soul.

Early treatments of Apollinarianism: De Diversis Quaestionibus 83 and De Agone Christiano

Augustine's earliest critique of Apollinarianism is found in De Diversis Quaestionibus 83, the collection of miscellaneous philosophical and theological questions and answers begun in around 388 and collated in 396. Although Adversus Apollinaristas (Quaestio 80) is placed at the end of the collection, there is no certain indication of its composition date. At the outset, he identifies the Apollinarian error as a denial of the humanam mentem and rationalem animam of Christ, which distinguishes the human from other animals. Whilst the distinction between anima and animus here is clear (the latter being nonrational), the dividing line between anima and mens remains opaque. On the basis of their reading of John 1.14, Augustine goes on, the Apollinarians seek to make a compound (concretum) of the Word with the flesh of Christ.35 Quite apart from grounding their position on poor exegesis (caro in John 1.14 refers to the whole human person, not only human flesh), they neglect the intermediary position of the anima in relating the Word to the body,36 and the essential assumption of passivity within the Incarnation in virtue of it. He leaves the position of the mens in this mediatiorial relationship unexplained. He continues:

Their empty and inept accusation does not give us cause for fear, when they spitefully resist and say: 'If he truly had the affections of the soul, therefore he was placed under necessity.' We may swiftly respond: he was indeed placed under necessity, because he (p.155) was bound, whipped, crucified, and died. Thus they may understand at the same time and without stubbornness that he also had the passions of the soul, which is to say, real affections, as it pleased him to take them up by the will of the dispensation, when he took up the passions of the body without any necessity by the same will.

nec illa nos terret inanis atque inepta calumnia, qua inuidiose resistentes aiunt: ergo sub necessitate positus fuit, si has affectiones animi ueras habuit. facile quippe respondemus: ergo sub necessitate positus fuit, quia conprehensus, flagellatus, crucifixus et mortuus est, ut tandem sine pertinacia si uolunt intellegant sic eum passiones animi, hoc est affectiones, uoluntate dispensationis ueras tamen ut placuit suscepisse, quemadmodum http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 8/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship passiones corporis eadem dispensationis uoluntate sine ulla necessitate suscepit.37

Without a soul, the saving suffering and death of Christ becomes unintelligible; however, the real passions and affections experienced by Christ and recorded by the evangelists prove its presence.38 In spite of an apparent confusion over the technical vocabulary to be applied to the soul (the previously animal and irrational animus replaces anima as the seat of the affections in the text cited), Augustine's core criticism seems clear: the Apollinarian error is motivated by a desire not to involve the Word in human passivity, which can be effected only by removing his soul, both affective and intellectual. This is precisely what the Catholic position sets itself against, by proclaiming an Incarnate God who assumes a human nature capable of real suffering.

In around 396–7, Augustine wrote De Agone Christiano as a short rule of faith for those with only an elementary grasp of Latin. The text contains two short paragraphs, each of which appears to handle Apollinarianism without naming the heresy explicitly. Augustine's treatment of the issue here is interesting, as 21.19 and 23.21, which focus on Apollinarianism, are separated by an analysis of Adoptionism at 22.20, clearly describing the Photinian position Augustine admitted to holding in his youth.39 While it may be dangerous to infer too much from this uneven composition, it is notable that two articles dealing with one heresy should be severed from one another. The first reproduces only half of the argument of Quaestio 80.1: Apollinarianism excludes the mens humana from Christ, and amazingly so, as this is the highest part of man. Augustine adds, 'much more is the human mind to be mourned, if it is conquered by its body; and if it is not reformed in that humanity, in which the Lord's human body has received the dignity of the heavenly form',40 providing the soteriological rationale for the Catholic position. However, in the second article, Augustine describes the error in the full terms of Quaestio 80.1, in which the whole soul of Christ is denied. This is berated as being even more ridiculous than the previous position, and is (p.156) coupled with the example of the misinterpretation of John 1.14, which in Quaestio 80 is connected with the denial of Christ's mens. While Augustine appears to remain uncertain here whether the Apollinarians deny the lower or higher part of the soul (or both), the soteriological result of either option is clear to him and rejected.

It should be clear that, if Augustine did recall the texts of Damasus and Ambrose dealing with Apollinarianism, he did not reproduce their arguments verbatim in his own early works. His confusion concerning precisely what Apollinarianism denied (whether Christ's anima, animus or mens) might very plausibly be rooted in Damasus' own inexact treatment of the matter, pace Studer; likewise, Ambrose's emphasis on the danger of theopaschy inherent in the heresy appears to surface in both Quaestio 80 and in De Agone Christiano, albeit only as an underlying theme. Studer's reference to 'general' Milanese and Roman traditions on the topic, coupled with Altaner's vague assessment of the texts ('One can assume…that he has a textual source in mind'41) leaves the question of his sources open.

Mature works: Enchiridion, De Haeresibus, De Dono Perseverantiae

Augustine's subsequent treatment of Apollinarianism in a heresiologically explicit manner is found in the Enchiridion of the early 420s.42 Again, Apollinaris is not named here, though it is clear that his heresy is being discussed. Augustine says nothing of the absence of mens or anima in his depiction of Christ; he merely states the Catholic position that 'it is absolutely wrong to say that anything of human nature was lacking in that taking up of humanity; but it was a nature free in every way from every bond of sin',43 because it was born of a virgin who conceived by faith and not desire. John 1.14 is glossed here with Romans 3:20 ('Since all flesh will not be justified by the works of the Law'), supporting Augustine's central point, that the Incarnation posits a humanity (caro) assumed by divinity, not a divinity transformed into humanity (caro).

Studer follows Altaner in dating Augustine's reception of Ps. Epiphanius' Anakephaleosis of Epiphanius' Panarion to 423 or after. Augustine reproduces very closely its treatment of Apollinarianism in refuting Julian's attack on his own Christology.44 While the source may have been new to Augustine in 423, (p.157) its content was not, providing material in substantial continuity with his prior understanding of the heresy. However, it reduces Apollinarianism to a threefold complex of errors, beginning with the denial of Christ's human soul and ending in monophysitism. I repeat in summary: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 9/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship some Apollinarians denied Christ a human soul; others proposed that his body was consubstantial with his divinity (the logical result of excluding his soul and positing a singlenatured Christ); while others held that the Word was transformed into flesh (the obverse outcome of the two previous assertions).

Altaner detects the use of the Anakephaleosis slightly before its deployment against Julian, at De Haeresibus 45.45 By my reading, this text lacks the 'some…others' ambiguity of Contra Iulianum Liber Imperfectus 4.47, and turns rather on the shift in Apollinaris' mind from a dichotomous flesh–spirit (σαρξ‐πνευμα ) to a trichotomous flesh–spirit–mind (σαρχ πωευμανους ) anthropology; added to this, the threefold variation of Apollinarianism detailed in Ps. Epiphanius is not so evident. Importantly, where Augustine moved between the vocabulary of mens and anima without analysis in his early works, he makes sense of this in De Haeresibus by recounting a historical division between the former and the latter in Apollinaris' thought. To begin with, Apollinaris confessed that 'Christ our God took up flesh without a soul' (deum christum carnem sine anima suscepisse); however, 'defeated on this matter by the witness of the evangelists, the Apollinarians said that the mind, which makes humans rational, was lacking in Christ, and that in place of it was the Word'.46 Augustine lifts this explanation directly from Rufinus' continuation of Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica 11.20.47

Given his use of the History in De Haeresibus, it is strange that Augustine does not redeploy this useful narrative solution in refuting Julian's attack on his own 'Apollinarianism'. This notwithstanding, the explanation continues to evade a metaphysical explanation of what mens and anima actually are.

(p.158) The threefold description of Apollinarianism presented by the Anakephaleosis appears more clearly in another very late work, De Dono Perseverantiae, although once more without the 'some…others' equivocation of Ps. Epiphanius; rather, the varieties are set out as interrelated permutations of the same fundamental error, the denial of the fullness of Christ's humanity. Catholics confess that this was complete; Apollinarianism permits his soul or rational mind to be omitted, and the Word to be changed. While the Anakephaleosis says nothing about the consubstantiality of the Word with his human body in its account of Apollinarianism, the denial of either Christ's mens or his anima (which is found here) must necessarily amount to it, by a change in the Word when conflated with human physicality. Studer argues that De Dono Perseverantiae 67 is drawn from a source other than the Anakephaleosis, although this seems difficult to maintain; if anything, the clear reduction of the heresy into three correlated propositions (albeit three of a possible four) seems to rely even more heavily on Ps. Epiphanius than on the text of De Haeresibus.

Overview From these five major treatments of Apollinarianism in the Augustinian corpus, I draw the following conclusion. From his earliest encounter with anti Apollinarian teaching, Augustine was aware of the soteriological implications of the heresy: if Christ has no human soul, the Word must undergo change in the Incarnation in order to provide a rational subject for the evident suffering and affections of Jesus. To say that the Word is transformed into the human or that he becomes consubstantial with the flesh thus reduces to the same thing: God is no longer truly God in the Incarnation. While this aspect of the problem does not appear to change over some fortyfive years, Augustine remained confused throughout the same period about the precise thing Apollinaris began by denying, which is only partially solved by recourse to Rufinus' chronological account of the development of the heresy. Augustine shares this confusion with others. In large part, this must be put down to the fluidity of language used in the West to describe the variety of intellectual, appetitive, affective, and voluntary human faculties. In all his rejections of Apollinarianism (and perhaps because of this fluidity), Augustine falls into the trap of Damasus; not once does he supply a close examination of the nature of Christ's soul in such a way as to justify its being both immune to sin and also of a nature common to all. Thus Julian finds Augustine's Achilles' heel. Simply citing the virginal conception of Christ, as in the Enchiridion, does not make the problem any clearer. All the elements of a textbook refutation of the heresy are present in his work (albeit accompanied by a confused technical language), without any extrapolation of a positive, Catholic alternative, made all the more (p.159) necessary by Augustine's insistence that every human is in Adam in his slavery to sin. While he clearly affirms the reality of Christ's human will and affections, he provides no explanation of how these can be good while exercised in a mortal, and thus concupiscent, body.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 10/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship

In the light of this, Augustine's final reply to Julian on the topic of his own 'Apollinarianism' deserves some further and final consideration. Where Augustine responds, 'I really do not know what they thought by saying that he had not taken up a mind' (postea vero nescio quid cogitantes dixisse quod non sumpserit mentem),48 I want to suggest that he is fundamentally in sympathy with the basic premiss of Apollinarianism, that the divine Word would, in fact, be the mens of Christ, were he to lack a human one. Their system is problematic not in this respect, but because it involves the divine mind in a passivity fitted only to creaturely minds; in short, it changes God. This explains why the emphasis in Augustine's treatments of Apollinarianism is always on the error of monophysitism, and remains inexact about the place of the mens/anima distinction in their system. This is given further confirmation in his subsequent comment: 'What you claim the Apollinarians asserted—that there was no 'sense' in Christ, and that they proclaimed him to be impassible—I have read that nowhere but in your book, nor have I heard it ever, from anyone.'49

For the Apollinarian, the divine mind changed into a creaturely condition would inevitably have bodily sensus. For Augustine, this is precisely where it is erroneous; not to recognize this is a major fault on Julian's part. If, as Studer maintains, Augustine was aware of Damasus' Epistle 9, he would have been acquainted with the application of the term sensus to the humanity of Christ.50 As I observed from Grillmeier, this is exactly where Damasus fails in his text to produce a convincingly positive account of Christ's human soul and sensus. In exactly the same vein, Augustine's reaction to the issue of Christ's sensus raised by Julian is to turn Damasus' apparently constructive phrase around to fit an Apollinarian mould, in which a changed God would, of course, have bodily sense. He has effectively sidestepped Julian's criticism, by applying the obverse of a deadend Catholic solution to the Apollinarian position without addressing the problem it fails to solve: he offers an Apollinarian answer to a Catholic question. This is mere muddle in the midst of polemic, as long as Augustine can be shown to give due weight to the genuine humanity of Christ's animate life. I therefore open what follows by examining the most important surveys of Augustine's Christological 'psychology', before moving into an investigation of his broader theological anthropological framework for depicting the human (p.160) emotions and intellect; this will lay out the apparatus for analysing his Christological statements on the matter.

Christ's sensus humanus In their respective surveys of Augustine's Christology, both van Bavel and Geerlings raise the question of the anachronism of analysing the psychology of Christ in the context of Augustinian, and broader Patristic, thought.51 This part of my study, therefore, begins with a justification: no other writer in the history of the early Church offers so much material for this task as Augustine, and any examination of his Christology must seek the connections between his understanding of the human person, worked out in such detail over some forty years, and his understanding of Christ. In one of the most quoted maxims from his time spent at Cassiciacum, Augustine reduced his entire theological project to a quest to know God and the soul.52 Within a few years of the claim, he had begun the Confessiones, his founding contribution to the construction of the Western person in its relationship to itself and its creator. Not only did Augustine remould individual words in the service of his own psychology;53 his integrated thought about the human self stands as an achievement of the highest synthetic subtlety and novelty.54

Added to this, van Bavel's and Geerlings's cautiousness pays insufficient attention to the important role played by the psychology of Christ in the great Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. Yet, since it is only with Augustine that an 'inner' theological anthropology is made a public presence in Christian discourse, his predecessors seem by comparison to handle the issue with comparative clumsiness and lack of selfawareness. Writing of the whole Alexandrian tradition, Grillmeier summarizes: '[The danger of distortion]…can be seen [here]. There can be no doubt that the decline in teaching about the soul of Jesus had a detrimental effect on (p.161) the picture of Jesus in the Eastern church wherever the Word–flesh (λογοςσαρχ ) framework came to occupy a dominant place.'55 Nestorianism, in another generation, would supply the same problem in the opposite form. Williams provides a single explanation for the simultaneous unbalancing and obfuscation of the debate: 'The abandonment of Origen's cosmology in the third century is the chief cause of the abandonment of belief in Christ's soul by "mainstream" Christian writers.'56 The nature and functions of the soul could take their proper place in the theological imagination of the Church, he goes on, only once Augustine had revived it by making the pathetic and erotic fundamental to Christian selfperception within the context of http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 11/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship religious praxis. Whether or not one agrees with this analysis, the 'inner' life of Christ as an animate human, viewed within Patristic writing, is a pertinent topic for present enquiry.

Finally, Augustine's account of Alypius' misgivings about the teaching of the Catholic Church on this issue highlights his own awareness of its importance, for himself as well as for the broader community of enquiring lay Christians, in his near past. Having recounted his own tendency to Photinianism in Confessiones 7, he goes on:

Alypius, however, thought that Catholics believed God was clothed in flesh, so that there was nothing in Christ but God and flesh; and he thought they did not confess he had a mind and soul. And because he was well persuaded that those things that are committed to writing in the memorials of Christ could not be done, except by a living and rational creature, he moved towards the Christian faith the more slowly.

alypius autem deum carne indutum ita putabat credi a catholicis, ut praeter deum et carnem non esset in christo, animam mentemque hominis non existimabat in eo praedicari. et quoniam bene persuasum tenebat ea, quae de illo memoriae mandata sunt, sine uitali et rationali creatura non fieri, ad ipsam christianam fidem pigrius mouebatur.57

Recounting the thoughts of Alypius, Augustine underlines the importance of Christ's soul at the level of even basic Christology: in the gospel account Jesus is unequivocally a human, yet acts in a way also identifiable with God; doing away with his soul does service neither to his divinity nor to his humanity, so what kind of soul can he have? Lending strength to Williams's argument, Augustine casts a critical eye back to the Catholic community of the Church of the 380s, which was in no strong position to offer resounding guidance on the issue.58 As he wrote around the year 397, the importance of correctly estimating and expressing the inner life of Christ was more than clear to Augustine.

(p.162) Establishing a method

The fullest exposition of Augustine's treatment of Christ's soul written to date is found in the last two chapters of van Bavel's Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin. It is indicative of the quality of this work, and also of the relatively slow pace of progress within this field of research, that its findings were largely reproduced by Geerlings, albeit in highly condensed form, as well as in the recent Augustinus Lexikon article touching on the affective life of Christ by Adolar Zumkeller.59 Van Bavel's method, informing all these studies, divides the emotional or affective life of Christ's soul from its intellectual functions, handling the one after the other.60 This is not a distinction made by Augustine in his descriptions of Christ's human nature, not least as a result of the (frequently) exegetical context in which they arise. In the light of the thoroughness of van Bavel's work (and its legacy in current scholarship), I intend to use his analysis as a point of entry into the topic, before moving into an exposition that attempts greater faithfulness to Augustine's own anthropological priorities; in turn, this should yield a clearer picture of the compatibility of his Christology with his theological anthropology.

Van Bavel opens his analysis of the emotions of Christ in Augustine's thought by drawing a distinction between the Stoicism (here minimally defined) of early works such as De Ordine and De Beata Vita, and those written after 391. The former works from the assumption that the wise man gives no place to the passions in his moral life, having excluded them in his ascent to knowledge and perfection; accordingly, Augustine depicts Christ as entirely apathetic and is thus deemed 'dangereusement dualiste'.61 After 391, Augustine's wholesale acceptance of the Stoic theory of the emotions wanes, and after 393 he begins explicitly to defend the reality of Christ's human emotions, although van Bavel offers no reason for this apparent volteface. Instead, he takes Augustine's treatment of the passions in De Civitate Dei 9 and 14 as normative for the whole of Augustine's thought from 393 onwards, categorizing the emotional theory of this work as an explicit rejection of his previously held Stoicism. Here, the passions of the soul—both emotional and (p.163) physical— are defined as the result of sin; while not morally culpable in themselves, that from which they proceed is: 'It is here that the will of the human, good or perverse, renders the passions morally good or bad.'62 To account for the scriptural record of Christ's emotions, Augustine develops the most readily recognizable trope of his Christological psychology: Christ http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 12/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship voluntarily assumes the human passions, and experiences them in total concord with both his human will and his reason. While Christ's affective life is both real and fully voluntary in Augustine's mature thought, van Bavel highlights his persistent treatment of certain passions experienced by Christ as a form of pedagogic exemplarism: they are experienced as real human passions, but are willed into existence by Christ to be an example for humanity. Augustine further nuances his treatment of the passions of Christ by subsuming them in the totus Christus; here, the passions of the members of Christ are transferred figuratively to Christ the Head, revealing the nature of the one Body in spite of its bifurcation between eschatological fullness and present hope. In his summary comments, van Bavel considers the charge that this aspect of Augustine's Christology amounts to Docetism (again, he leaves this undefined), without fully conceding the point. Rather, Augustine is consistent with himself, and the charge of Docetism falls down as anachronistic.

Van Bavel moves into his survey of Christ's knowledge with the proviso that this remains the most difficult area of Augustine's Christology. In contrast to his analysis of Christ's passions, he does not furnish his reader with even a brief summary of Augustine's understanding of human intellection, instead treating Christ in isolation. In his humanity, Augustine's Christ does not experience ignorance or weakness of reason. Rather, from his infancy he enjoys both an unlimited knowledge of temporal things, including future events, and possesses the full beatific vision promised to the saints. The apparent ignorance of Christ displayed in the gospels is once again treated by Augustine under the headings of voluntary participation in the present human condition, pedagogic exemplarism, and the exegetical totus Christus device. The besetting ambiguity (and thus difficulty) of Augustine's position here arises from not ascribing this exceptional knowledge to either one of Christ's natures. Reading from the subtext, however, van Bavel's final opinion is that, for Augustine, 'the human Christ is not on the same level as other humans: he is omniscient'.63

While van Bavel's work is extremely thorough, it requires expansion by revisiting Augustine's theory of the affections in close conjunction with his understanding of the intellect and will. A chronological survey of every Augustinian text that handles Christ's inner life and its relationship to his developing anthropology is not possible in the confines of this context. (p.164) As a result, I want to accept van Bavel's choice of De Civitate Dei 9 and 14 as the axiomatic expression of Augustine's mature anthropology, adding to it the necessary condition that intellect and will are properly indivisible, from Confessiones 10. This should create a more holistic template against which Augustine's Christological psychology can be measured.

The human passions: value and process

Augustine synthesizes his reading of Platonist ethics and Stoic psychology in his treatment of the passions in De Civitate Dei to produce a formulation entirely his own. His reception of Platonist ontology and ethics of course forms one of the most vexed questions of Augustinian scholarship, which I will not attempt to unwrap here. His understanding of the Stoic theory of the passions, inasmuch as it is found in both De Civitate Dei and the earlier Confessiones, is in the first instance lifted from the third book of Cicero's Disputationes Tusculanae. To provide the simplest sketch of each as it functions behind the work, I supply two vignettes.

The first is that of the conscious subject, placed within a sliding scale of objects (both conscious and unconscious) to which it stands related. By means of the motor of desire, this subject can draw itself to any of these objects in a movement that is evaluated by the relation of both the subject and the object to the eternal and immutable Good on which their relative values are based. Drawing itself to objects nearer the Good in order to know them constitutes a good movement; the opposite drive towards lower objects constitutes a bad one; moral perfection, in turn, is defined as attainment of the full knowledge of the eternal Good by the conscious subject.

The second begins with a consciousness whose environment is considerably more limited: its 'genuine good'64 lies in the attainment of its own essential character as a rational being, which is virtue. This is achieved by navigating those objects —both concrete and notional—to which it is related. In themselves, they are properly thought of as indifferent; the process of evaluating them, which in turn constitutes the rational perfection of the conscious subject, is not. In this scheme, emotions are not involuntary, but incorrect value judgements of the relationship of the conscious subject to the objects that http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 13/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship surround it; thus wisdom suspends emotion (incorrect value judgements), allowing right judgement to prevail.

On a first viewing, the vignette of Platonism broadly considered places the subject in a moral cosmos whose temporal goods are navigable only in relation to their defining source, the eternal Good, the ultimate object of knowledge (p.165) and moral desire. My vignette of Stoicism places the subject in a more limited, solipsistic domain. Here virtue is the 'only unconditional good', and it is 'wholly under the province of the will'; the temporal benefits that surround the subject willing its virtuous selfrealization might have 'selective value' as things to be preferred or ignored as temporal benefit might accrue to them.65

In De Civitate Dei, Augustine collapses the distinction between these two models by renaming the objects related to the subject as 'indifferents' in Stoicism as Platonic 'goods'.66 Where the Stoic sage exercises a virtuous reason in using the indifferents by which he is surrounded to attain full rationality and thus virtue, Augustine's human must use a reason whose movement towards fulfillment is powered by love to attain goods and, finally, the God who is arbiter and source of goodness. In his scheme, the false judgments of the Stoic are therefore redefined as wrongly directed loves. In three passages, Augustine reduces the mechanics of the Stoic system to his own requirements. The first lays out the essentials of Stoicism as Augustine understands it:

The will, the Stoics say, longs for the good, and the wise person has such a will. Gladness arises from the attainment of the good, which the wise person attains wherever he is. Caution avoids evil, just as the wise person ought to avoid evil. Grief arises from evil that has already taken place. Because they do not think any evil can happen to a wise person, they say that there can be nothing like grief in his soul. Thus they say the following: only a wise person can have a will that results in gladness and (p.166) caution, and only a fool can have desires that result in joy, fear and grief. The former three are called 'constancies'; the latter four are 'disturbances' according to Cicero; but most other writers call them passions.

uoluntas quippe, inquiunt, appetit bonum, quod facit sapiens; gaudium de bono adepto est, quod ubique adipiscitur sapiens; cautio deuitat malum, quod debet sapiens deuitare; tristitia porro quia de malo est, quod iam accidit, nullum autem malum existimant posse accidere sapienti, nihil in eius animo pro illa esse posse dixerunt. sic ergo illi loquuntur, ut uelle gaudere cauere negent nisi sapientem; stultum autem non nisi cupere laetari, metuere contristari; et illas tres esse constantias, has autem quattuor perturbationes secundum ciceronem, secundum autem plurimos passiones.67

By Augustine's account, Stoic theory divides the capacity of the subject to approach its object into two types, depending on the rational judgement that has been made in advance of the move: right reason wills (uelit), wrong reason desires (cupit). The constantiae of the wise man proceed from judgement through willing and into the calm attainment of the object, whose ultimate value consists in confirming the rightness of the subject's reasoning will; by contrast, the perturbationes or passiones of the fool result in a passivity to objects that painfully slip from his grasp and are mourned when lost. This frustration confirms the poverty of his initial judgement, a choice of flawed reasoning.

Augustine moves from this pure Stoic prototype by collapsing the distinction between will and desire, along with the Stoic insistence that the will must follow reason:

The will is found in all of the passions; indeed, all of them are nothing but forms of will. For what is desire and joyfulness but the will agreeing with what we want? And what is fear and sadness except the will disagreeing with the things we want?…And, universally, a person's will is either attracted to or offended by the various things he longs for or flees from, and as a result it is turned or changed into this or that emotion.

uoluntas est quippe in omnibus [passionibus]; immo omnes nihil aliud quam uoluntates sunt. nam quid est cupiditas et laetitia nisi uoluntas in eorum consensione quae uolumus? et quid est metus atque tristitia nisi uoluntas in dissensione ab his quae nolumus?…et omnino pro uarietate rerum, quae appetuntur atque fugiuntur, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 14/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship sicut allicitur uel offenditur uoluntas hominis, ita in hos uel illos affectus mutatur et uertitur.68

In the process of this discussion, Augustine simultaneously abolishes the Stoic division of emotional movement into constantia and pertubatio/passio: all the emotions are fundamentally alike, and differentiated only by the direction of the will that underlies them.69 The synonymity of love and will, whose (p.167) direction determines the value of their movement and its outworking in emotion, is brought out further in what follows:

Thus a right will is a good love, and a perverse will is an evil love. Love that strives to possess what it loves is desire; love that possesses and enjoys what it loves is joyfulness. Fleeing from what is opposed to it, is fear; and love that perceives what is opposed to it when it occurs, is grief. In all of this, these things are evils if the love is evil, and goods, if the love is good.

recta itaque uoluntas est bonus amor et uoluntas peruersa malus amor. amor ergo inhians habere quod amatur, cupiditas est, id autem habens eoque fruens laetitia; fugiens quod ei aduersatur, timor est, idque si acciderit sentiens tristitia est. proinde mala sunt ista, si malus amor est; bona, si bonus.70

Where Stoic passion is the condition of the rational subject consequent on wrong choice, worked out through desiring or withdrawing from a particular object, Augustinian passion equates with perverse love. Both create a situation of passivity within the reasoning, appetitive subject where it ought to be active and selfcontrolling; hence passio. Stoic passivity in emotional disturbance lies in the abolition of right reason, when desire executes a poor judgement. Augustinian passivity in emotion results in a wholescale ontological diminution of the reasoningloving person when she pursues apparent goods that are in fact ills.71

De Civitate Dei 9 and 14 therefore expand Stoic passion theory to fit Augustine's understanding of the state of man, slipping into nothingness as a result of perverse love. The foundations of this understanding can already be seen in the Confessiones' account of the circumincession of memory, will and intellect and its later counterpart in De Trinitate. Albrecht Dihle summarizes the Augustinian shift:

In the traditional view of Greek philosophy intention appeared either as the result or byproduct of cognition, as the mode of its application, or as its potential. St Augustine separated will from both potential and achieved recognition. Arguing strictly psychologically, he explained the act of vision as a result of the following process: the faculty of seeing is joined with the object of visual perception by the will of the perceiving individual. The same relation subsists…in the case of thought, i.e. purely intellectual (p.168) cognition, with the only difference being that the object of cognition is presented by the perceiver's own memory…the triad memoria, intelligentia, voluntas accounts for the whole of the human self.72

As a result, the description Augustine offers of the passions in Confessiones 10 is different from that found in De Civitate Dei. Where the latter views the passions in the specific analytical context of 'the quality of a man's will',73 the former is a subjective investigation of the mind's unity 'in a step by step ascent to him who made me'.74 The intended direction of Augustine's love in Confessiones 10 is towards the highest good; as a result, he is able internally to perceive the reality of the passions, though in abstraction from the direction of will by which they were initially experienced:

Memory also contains the affections of my soul, not in the way the soul possesses them when it suffers them, but in a very different manner, in the way the power of the memory possesses memory itself…For even when I am unhappy, I can remember myself being happy in the past; and even when I am not sad, I can recall my past sadness; I can recollect that I was once afraid without fear, and be mindful of an earlier desire without desire…To be sure, memory is like the stomach of the mind; joyfulness and grief like food, sweet and bitter in turn.

affectiones quoque animi mei eadem memoria continet non illo modo, quo eas habet ipse animus, cum patitur eas, sed alio multum diuerso, sicut sese habet uis memoriae…nam et laetatum me fuisse reminiscor non laetus et http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 15/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship tristitiam meam praeteritam recordor non tristis et me aliquando timuisse recolo sine timore et pristinae cupiditatis sine cupiditate sum memor…nimirum ergo memoria quasi uenter est animi, laetitia uero atque tristitia quasi cibus dulcis et amarus.75

The prior direction of Augustine's will in which he experienced these passions is no longer present, so that remembering them does not repeat them in their prior form. They can be experienced as fresh passions through the power of memory, under the designation of the righteous will, and consequently do not hinder the ascent of the remembering, loving, and intelligent self to God.

Love and reason either side of the Fall

All of this is fully intelligible only when placed in the context of the distinction between human nature as it exists before and after the Fall. In Paradise, Adam and Eve were incapable of feeling perturbationes, as there was no threat of (p.169) losing any good or any experience of its loss;76 in the absence of any conditions in which perverse love could arise, the pair were capable only of right affections. The state of peace and that of Paradise share the common factor that humans operate with ἀπαθεια in both. Where Augustine mutates the distinction constantia/perturbatio into a Christian Platonist right/wrong love, he likewise redefines apatheia (ἀπαθεια ) as the contented possession of the object of right loving:

Moreover, if we are to describe ἀπαθεια as the inability of the soul to be touched by any affection, who would not judge this to be a stupor worse than all vices? Therefore it can be said without absurdity that our future beatitude will be without the impulse of fear, and free from any sadness; but who would say that there will be no love and gladness there to come, unless he were thoroughly estranged from the truth?

porro si ἀπαθεια illa dicenda est, cum animum contingere omnino non potest ullus affectus, quis hunc stuporem non omnibus uitiis iudicet esse peiorem? potest ergo non absurde dici perfectam beatitudinem sine stimulo timoris et sine ulla tristitia futuram; non ibi autem futurum amorem gaudiumque quis dixerit, nisi omni modo a ueritate seclusus?77

Augustine's distinction appears at first to owe a debt to the Stoic division of the affective life into constantiae and passiones, so that, in both Eden and heaven, humans experience only the former. However, it should be remembered that this latter distinction does not exist in Augustine's formulation: for him, the passions are morally right or wrong only in their orientation towards, or away from, God. Furthermore, on its own terms, he does not understand Stoic ἀπαθεια to be a complete evacuation of emotion from the self; rather, it is what the etymology of constantia denotes: 'the stability of the emotional life under rational control, one where right reason has excluded irrational passions and brought about a state of ἀπαθεια , fixity and tranquillity of mind.'78 By contrast, Augustine affirms the place of affective life in both the original and final state, as the end of man is participation in the divine will by his love and desire as much as by the vision of reason. Here, again, is the inversion of the Stoic theory of the passions: passivity to an outside object is entirely approvable if that 'object' is God. Where the Ad Simplicianum speaks of the irresistible pull of divine love and the Confessiones dwells on its weight, De Civitate Dei formalizes the point: obedience to the divine will is the proper end of the (p.170) passions, and they function correctly in putting humanity in the posture of a recipient. This constitutes the end of human agency, in which the active human will stands in passivity to the divine command. Augustinian ἀπαθεια is the end of love, not its negation.

Because passio fundamentally describes the 'directionality' of the human will, it is from the capacity of humans for right affection that Augustine can argue for the Fall—and its subsequent opportunities for wrong affection—without being inconsistent. Dinkler puts the point clearly:

On the way to happiness, two possibilities lie before the soul: its will can follow amor and ascend to the bona et beata vita, to the summum bonum; or it can run after libido and cupiditas (which was theoretically possible even for Adam). If it pursues the first way to the beata vita, the affection is first the 'direction', and then the object of the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 16/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship will. If it enters the second way to concupiscentia, the affection as cupiditas immediately becomes its subject and its potentiality, and places itself as a power against the will.79

As part of the paradox of the affections, obedience to God makes the affective passage to him into an object itself, because it is love, and God is love; disobedience, by contrast, reduces the affection to the level of its source and subject (mere creatureliness ex nihilo) in a cycle of narcissism.

While the affections are open to the pursuit of the good as much as evil in a prelapsarian world, Augustine places them at the heart of the divine punishment for sin after the Fall. For this he laid the early foundations in De Libero Arbitrio, coupling the experience of affective difficulty and intellectual ignorance together under the same heading.80 In exchange for disobedience to God, fallen man must struggle with his disobedience to himself; with a will working against itself, desiring what he cannot and truly does not wish to have, his subjection to himself by immoral passions ceases to be his own act: 'For even against his will his mind is troubled often, and his flesh endures pain, grows old and dies, and suffers other things still; we would not suffer them against our will if, in every way and in all its parts, our nature would obey our will.'81 Augustine's conception of the divine punishment for sin has been read as a state of legal guilt (in virtue of which humanity under Adam is in Original Sin), over and against the capacity of man formally to sin out of his created freedom, as Adam did in the beginning.82 If there is any ambiguity in the (p.171) account offered in De Civitate Dei (and I do not believe there is), it is entirely absent by the time Augustine takes up the debate with Julian of Eclanum. Here, sin is punished by Sin not in the abstract, but in an unhaltable cycle of sinning; the ensuing sin is the punishment for the preceding sin, as Augustine terrifyingly suggests. It encompasses both the will (the heart), and also the mind (the faculty of vision, now become blind), both of which entwined are the proper domain of the affections:

Sin is like a blindness of the heart, which God the illuminator alone can remove. It is also the punishment of sin, by which a worthy reproach punishes the proud heart. Sin is also the cause of sin, when something evil is committed by the error of a blind heart. And thus concupiscence…is both sin…the punishment of sin…and the cause of sin.

Et sicut caecitas cordis, quam solus removet illuminator Deus, et peccatum est, quo in Deum non creditur; et poena peccati, qua cor superbum digna animadversione punitur; et causa peccati, cum mali aliquid caeci cordis errore committitur; ita concupiscentia carnis…et peccatum est…et poena peccati est…et causa peccati est.83

Only by the gift of grace, both baptismal and the hidden quantity God may or may not choose to grant the individual, can this cycle of compromised emotion be undone.

Prepassion and concupiscentia carnalis

The account I have so far laid out is internally consistent, quite apart from any question of its faithfulness to one or other variety of Stoicism or Platonism. This review of Augustine's theory cannot be complete, however, without surveying his ambiguous treatment of prepassion. The earliest Latin text that draws the distinction between an initial response to a given situation in a prepassion and its endorsement by mental judgement in passion is Seneca's De Ira. Here he lists pallor, tears, sighing, and sudden change of expression as the pyschophysical signs of prepassion, to be contrasted with its full outworking in passion proper:

Thus that first motion of the soul, when some kind of injury strikes it, is no more anger than the kind of injury is that strikes it to begin with. The movement that follows it, (p.172) which does not receive the injury but approves it, is properly called anger: the rousing of the soul to revenge by the will and judgement of the one who proceeds with it.

Ergo prima illa agitatio animi, quam species iniuriae incussit, non magis ira est quam ipsa iniuriae species; ille sequens impetus, qui speciem iniuriae non tantum accepit sed adprobavit, ira est, concitatio animi ad ultionem http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 17/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship voluntate et iudicio pergentis.84

Seneca's point is clear: instinctive responses such as these are not emotions, because they are not rational accessions to mental passivity in a given situation of threat, loss, and so on. As I noted above, Augustine's knowledge of Stoic psychology was largely formed by the Disputationes Tusculanae, in which the distinction found in Seneca appears only in passing (and not very clearly at that).85

Augustine's own discussion of prepassion is instead lifted from Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae. At De Civitate Dei 9.4.2,86 he relates Gellius' account of a seafaring Stoic who, when he grew pale on deck with the coming of a storm, was teased for failing to live up to his ideal of ἀπαθεια . Quoting Epictetus,87 the Stoic rebuked his critics by explaining that the soul experiences mental images, which they call phantasiae; and that it is not in our power to control whether or when they strike the soul. When they arise as a result of terrifying and awesome things, they necessarily move the soul even of a wise man, so that he fleetingly either begins to quake with fear, or is drawn into sadness…However, this neither causes a disposition to evil in the mind, nor an approval of, or consent, to it.88

As Sorabji points out, Augustine's text is clumsy: in the central narrative, the Stoic 'grew pale' (expalluit); in the exposition of the incident that follows it, Gellius (and Augustine after him) glosses this purely physical response with 'began to quake with fear' (pauescat metu). Unwittingly, Augustine follows Gellius into a blurring of the distinction between passion and prepassion, in the very process of attempting to define it.89

(p.173) More important than this textual slipup, Sorabji argues, is the gradual erosion of the distinction between prepassion and passion by earlier Christian authors—Origen in particular—which Augustine inherits and reads into Noctes Atticae. The locus classicus for Origen's 'mistake' is found in De Principiis 3.2; at chapter 2.2, he distinguishes between the first movements or seeds of sin, and their full outworking in vice;90 however, at 2.4 he develops the point to define these first movements as λογισμοι (thoughts, cogitationes, in Rufinus' Latin). Earlier in the text, discussing the temptation of a man by the allurements of female flesh,91 Origen argues apparently with the Stoic tradition that a man would be capable of quelling the impulse by the application of reason; however, he names these κινηματα (movements) παθη (passions), making the passage consistent with 3.2.2–4. Origen's application of the shift throughout his exegesis would have a lasting effect on later discourse;92 as Sorabji puts it: 'Instead of the very sharp distinction between first thoughts which are not your fault at all, and emotions for which you are totally responsible, the Christian talk of bad thoughts allows for many intermediate degrees of sin.'93

(p.174) Augustine's own discussion of prepassion appears first in De Sermone Domini in Monte, where the passage of sin is firmly rooted in the corruption of the first stage of passion. Sin comprises both suggestion and consent. Suggestion is launched from the sensation of receiving an inner image, whether held in the memory or produced in the moment of sensation; either way, it 'slides in the more secretly, in order to affect our reasoning'.94 He goes on:

As I was beginning to say, these three steps are like the events recorded in Genesis: a suggestion and certain amount of persuasion comes about by the serpent; in the carnal appetite, as in Eve, there is pleasure, and in reason, as in the man, there is consent. When these things have taken place it is just as when humanity was expelled from Paradise, which is to say the most blessed light of justice, into death.

tria ergo haec, ut dicere coeperam, similia sunt illi gestae rei quae in genesi scripta est, ut quasi a serpente fiat suggestio et quaedam suasio, in appetitu autem carnali tamquam in eua delectatio, in ratione uero tamquam in uiro consensio. quibus peractis tamquam de paradiso, hoc est de beatissima luce iustitiae, in mortem homo expellitur.95

Although only the final stage of consent is explicitly ascribed to reason, it is clear that the whole process Augustine http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 18/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship describes is a single movement of the intellect, and, along with Origen, he pushes sin back into the awakening of the prepassion, though as such it goes unnamed.96

De Sermone Domini in Monte dates from 393–6; in around 394, Augustine had almost certainly received a number of Jerome's scriptural commentaries (including those translated from Origen's Greek). Jerome's commentary on the same passage of Matthew, while making no connection with Genesis, expands Origen's scheme in detail. Unfortunately, the loss of the earlier sections of Origen's own commentary on Matthew makes impossible the ultimate ascription of Jerome's exposition to this text. Here, prepassion is defined as the beginning of sin, which is 'not fully comprehended in the crime', whereas passion is 'meditated on in the vice':97

Whoever sees the woman and finds his soul has been titillated, he has been struck by prepassion. If indeed he consents and makes a disposition from the thought of it, this is (p.175) like what is written in the words of David: 'They have gone over into the disposition of the heart'; it has gone over from prepassion to passion. Here the will to sin is not absent, only the occasion for sinning.

ergo qui uiderit mulierem et anima eius fuerit titillata, hic propassione percussus est; si uero consenserit et de cogitatione affectum fecerit sicut scriptum est in dauid: transierunt in affectum cordis, de propassione transiuit ad passionem et huic non uoluntas peccandi deest, sed occasio.98

At first glance, Jerome appears to reproduce the clear distinction of Stoicism: the occasion for wrongdoing arises after the progress from prepassion to passion. However, the detail of Jerome's vocabulary calls this into question: a soul both titillated upon seeing a woman and also 'struck' by prepassion (as befits the passivity of the affections) can never be that of the Stoic sage. It seems likely, therefore, that, in addition to receiving an Origenian understanding of prepassion as part of the broader tradition, the early formation of Augustine's own position on the issue arose from a direct reading of Jerome, and Origen through him.99

Consistent with that of his Christian predecessors, Augustine's theory of the passions thus pushes the rational (and therefore culpable) element of sin into the initial awakening of wrong desire. This is bolstered by my observation that will and reason are circumincessive in Augustine's anthropology. However, Augustine goes further still, in his account of concupiscentia carnalis. This lust of the flesh completely circumvents the passions and exerts its power over the genitals directly; it emerges from behind the realm of even the first stirrings of voluntary desire.100 By contrast, erotic desire in paradise proceeded from a reasonable will exerting full and peaceable control over its bodily members. Just as carnal concupiscence is arrived at without reason, so the enjoyment of it almost entirely overwhelms the vigilance of the mind:101 it results in an ecstasy of pure passion, the antithesis of a love that unites desire and reason in (p.176) the enjoyment of its proper object. Of all the limitations wrought on the will by the sin of Adam, this occupies the exemplary position:

That disobedience, which puts the genital members at the liberty of their own movements alone and detracts from the power of the will, shows amply what is the retribution given to humanity for its primal disobedience. It was fitting that, particularly in that part of the body where the nature of sin is reproduced, those things should appear that, on account of that first and great sin, have been changed in our nature for ill.

in eius quippe inoboedientia, quae genitalia corporis membra solis suis motibus subdidit et potestati uoluntatis eripuit, satis ostenditur, quid sit hominis illi primae inoboedientiae retributum; quod in ea parte maxime oportuit apparere, qua generatur ipsa natura, quae illo primo et magno in deterius est mutata peccato.102

As I hope to have shown in the foregoing exposition, taking De Civitate Dei and the Confessiones together reveals a fully integrated, distinctly Augustinian theological anthropology. Its primary datum lies in the Confessiones' conflation of will and reason, by which loving and possessing the thing loved arise from a complex but unified movement of intellect and volition: this is what constitutes the uniqueness of human nature. From this, De Civitate Dei launches its critique of Stoic emotional psychology as reductive. Taking the vocabulary of this discourse, Augustine remoulds it in Christian Platonist http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 19/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship form: human affections are to be judged not in isolation, but in relation to their transcendent goals. Thus Stoic cupiditas (for example) is redeemed when engaged in the desire for its heavenly counterpart and ultimate source: Love Itself, or God. In this scheme, ἀπαθεια is similarly redefined as the untroubled human possession of the good God. From this sanctified affections flow, in a joy that is simultaneously at peace. In all right love, the grace of God (the love that makes him lovable) is an assumed sine qua non. However, Augustine's scheme contains what is, at one level, an inconsistency. Because it escapes the control of both desire and reason, carnal concupiscence imposes a limit on the degree to which human affection can be healed in this life; the seedy underside of human propagation must await an eschatological therapy. The groundwork for this lies in the gradual erosion of the distinction between prepassion and passion Augustine inherited from the Origenian tradition. Having pushed the culpable into the realm of the very first stirrings of desire, this inheritance allows Augustine to remove sinfulness even further from the realm of both love and intellect, its 'denature' operating underneath and in concealment from the faculties of the soul. Concupiscentia carnalis finally reifies sin, condemning humanity for an embodiment it cannot avoid or rectify of itself.

(p.177) Julian's challenge to Augustine lands in this fissure. For him, the desire attendant on reproduction is one impulse among many; it is not automatic, of a unique character in permanently deforming the desires of the soul that its body houses. By his reading, the privilege Augustine grants carnal concupiscence results in a Christological disaster: excluding Christ from it by his conception of a virgin necessarily brings into question the reality of his mortal flesh. In order for Augustine to maintain Christ's affective life, he must, therefore, fall into the error of Apollinarianism, situating the eternal Word in the body of sin as its triumphant possessor, immune to its deformities but capable of its wellordered affections. In the next section, I shall attempt to uncover Augustine's treatment of the voluntary and intellectual faculties of Christ, to Julian's rebuttal—or vindication.

The inner life of Christ: a human will? It is not my intention here to evaluate every statement of Augustine on the inner life of Christ. Van Bavel's monograph offers a more than adequate survey of a very large number of texts, to which I would refer the forensically minded reader. Instead, I want to look again at the broad lines of Augustine's treatment of the topic, and offer a fresh evaluation. I begin with a proviso. In harmony with his consciously orthodox (albeit uninventive) rejection of Apollinarianism, Augustine is on first inspection clear that Christ underwent the ordinary movements of the soul. The plain historical account of the gospel leaves the Catholic in no doubt on this matter. By contrast, the Apollinarian position is the more ridiculous for admitting that Old Testament references to God's soul (cf. Lev. 26:11) refer to his will, while they doubt the words of Christ, 'My soul is sad, even unto death', refer to his human soul (Matt. 26:38).103 However, while Augustine affirms the plain truth of the historia evangelica on this point throughout his work, his exegesis is almost always accompanied by careful qualification.

The most frequent refrain found in Augustine's passing treatments of Christ's experience of the passions is that he felt them entirely at the command of his will. The discussion of the passions in De Civitate Dei 14 falls back on the obverse example of Christ to prove the general point that the emotions are not presently under full human control; added to this, his experience of the passions illustrates that they can be put to good use in the moral life:

For this reason also the Lord deigned to live a human life in the form of a slave and, although he had no sin at all, he displayed [the emotions] when he judged that they ought to be displayed. For his human affections were not false, whose body was real (p.178) and whose soul was truly that of a human…Indeed, he took up those movements in his human soul when he willed by the grace of the sure dispensation, just as he was made human when he wished it to be so.

quam ob rem etiam ipse dominus in forma serui agere uitam dignatus humanam, sed nullum habens omnino peccatum adhibuit eas, ubi adhibendas esse iudicauit. neque enim, in quo uerum erat hominis corpus et uerus hominis animus, falsus erat humanus affectus…uerum ille hos motus certae dispensationis gratia ita cum uoluit suscepit animo humano, ut cum uoluit factus est homo.104 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 20/35

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The gospel narratives cannot be denied: Christ wept real tears. The point at issue, however, is whether the passions experienced by Christ were controlled by a perfect human will or not. As I have attempted to show, Augustine is clear that humanity in its prelapsarian state was capable of a complete hegemony over the emotions by the will, and its love could desire the eternal good and experience the 'passion to' and 'for' God. Casting Christ in the same mould would make perfect Christological sense; Augustine, however, denies his audience the satisfaction of a clearcut statement on the issue.

Where it would be helpful to see an explicit ascription of the perfect will of Christ to his human nature, Augustine frequently supplies an ambiguous reference to the Word as the 'place' in which Christ's personal agency is to be located. In a lengthy discussion of John 10.5 ('I lay down my life, and I take it again'), Augustine defines ordinary human death as the yieldingup of the soul by the flesh, in a way that is outside voluntary control. His implicit point here must be that the punishment of death attached to Original Sin places the decay of the body over the power of the will to animate it. By contrast, only the deaths of the martyrs are excepted from this process, as they are empowered by the indwelling of Christ, and give up their souls through his will, not their own.105 Turning to consider Christ himself, Augustine remarks that he died 'when the Word willed it, for power was in the Word'.106 The same tendency appears in the discussion of Christ's minor physical passions and emotions in Tractatus in Ioannem 60: his sleep, hunger, sadness, and anger are explained in terms reminiscent of the passage from De Civitate Dei 14 cited above: 'He engendered human affections in himself by his power when he judged it fitting, who by that power took up a whole humanity.'107 In the same passage, the potential danger of such a position becomes clear: 'how much good from partaking of his divinity we ought to expect and hope for, whose disturbance calms us, and weakness strengthens us?'108 Granted, the communication of (p.179) idioms is assumed here with some rhetorical licence; but similar references to the Word as the power motivating Christ's emotional life confirm, rather than explain, this ambiguity:

The soul and flesh of Christ is one person with the Word of God; it is one Christ. By this Word where the highest power is, was weakness made use of at the very nod of his will; that explains, 'He troubled himself'.

anima et caro christi cum uerbo dei una persona est, unus christus est. ac per hoc ubi summa potestas est, secundum uoluntatis nutum tractatur infirmitas; hoc est: turbauit semetipsum.109

Precisely where is the summa potestas in Christ? It is difficult not to situate it solely in his divine nature. In spite of Augustine's assurance that Christ is one person in two natures, that personality appears to be predominantly characterized by the nature of the Word who assumes it.

The difficulty of assigning the source of the acts or experiences of Christ to either one of his natures is, of course, not a novelty unique to Augustine. And, while it would be unreasonable to expect Augustine to consider the Incarnation in Cyrilline or Chalcedonian terms, the absence of any sustained consideration of the relationship between Christ's human and divine natures in the makeup of his personal will remains strange, not least when Augustine is so commonly credited with establishing a new concept of the human will and its operation.

The Totus Christus motif

Further complicating Augustine's position is his ascription of the passions of Christ as an individual to his ecclesial members and vice versa, the unmistakable feature of his construal of Christology in terms of the totus Christus. His language here is discursive rather than technical, and found alongside his similarly unclear presentation of the Word's power in performing the functions of the soul. By a 'wonderful transmutation…a divine transaction…a celebrated transformation of things' (mira commutatio…diuina commercia…mutatio celebrata rerum), the passions of the human Church, clinging to its Head in love, are assigned to that Head.110 However, this says nothing about Christ's passions as a human individual. Accordingly, where Tractatus in Joannem 47 raised the difficulty of finding a role for the soul of Christ in his own human death, the Enarratio in Psalmum 43 neatly bypasses the allied problem of Christ's cry of anguish from the cross by ascribing it to his members crying out their death throes in him.111 Tractatus in Joannem 60 sees the totus Christus motif used together with the notion of the Word (p.180) summoning the affections at will. It should be http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 21/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship noted, however, that these are changed before being experienced by the Head: 'he transfigured in himself the affections of our weakness, suffering with us in the affections of his soul.'112 Importantly, this 'transference of the passions' is not reciprocal. The Enarratio in Psalmum 40 comes close to suggesting a twoway movement: 'What Christ suffered, his Church suffers too; what the Head suffered, those things suffer also his members.'113 Developing the point, however,

Augustine makes clear that he is referring to the persecution of Christ by Judas, which finds a corollary in the mixture of wheat and chaff in the Church. This is theological synecdoche, and there is no sustained suggestion that the members of Christ participate in the passions of Christ's individual soul.

Clearly the totus Christus motif in Augustine's writing is a theological metaphor, and does not imply anything concrete about the 'metaphysical biology' of the Incarnate or risen Christ. Augustine admits this himself in De Doctrina Christiana 3, written in around 426–7. In interpreting Scripture, he explains, the reader must be aware of literary motifs that recur throughout the text and threaten to overturn its meaning if taken literally.114 Citing Tyconius' Liber Regularum as a text useful for decoding these motifs, Augustine lists his chapter De Domine et Corpore Eius as the first significant scriptural metaphor to need careful handling. Interpreters should not be puzzled when Scripture moves from head to body while still dealing with the same person, because Christ nonetheless remains a single being. Augustine does not state explicitly that speaking of the totus Christus, head and body, is a theological–literary device, but his point is clear. However, in book 2 of the same work, Augustine underlines the rule that metaphors work only if there is a proper and intelligible correspondence between the figure and what it signifies.115 With this in mind, we might ask whether the totus Christus metaphor is intelligible and appropriate, when viewed in the light of Augustine's treatment of the human passions in the works cited above. Can a head feel the feelings of its members, or is this a nonsense in the terms of Augustine's broader theological anthropology? Quite apart from this stands the question whether the transference of the passions implied in the motif does not in fact function to distract attention away from Augustine's otherwise minimal handling of the topic proper, the affective life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Of the passages in the corpus that do handle the human will of Christ directly, several complicate Augustine's position further by suggesting the (p.181) coexistence of a number of 'wills' in the person of Christ derived from both his two natures and human nature in pre and postlapsarian form. An early example of this tendency is found in Augustine's second Enarratio in Psalmum 31.II, in which Christ's cry 'Let this cup pass from me' (Mark 14:36) indicates that he 'shows his human will' (ostendit humanum uoluntatem). By contrast, his ensuing obedience to the divine will reveals his 'right heart' (rectum cor).116 This distinction is more fully developed in Augustine's much later works against Arianism.

Arianism and Apollinarianism

The connection between Arianism and Apollinarianism was a commonplace of post Nicene orthodoxy in the West, and would have been familiar to Augustine from Ps. Epiphanius' Anakephaleosis;117 even before this, Augustine showed himself aware of the heresies' shared understanding of the soul of Christ. With the arrival of the Gothic commander Vitalis and his Arian troops in Africa Proconsularis after 410, and upon receiving the 'Arian Sermon' (in reality a collection of Western Homoian Christological propositions in the form of a coherent florilegium), Augustine issued his Contra Sermonem Arianorum in around 419. To my knowledge, this text contains the fullest discussion of the divine and human natures of Christ in their relation to his will in the Augustinian corpus, and as such requires citing at length.

Immediately before the passage in question, Augustine has derided the Arian sermon for construing the obedience of Christ Incarnate as an indication of his subordination to the Father as divine Word. He offers a different interpretation of the same piece of Scripture:

That Jesus says, 'I came down from heaven, not to do my will, but to do the will of him who sent me', can be taken to refer to the fact that the first Adam…by doing his own will and not the will of his Creator, made the entire human race subject to guilt and punishment through a corrupted form of generation…On the contrary, he through whom we were to be liberated did not do his own will, but the will of him by whom he was sent. And therefore in this passage it is said to be his will, so that it is understood to be his own as opposed to the will of God…Such a will had http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 22/35

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Adam and, on that account, we died in him. Christ did not have such a will, so that we might have life in him. This can be said correctly of the humanity in which there existed a will of its own through disobedience, which was opposed to the will of God. What pertains to the (p.182) divinity of the Son is different: the will of the Father and the Son is one and the same; nor can it be in any way different, where the nature of the Trinity is wholly immutable. But so that the Mediator of God and humanity, the human Christ Jesus, should not do his own will (which is opposed to God), he was not that kind of human: he was God and human. Through that wonderful and singular grace there could be a human nature in him without any sin whatever…On account of this, he said, 'I came down from heaven, not to do my will, but to do the will of him who sent me.' Because of this, he could be the cause of such obedience, which was altogether without any sin in the humanity he assumed, because he came down from heaven.

quanquam et hoc ipsum quod dicit iesus, descendi de coelo, non ut faciam uoluntatem meam, sed uoluntatem eius qui me misit; ad illud referatur quod homo primus adam…faciendo uoluntatem suam, non eius a quo factus est, uniuersum genus humanum propagine uitiata culpae et poenae fecit obnoxium…unde a contrario, per quem liberandi fueramus, non fecit uoluntatem suam, sed eius a quo missus est. ita quippe hoc loco dicitur uoluntas sua, ut intelligatur esse propria contra uoluntatem dei…hanc habuit adam, ut in illo moreremur: hanc non habuit christus, ut in illo uiueremus. de natura quippe humana hoc recte dici potest, in qua exstitit per inobedientiam uoluntas propria, quae dei uoluntati esset aduersa. caeterum quod attinet ad diuinitatem filii, una eademque uoluntas est patris et filii: nec potest ullo modo esse diuersa, ubi est natura trinitatis immutabilis uniuersa. ut autem mediator dei et hominum homo christus iesus non faceret propriam, quae deo aduersa est, uoluntatem, non erat tantum homo, sed deus et homo: per quam mirabilem singularemque gratiam humana in illo sine peccato ullo posset esse natura…propter hoc ergo ait, descendi de coelo, non ut faciam uoluntatem meam, sed uoluntatem eius qui me misit: ut ea causa esset tantae obedientiae, quae omnino sine ullo peccato esset hominis quem gerebat, quia de caelo descenderat.118

In the notes accompanying his translation of this text, Roland Teske glosses the above passage:

Augustine clearly affirms that Christ could only not sin by reason of the union of the assumed human nature to the person of the Word. On the other hand, the human nature he assumed is able to be free from sin only by reason of that grace, since he assumed fallen nature…Augustine seems to imply that the human nature of Christ could have and would have sinned, were it not for its union with the Word. It is, however, only a person who can sin, and not a nature.119

I take his final observation first. Teske confirms my repeated insistence that Augustine's conception of the Fall and its punishment effectively redefines human will as necessarily sinful: possessing sinful flesh will always result in sinful desires, because the will is in thrall to the body through concupiscentia carnis. Eschatological release alone redeems this fault of present embodiment. Accepting Teske's claim that only persons can sin, the passage nonetheless presents a Christ whose 'normal humanity' is drastically reformed by the (p.183) presence of the Word, to a degree more characteristic of the divine nature than the life of either presently graced humans or the spiritually embodied saints. Furthermore, this sits very uncomfortably alongside Augustine's phrasing in the following chapter, referring to 'the Son of Man who was assumed out of time' (filius hominis qui ex tempore assumptus est), giving the impression (as Teske concedes of this passage) that the Word assumes a person, not a nature. The implication of this is surely that Christ must retain the sinful will common to human persons. Augustine's language of grace in the passage above does not greatly resolve the problem: the grace of adoption, by which the fallen will is enabled to function rightly and still maintain its integrity as human willing, is different from the grace of the Incarnation, as his reference to the 'singularity' of the Incarnation underlines. In any case, the grace of adoption is complete only in the eschatological life in pace, as Augustine's reading of Romans 7:25 insists, and redeemed humanity is not the state the Word takes flesh to address.

The Contra Sermonem Arianorum thus reveals two apparently conflicting tendencies. The first centres on Augustine's use http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 23/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship of seemingly 'Antiochene' categories, in which the assumption of a human person in the Incarnation, combined with his definition of fallen human nature, implicates the assuming Word in inevitably sinful desire. The second centres on the text's more characteristically 'Alexandrian' suggestion, that the Word restores the faults of humanity in taking up its nature. In the light of the passages I have highlighted elsewhere in this chapter, I would go further: Augustine's Word appears rather to undermine and deconstruct the humanity assumed, where humanity is defined as essentially sinful in bondage to the flesh.

In Chapter 2, I attempted to show that Augustine's conception of Christ 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' invites readings in which aspects of both fallen and prelapsarian humanity are assumed in the Incarnation. However, once his suppression of Christ's human will comes into view, the picture is considerably simplified: Christ's human nature is fallen; his flesh is in fact sinful flesh. It is designated 'like' sinful flesh in virtue of the indwelling Word that is the locus and power of its agency. But, by Augustine's own lights, this makes no sense, as sinful flesh is defined as that which is dominated by a corrupt will (that is, agency). 'Sinful flesh under sinless agency' amounts to a nonsense, as even graced humanity is required to battle against sin until its attainment of the eschatological state, which accompanies release from the flesh of sin. It would seem that, in addressing the requirement that the Incarnation respond to the state of fallen humanity, Augustine has been thwarted by his own definition of man: he cannot allow the Word to be united to the entirety of fallen human nature, so that he abstracts the static effects of sin from humanity, in order to unite it to the nature and person of the Word. Geerlings makes a similar point:

(p.184) When Augustine describes the Incarnation as sine peccato, non sine conditione peccatoris [lacking sin but not the condition of the sinner] (Mus. 6.4.), he separates that condition from its essential connection [Sachzusammenhang] with sin, and makes from it an idealized body for the Saviour; and this tends to abrogate the bodily existence of the Mediator. Here Augustine comes close to the Christology of Apollinarianism…The weighting towards the Logos within the hypostatic union, and the separation of the infirmities of the body from their connection to the soul, surely betray this tendency.120

Following on Julian's argument, we indeed seem to be left with an apparent neo Apollinarianism, in which the Word must necessarily take the place of the soul in a decapitated humanity.

Further proof? Christ's human knowledge I argued above that, for Augustine, the will and the intellect cannot properly be separated except in the process of verbalizing their corelationship with one another, because they constitute a dual faculty in the human person. To be consistent with this, I would expect Augustine to account for Christ's knowledge in a similar manner, as a synthetic corollary of his will. The expectation is not disappointed, but lends credence to the charge of Augustine's neo Apollinarianism stated above: Christ's human knowledge, such as it is, is that of the divine Word.

The number of texts in which Augustine discusses the character of Christ's human knowledge is relatively small. In his earliest exegesis of John 11:1–44, in De Diversis Quaestionibus 83, Augustine interprets Jesus's apparent ignorance of Lazarus' grave as a figurative indication of human predestination, the 'hidden calling' not known to humans in this present life. Lazarus is finally loosed from his shroud only after leaving the tomb. By contrast, Christ leaves his on his grave slab, showing 'how much difference there is between the human that the Wisdom of God put on, through whom we are liberated, and other humans;'121 Christ, who committed no sin and was ignorant of nothing, was likewise not bound by the tomb or entwined in the wrappings of death so as to hinder his rising from both.122 In a further discussion of predestination in the same text, Augustine is still more explicit: the understanding possessed by Christ, the human child who grew in age and Wisdom, is not held in common with the other humans whose nature he possesses. His exceptional (p.185) knowledge is that hoped for by his heirs in their heavenly life.123 In the Enarratio in Psalmum 15, Augustine expands the same theme: the beatific vision promised to the saints is 'restored' to them, whilst Christ in his human nature never lost it.124 His treatment of Psalm 4 runs a number of these themes together: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 24/35

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[The Psalmist's claim 'You have enlarged my heart' (Ps. 4:1)] is rightly applied to the person who believes in Christ and is illuminated by him; but I do not see how this can in any way be fittingly said of that humanity of the Lord, which the Wisdom of God took up, for it was never deserted by Wisdom. But in whatever way this was his prayer, it is a better index of our weakness, and thus the same Lord can be taken as speaking for his faithful ones about this sudden enlarging of the heart.

in persona eius qui credens in christum illuminatus est, recte accipitur; in ipsius autem dominici hominis, quem suscepit dei sapientia, non uideo quemadmodum hoc possit congruere. non enim ab ea aliquando desertus est. sed quemadmodum ipsa eius deprecatio, nostrae potius infirmitatis indicium est, sic etiam de ista repentina dilatatione cordis potest idem dominus pro fidelibus suis loqui.125

The latest, and for my purpose here most interesting, text in which Augustine raises this issue is De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione. His position here is consistent both with the theology of the examples already given, and also with one of the central purposes of the anti Pelagian treatises: to demonstrate the sinfulness of the newborn from both Scripture and common observation. Together with the anger of infants towards their mothers, Augustine cites their resistance of baptism as a symptom of the ignorantia that forms part of the punishment for sin.126 By contrast, the Saviour of infants and adults was born without any such disposition:

How plain it is we should believe that there was no ignorance of any sort in that infant, in whom the Word was made flesh to dwell among us; nor should we believe that there was that weakness of the soul in the Christchild, which we observe in other children. For through that weakness, when they are disturbed by irrational movements of the soul, they are without reason or selfcontrol. Rather they are oppressed by a certain pain, or fear of pain. Because of this, you can see that they are sons of that disobedience, which is put to motion in their members. Repugnant to the law of the mind, it cannot be quieted, even when reason wills it.

quam plane ignorantiam nullo modo crediderim fuisse in infante illo, in quo uerbum caro factum est, ut habitaret in nobis, nec illam ipsius animi infirmitatem in christo paruulo fuerim suspicatus, quam uidemus in paruulis. per hanc enim etiam, cum (p.186) motibus inrationabilibus perturbantur, nulla ratione, nullo imperio, sed dolore aliquando uel doloris terrore cohibentur, ut omnino uideas illius inoboedientiae filios, quae mouetur in membris repugnans legi mentis nec, cum uult ratio, conquiescit.127

To account for the infancy of Christ, Augustine resorts to a formula which is difficult not to interpret as a subtle form of docetism: 'Because there was in him the likeness of the flesh of sin, he willed to endure the changes of age beginning from his infancy. This was so that we might see him capable of reaching death by growing old in his own flesh, had he not been murdered in his youth.'128 Once again, the passage tends to the ambiguity of evacuating the human soul from Christ as an agent within his person, subtextually replacing the Word as its divine 'performer' in a manner that does full justice to Augustine's anti Pelagian teaching on Original Sin, but leaves a question over his conception of Christ's human nature. A later exposition of the raising of Lazarus sees Augustine describe Christ's ignorance of Lazarus' tomb as something Christ 'fabricated' (finxit).129 Finally, in one of Augustine's latest works, this ambiguity is resolved in the startling admission that Christ's knowledge of the Father pertains specifically to his divine nature, which is a proof of his eternal generation. The basis of Augustine's dispute with the Arian Maximinus at 9.1 is the interpretation of 1 Tim 1:7, 'Honour and glory be only to the invisible God.' Where Christ says, 'Noone sees the Father unless he is from God', this must be taken as proof of Christ's divinity; his words contain the promise of the vision of the blessed in heaven, and are spoken by him 'in the flesh', in carne.130

As is manifest in all the examples given here, Augustine unequivocally affirms the divine vision of Christ in his earthly life, to the detriment of any real growth in human knowledge or sharing in the weakness of human intellect. Christ's exceptional knowledge of the divine nature is itself transferred from that nature to his humanity, seemingly without accounting for the limitations of the human mind as it would subsist in humanity either in its fallen state, or on its http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 25/35

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(p.187) Conclusion This chapter began by attending to Julian's bewilderment at Augustine's doctrine of the Fall and its effects on human nature. Distinguishing reproductive biology from acts of the will, Julian challenged Augustine to justify how the propagation of the species could simultaneously result in the transmission of a vitiated nature to seemingly innocent infants. My purpose here has not been to answer this charge from within Augustine's theology directly (indeed, I do not believe it can be answered satisfactorily). Instead, I turned to the corollary of the question, in Julian's criticism of Augustine's Christology. Viewing concupiscence of the flesh as one among many misorientations of the will, Julian accordingly asks how Augustine's Christ can possess a real soul if his humanity is conceived without concupiscentia carnis. The outcome of such a conception, so he argues, is a Christ whose moral life lacks effective exemplary content for the redemption of the faithful. By thus truncating Christ's soul, Augustine has fallen into the heresy of Apollinarianism.

In order to unpack Julian's accusation, I first examined Augustine's major, formal treatments of the Apollinarian heresy in his doctrinal works. These revealed both confusion and clarity. While Augustine remains unsure of the precise faculty being denied by Apollinarianism (Christ's mens or anima, both of which he fails to define consistently), he nonetheless shows an acute awareness of the danger of monophysitism and theopaschy inherent in any denial of Christ's human soul. From a broad Latin inheritance, he takes the terms for his definition along with his metaphysical confusion. In the manner of his predecessors, he likewise fails to answer the Apollinarian model of a Christ who is Word and flesh with an articulate Catholic alternative, which does justice to the very different natures of God and man subsistent in one person. As I observed, this shortfall is understandable in the heat of polemic, and acceptable in dogmatic works that explicate doctrine by negating heretical alternatives. However, it is problematic where expressions reminiscent of Apollinarianism surface elsewhere in doctrinal and exegetical works.

In order to assess whether the latter is applicable to Augustine, I stepped back from his Christological pronouncements to survey his broad conception of the human will and intellection. In this, I took the lead from van Bavel's summary comments on Augustine's Christological psychology, and unexamined choice of De Civitate Dei 9 and 14 as the locus classicus of his theory of the mind and its affections; to these texts, I added that of Confessiones 10. This resulted in a new reading of Augustine's theological anthropology, in which De Civitate Dei 9 and 14 are seen as a critique of Stoic emotional theory while simultaneously absorbing their technical vocabulary. Thus the constantiae, passions, and ἀπαθεια of Stoicism are transferred into a Christian Platonist (p.188) scheme in which the emotions are redeemed by their graced orientation towards God. This simultaneously transforms the intellective and voluntary faculties into the nature of their object: love loving Love. While real moral progress subsequent on the gift of grace is expected in such a conversion to the Good, Augustine's definition of concupiscentia carnis hinders the degree to which he can permit humans to travel this road before death and eschatological life. Behind this lurks the unclear distinction between prepassion and passion, the child of the Origenian tradition, whereby the first stirrings of sinful thoughts are judged on a par with their outcome. Augustine goes further still, pushing sinfulness behind even semiconscious desire, so that sinful flesh controls and dominates the life of the mind in the overpowering movement of lust.

Finally returning to Christology, I surveyed Augustine's explicit treatments of Christ's human will, affections, and intellect. Earlier in this chapter, I argued that his extensive handling of these issues in a theological anthropological context promised to reveal a similarly detailed consideration of the inner life of Christ. However, this is far from the case. The number of texts in which Augustine explicitly or implicitly reflects on the psychology of Jesus is small. Furthermore, they show no close relationship to his broader conception of human inwardness. Rather, his Christ possesses an ambiguous will, imprecisely apportioned between his divine and human natures; where human, it remains unclear to what degree it is thwarted by the effects of the Fall. By contrast, his Christ lives without ignorance of any kind: his knowledge is that of God. In all of this, Augustine fails to define exactly how a will and intellect that is divine can be held by a single person who also fully possesses human nature.

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What compromises Augustine's treatment of the humanity of Christ is, as Julian recognized, his theology of the Fall. In his claim that concupiscence of the flesh cannot be healed by grace in this life, and that it remains outside the power of even the sanctified will, he simultaneously removes it from the Incarnation. What cannot now be healed could not then be assumed. While this inconsistency in Augustine's Christology cannot finally be classified as 'Apollinarian' (in whichever way that is understood), it does amount to an absence of clear pronouncement on the nature of Christ's full, human soul. As I shall show in the following and final chapter, this is a side effect of Augustine's reluctance to synthesize his theology of the Fall with his speculation about the soul's origin. Julian's question 'How can you muddle a matter of the will with the circumstances of insemination?' goes to the heart of the problem: by failing to account for the relationship between the voluntary Fall of Adam, the physical act of concourse, and the process of bodily ensoulment at conception, Augustine is left without an explanation for the manner in which Christ receives a sinless soul through his virginal conception. Behind (p.189) this stands his latent but persistent belief in the premundane life and fall of the soul, the elephant in the room in all his engagement with Pelagianism. As will become clear, the apparent imbalance of divinity and humanity in the inner life of his Christ is the result not of the predominance of the Word in his one person, but of the ontological continuity of the Word with his heavenly and unfallen humanity.

Notes:

(1) Fredriksen (1988: 112).

(2) Ep. 184a.3.1; Ep. 194.44.10; Pecc. Orig. 45.40; Nupt. Conc. I.21.19, 37.32, 38.33.

(4) C. Iul. 5.51.14: Verum enim est quod ibi accepisti, ea quae in subjecto sunt, sicut sunt qualitates, sine subjecto in quo sunt, esse non posse, sicut est in subjecto corpore color aut forma; sed afficiendo transeunt, non emigrando.

(6) Gillian R. Evans (1981); Elizabeth Clark (1988).

(7) I discuss this further in Chapter 6.

(9) C. Iul. Imp. 2.178: Si enim non credis partem animae seminibus illigatam; quo ore scribis, omnes homines Adam solum fuisse; cum homo utique nisi anima et corpus simul esse non possit? It does not appear to occur to Julian that Augustine may have conceived all humans to have been in Adam as a spiritual creature, quite without any body, a point to which I shall return later.

(10) C. Iul. Imp. 2.178: Et qualibet ergo, et quantalibet parte, omnes qui ex illo nati sunt, ille unus fuerunt, sive secundum solum corpus, sive secundum utramque hominis partem; quod me nescire confiteor, nec me pudet, ut vos, fateri nescire quod nescio.

(11) Cf. Pecc. Orig. 3.3; as C. Iul. Imp. 2. 178 indicates, Julian himself knew De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione.

(12) Lib. Fid. 28: Nam si non ex supposita materia crearetur hominis caro sicut etiam Adae et Evae, et sic postea in ipso anima non ex supposita materia, tanquam pariter Adae et Evae, nunquam propheta Zacharias ita dixisset, Et creans spiritum hominis in ipso.

(13) Lib. Fid. 5.39.4: aut injustum Deum pronuntiant, aut certe Deo diabolum aestimant fortiorem, eo quod naturam, quam Deus creavit bonam, eam diabolus per praevaricationem Adae et Evae malam potuerit efficere.

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8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship

(14) Pecc. Mer. 2.59.36.

(16) C. Iul. Imp. 4. 46: Tu vero nomen ipsum concupiscentiae amplexatus, vis a Christi corpore tam oculorum sensum abfuisse, quam viscerum.

(17) C. Iul. Imp. 4.47.

(18) C. Iul. Imp. 4.48.

(19) C. Iul. Imp. 4.49.

(20) C. Iul. Imp. 4.50.

(21) C. Iul. Imp. 4.47.

(22) It should be noted that at no point does Augustine define clearly what any of these terms means.

(23) C. Iul. Imp. 4.48.

(24) C. Iul. Imp. 4.49.

(25) Principally at Alexandria (362) and Rome (377/8).

(26) Studer (1984).

(27) Studer (1984: 395).

(28) Ep. 9.2: pro humano sensu in Domini carne versatum.

(30) Tomus 284, l. 32: Anathematizamus eos qui pro hominis anima rationabili et intellegibili dicunt Dei Verbum in humana carne uersatum, cum ipse Filius et Verbum Dei non pro anima rationabili et intellegibili in suo corpore fuerit, sed nostram (id est rationabilem et intellegibilem) sine peccato animam susceperit adque saluauerit.

(31) Grillmeier (1975: 350).

(32) Inc. Dom. Sac. 6. 49. Theopaschy here denotes the suffering of God through the mutation of his own nature in the Incarnation, to be distinguished from the divine participation in human suffering through the hypostatic union. This is to say that it is primarily an error about God qua God, not the Incarnation.

(33) Inc. Dom. Sac. 6. 60–1.

(34) I have marginalized this text from the list of Ambrosian sources from which Augustine might have drawn his exegesis of Romans 8:3 in Chapter 3, on the basis of its suggestion that Christ possesses a flesh that is subject to sin; supporting this, I indicate below that its handling of Apollinarianism is not closely reflected in that of Augustine.

(35) Div. Quaest. 83 80.1.

(36) This appears to be the thought behind 80.2: 'The evangelist wished to commend to us the love of the humility of God with which he humbled himself, and emphasizing how far he humbled himself, he spoke only of the Word and the flesh, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 28/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship omitting the nature of the soul which is lower than the Word, but superior to the flesh. For he commends that humility to us more by saying "The Word was made flesh", than if he were to say, "The Word was made human"' (uolens itaque euangelista commendare pro nobis dilectionem humilitatis dei qui sese humiliauerit, et quousque humiliauerit exprimens, uerbum carnem que nominauit praetermittens animae naturam, quae uerbo est inferior, carne praestantior. magis enim commendat humilitatem, quia dictum est: uerbum caro factum est, quam si diceretur: uerbum homo factum est').

(37) Div. Quaest. 83 80.4.

(38) Div. Quaest. 83 80.3.

(39) Cf. Conf. 7.19.

(40) Agon. 21.19: multum enim lugenda est mens humana, si uincitur a corpore suo: si quidem in illo homine non reformata est, in quo ipsum corpus humanum iam dignitatem formae coelestis accepit.

(41) Altaner (1967a: 288); emphasis added, highlighting Altaner's lack of suggestion on this point.

(42) That is to say, outside the context of scriptural exegesis or homiletics and in the course of defining other heresies against the Catholic faith.

(43) Ench. 10: nihil naturae humanae in illa susceptione fas est dicere defuisse, sed naturae ab omni peccati nexu omni modo liberae.

(44) Cf. Anak. T.2 Lib. 3.1, in its Latin translation: 'The Apollinarians are those who confess in a very limited way the perfect Incarnation of Christ. Some of them affirm that his body was consubstantial with his divinity; others have dared to defend their position, that Christ never assumed a soul, and they have insisted on denying it. Some have supported their claim with the words of the evangelist, "The Word was made flesh", and have denied created flesh—from Mary—was taken up by him; but they have stubbornly asserted that the Word was made into flesh. After all this, I do not know for what reason they fail to say that he assumed a mind' (Apollinaristae, qui perfectam Christi incarnationem minime confitentur: quorum alii consubstantiale divinitati esse corpus affirmant, alii vero defendere istud etiam ausi sunt, Christum nequaquam animam assumpsisse; idque negare instituerunt. Quidam his Evangelii verbis innixi, Verbum caro factum est: ex creata carne, hoc est Maria, carnem ab illo susceptam esse negarunt; sed solum Verbum carnem esse factum pertinaciter asseverarunt. Postea vero quam ob causam nescio, mentem illum non assumpsisse dixerunt). Cf. C. Iul. Imp. 4.47.

(45) Altaner (1967a: 289).

(46) Haer. 45: in qua quaestione testimoniis euangelicis uicti, [Apollinaristae] mentem, qua rationalis est anima hominis, defuisse animae Christi, sed pro hac ipsum Verbum in eo fuisse dixerunt.

(47) So Studer (1984: 394).

(48) C. Iul. Imp. 4.47.

(49) C. Iul. Imp. 4.47.

(50) I raise the possibility that this letter is behind both Julian's and Augustine's texts at this point.

(51) Van Bavel (1954: 180) makes the issue one of doctrinal development: 'If in his thought omniscience, the beatific vision and progress in wisdom are not yet harmoniously elaborated, he nevertheless left to posterity all of the elements to http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 29/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship systematise this teaching.' Geerlings (1978: 138), lacks the soft focus: 'The question of the psychology of the person of Jesus Christ is a question of modernity.'

(53) Cf. Bonner (1962), on Augustine's assimilation of the (once very broad) meaning of the widely used word libido, to that of the specifically Christian, technical term concupiscentia.

(54) Cf. Dihle (1982: 127): 'The Confessions abundantly testify to the intensity of St Augustine's introspection, and many famous passages from this book on will, memory, sense of time, sensuality, cognition, emotions and other psychological topics have been extensively commented on in modern scholarship. It is mainly through this entirely new concept of his own self that St Augustine superseded the conceptual system of GrecoRoman culture.'

(55) Grillmeier (1975: 342).

(56) Rowan D. Williams (1985: 137). The suggestion is a tantalizing one, but cannot be the whole solution.

(58) O'Connell (1967: 209–10) points out the misreading of the text in which Alypius is construed as the Apollinarian, most notably found in Courcelle (1950: 214 n. 2): 'Perhaps Alypius was one of those Milanese who was indoctrinated as an Apollinarian a little after 385, to the fury of Ambrose.' O'Connell's note has permanently corrected the error, although his doubts about the consistency of Milanese teaching against Apollinaris require a further and fuller hearing.

(59) Zumkeller (1986: 174–5), as part of his article on Affectus.

(60) The Thomist basis for the analytical division is evident. The Summa's Prima Pars covers the divine intellect and humans created in its image; Secunda Pars moves on to cover the moral life of man in relation to his affections and passions. Similarly, in his treatment of the Incarnation, Thomas treats first of Christ's knowledge in the broader discussion of his possession of grace (T.P. 3a. Q.9–12), then of his passions and affections (T.P. 3a. Q.15); T.P. 3a. Q.18 handles his will, and Q.46 the place of his passions in the Passion.

(61) Van Bavel (1954: 123).

(62) Van Bavel (1954: 121).

(63) Van Bavel (1954: 161).

(64) The expression is that of Sorabji (2000: 8).

(65) Wetzel (1992: 46).

(66) Civ. Dei 9.4 passim. James Wetzel (1992) provides one account of this redefinition of 'indifferents' as 'goods' in Augustine. Alongside the pure Stoicism found in Cicero, Wetzel detects a second 'paradigm' in Cicero's De Finibus, the 'Stoicized Aristotelianism of Antiochus of Ascalon' (p. 47). In his moral philosophy, happiness might be 'augmented by external blessings', giving fortune a role in the attainment of an individual's final happiness through the addition of preferable temporal goods in his journey towards virtue. This paradigm is 'Stoic in founding happiness on virtue, but Peripatetic in its refusal to exclude external goods from the definition of happiness' (p. 48). Thus, 'following Cicero's lead, Augustine reduces philosophy's pretensions to secure beatitude to a single strategy: Secure virtue, then under the auspices of virtue supplement beatitude with the enjoyment of what the world has to offer' (p. 49). The closeness of the two varieties of Stoicism may well have been lost on Augustine, allowing him to caricature the shortcomings of Stoicism in this way, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 30/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship and to 'refuse to accept the intrusion of fortune into beatitude' in his own moral thought, because of the evident reality of the world's hostility to virtue and the enjoyment of temporal goods under sin (pp. 50–1). Wetzel usefully points out that, by bringing a Peripatetic understanding of preferable goods under a Stoic umbrella, Augustine can attack them together for claiming that reason alone can control the passions in their response to the enjoyment of temporal goods and frustration by temporal ills. Augustine's acceptance of the place of temporal goods per se in the ascent to transcendent goodness, illustrated in the excerpts from Civ. Dei below, owes its basis to his Christian Platonism in the first instance, and is somewhat distinct from the question of fortune in augmenting the happy life. This is also Wetzel's view of Augustine's moral psychology: 'We might say, with some justice, that some amalgam of Stoic ethics and Platonic metaphysics continues to inform the expression of Augustine's theology of grace, even when that theology starts to draw its sustenance primarily from the Pauline epistles' (p. 113). In their language, grace is what forms reason in humanity's affective response to the world in time.

(67) Civ. Dei 14.8.1.

(68) Civ. Dei 14.6.

(69) This move allows him to include grief (tristitia) in the emotional life of the wise Christian: her frustration at the absence of beatitude is a right and reasonable response not only the state of creation under sin in the present, but also to the fragmentation of the past. So Wetzel (1992: 109): 'When the Christian saint grieves, it is not for the loss of material wellbeing, but for personal failures of vision and love, for having robbed the creation of its creator, for having usurped God's dominion.' Memory, the vessel of temporality in the individual, is therefore the crucial vehicle for the sanctification of this emotion.

(70) Civ. Dei 14.7.2.

(71) Cf. Sorabji (2000: ch. 2), for his central argument that Chrysippus developed Zeno's Stoicism to accommodate all emotions as judgements of the intellect, so that Seneca can later consider them 'merely one type of cognition: assent to a proposition about how it is appropriate to react' (pp. 328–9, glossing De Ira 2.4.1.). This is to be contrasted with Augustine's Neoplatonic conception of inner entropy following on the alienation of personal being from the order of being by the power of the will; cf. Dihle (1982: 128).

(72) Dihle (1982: 125).

(73) Civ. Dei 14.6.

(75) Conf. 10.21.14. Thonnard (1952b) argues that, even in Augustine's synthesis, the passions are strictly only undergone by the body, the affectiones being the soul's response to them. I cannot find the distinction in any of the texts analysed here; further, the 'recalled passions' (only ever mental) reexperienced here in the Confessiones appear to argue against him. The passions are problematic precisely because they disable the mind.

(78) Wetzel (1992: 102). He comments further: 'Except in his more hyperbolic moments, Augustine does not equate the Stoic ideal of apatheia with insensitivity.' As I have argued earlier in this book, that hyperbole is more typical of Jerome's rhetorical attacks on Origen's moral theology, in which ἀπαθεια is also translated impassibilitas. Neither 'insensitivity' nor 'impassibility' fully translates Augustine's conception of ἀπαθεια , either in Stoicism as he understands it, or in his Christianization of it; it is rather the attainment of a tranquillity that comes from a sanctification of the passions, oriented http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 31/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship to the love of God.

(79) Dinkler (1934: 74).

(80) Lib. Arb. 3.53.19.

(81) Civ. Dei 14.15: ipso namque inuito et animus plerumque turbatur et caro dolet et ueterescit et moritur, et quidquid aliud patimur, quod non pateremur inuiti, si uoluntati nostrae nostra natura omni modo atque ex omnibus partibus oboediret.

(82) This leads Bonner (1962: 310) to make the following assertion: 'Such a distaste for sexual passion is not easily comprehensible to the modern reader, who may be led to believe that Augustine regarded sexual concupiscence, in itself, as a sin. A careful examination of his teaching, however, shows that this is not the case. Concupiscence is not a sin; but it is a wound and a vice in human nature; can be the occasion of sin, even in the baptized; and is the means whereby Original Sin is committed…Concupiscence is a defect, a vice, an hereditary propensity to sin, without necessarily being a sin in the strict sense of the word.' Of course, considered in the abstract, Augustine does not think that concupiscence is always a sin; after the Fall, however, it is; and it is precisely Augustine's point that God punishes man by a propensity that is not under his own control: it is a requirement that man sin, under the decree of justice. Bonner highlights a number of other texts in support of his case; as far as I can see, they argue to the contrary, cf. Nupt. Conc.

(84) De Ira 2.3.1.

(85) Tusc. Disp. 3.83.34: 'When we have taken away what is all together voluntary, that mournful sickness will be removed; however, a slight gnawing and a certain sort of depression of the soul will still remain.' Hoc detracto, quod totum est voluntarium, aegritudo erit sublata illa maerens, morsus tamen et contractiunculae quaedam animi relinquentur.

(86) Augustine also repeats the narrative at Q. Hept. 1.30.

(87) Epictetus' text no longer survives; c.f. Schenkl, H: Epicteti Dissertationes Frag. 9. (Leipzig, 1916).

(88) Civ. Dei 9.4.2: animi uisa, quas appellant phantasias nec in potestate est utrum et quando incidant animo, cum ueniunt ex terribilibus et formidabilibus rebus, necesse est etiam sapientis animum moueant, ita ut paulisper uel pauescat metu, uel tristitia contrahatur…nec ideo tamen in mente fieri opinionem mali, nec adprobari ista eisque consentiri.

(89) Sorabji (2000: 372–5). Wetzel (1992: 51–3) offers a slightly different reading of this passage, consonant with his picture of Civ. Dei 9 as dependent on a conflation of Stoic and Peripatetic attitudes to temporal goods. Augustine's point in relating Gellius' story (so Wetzel) is that the Stoic fears the loss of temporal goods as the sea begins to threaten: 'the very experience of the disruptive emotion presupposes that to some significant degree the sage values material wellbeing and so fears its loss.' His inner Peripatetic thus hoists the pure Stoicmanqué by his own petard.

(90) Princ. 3.2.2: 'There is therefore evident reason for thinking that, just as in good things the human will on its own is imperfect to accomplish the good (for it is by divine help that it is led to perfection in each thing); so also, in things of a contrary nature we receive certain things, like seeds of sins, from what we possess for natural uses. But when we have indulged in them beyond what is enough for us and do not resist the first movements towards intemperance, we make space for the first stage of transgression. The hostile power incites and urges us on in every way, encouraging us to expand http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 32/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship our sins more abundantly, offering us the occasions and beginnings of sins, which the hostile powers spread more widely and far, and if they can, beyond all limits' (Evidens igitur ratio est quia, sicut in bonis rebus humanum propositum solum per se ipsum inperfectum est ad consummationem boni (adiutorio namque divino ad perfecta quaeque perducitur): ita etiam in contrariis initia quidem et velut quaedam semina peccatorum ab his rebus, quae in usu naturaliter habentur, accipimus; cum vero indulserimus ultra quam satis est, et non restiterimus adversum primos intemperantiae motus, tunc primi huius delicti accipiens locum virtus inimica instigat et perurget omni modo studens profusius dilatare peccata, nobis quidem hominibus occasiones et initia praebentibus peccatorum, inimicis autem potestatibus latius ea et longius et si fieri potest absque ullo fine propagantibus).

(91) The scriptural passages behind the text are surely Matt. 7.27–30 and Mark 10.2–12.

(92) Layton (2000) offers a contrasting reading of Origen as more sympathetic to the Stoicism of Chrysippus, not least on the basis of his ascription of prepassion to Christ (cf. the Latin Comm. Matt. 92, in which Christ 'began to be sad and to feel weary' (coepit tristari et taedari)). Origen 'insists that the verb "begin" in this case does not signify the initiation of a disposition, but rather defines the boundary beyond which an incipient movement did not pass' (Layton 2000: 269). However, he goes on to highlight Didymus' 'intellectualization' of prepassion, with the result that it becomes morally ambiguous. What appears to begin with Didymus (so Layton) appears to end with Jerome and Augustine (so Sorabji and myself), a testimony to the stronger treatment of the whole issue in De Principiis, to be received as normative by later readers.

(93) Sorabji (2000: 8–9). Following his own argument, I suspect he actually means 'between first movements…and emotions…Christian talk of bad thoughts…'. He appears to have fallen into Origen's trap!

(94) Serm. Dom. 1.34.12: inlabitur occultius, ut cogitationem contingat.

(95) Serm. Dom. 1.34.12.

(96) Sorabji (2000) reads the text as an example of Augustine's early faithfulness to Stoicism, partly on the grounds of the 'consent lies in the reason' phrase, and partly because there is no explicit condemnation of titillation as a sin. It seems to me that Augustine is making exactly Origen's point: sin is progressive, present even in the very beginnings of rational reflection on an opportunity for vice. Further, cf. Serm. Mon. 1.35.12: 'Hence, just as we arrive at sin by three steps— suggestion, pleasure, consent,—so of sin itself there are three varieties—in heart, in deed, in habit' (sicut ergo tribus gradibus ad peccatum peruenitur: suggestione delectatione consensione, ita ipsius peccati tres sunt differentiae: in corde in facto in consuetudine). The sin of the heart/prepassion is still sin. In any case the text dates from after the reception of Jerome's work.

(97) Comm. Matt. 1, ll. 605–18.

(98) Comm. Matt. 1, ll. 605–18.

(99) I have been unable to locate a passage in Origen that conflates the Fall narrative of Genesis with Christ's teaching on adultery. Again, the loss of his commentaries on both Matthew and Genesis is to be regretted. I raise the possibility that the roots of the snake motif in Serm. Dom. might have been lifted from Origen, Hom. Gen. 1.7: 'As from the waters, both good and bad thoughts are brought forth from our heart. But with the command of the Word of God and by his illumination, we can discern between good and evil; this is to say, that we should separate ourselves from those things which creep upon the earth and cause earthly concerns, and accustom ourselves to fly with those things which are better, not only over the earth, but also into the firmament of the heaven…If we behold a woman to desire her concupiscently, that is the poison of the creeping thing within us…'(De corde namque nostro velut de aquis proferuntur et bonae cogitationes et malae. Sed nos verbo praecepto Dei, ut cum ipsius illuminatione discernere possimus a bono quod malus est: id est, ut ea quae super terram repunt, et terranas sollicitudines gerunt, separemus a nobis; illa vero quae meliora sunt, id est http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 33/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship volatilia, sinamus volare non solum super terram, sed etiam secundum firmamentum coeli…Si viderimus mulierem ad concupiscendam eam, illud est in nobis reptile venenatum …).

(100) Civ. Dei 14.23.2.

(101) Civ. Dei 14.16.

(102) Civ. Dei 14.20.

(103) Q. Hept. 3.93.

(104) Civ. Dei 14.9.

(105) Tr. Ioh. 47.11.

(106) Tr. Ioh. 47.13: quando uerbum uoluit. principatus enim in uerbo erat.

(107) Tr. Ioh. 60.5: affectum quippe humanum, quando oportuisse iudicauit, in seipso potestate commouit, qui hominem totum potestate suscepit.

(108) Tr. Ioh. 60.5: quantum itaque bonum de participatione diuinitatis eius exspectare et sperare debemus, cuius nos et perturbatio tranquillat, et infirmitas firmat?

(109) Tr. Ioh. 49.18.

(110) En. Ps. 30.II.1.3.

(112) Tr. Ioh. 60.2: transfigurauit etiam in se affectum infirmitatis nostrae, compatiens nobis affectu animae suae. The translators of the NPNF edition have rendered 'transfigurauit' 'transferred', in greater faithfulness to a totus Christus theology than Augustine's own language here permits.

(113) En. Ps. 40.8: quod passus est christus, patitur et ecclesia; quod passum est caput, patiuntur et membra.

(114) Doct. Christ. 3.41.29.

(115) Doct. Christ. 2.24.16.

(116) En. Ps. 31.II.26.

(117) Cf. Anak. T.2, Lib. 2.5: 'The Arians, or Ariomanites, say that the Son of God was created and that the Holy Spirit is the creature of a creature, and they affirm that our Saviour merely took flesh from Mary, but not his soul' (Ariani, sive Ariomanitae Dei Filium creaturam esse dicunt, Spiritum vero sanctum creaturae esse creaturam, Salvatorem nostram carnem duntaxat a Maria, non animam accepisse confirmant).

(118) C. Serm. Ar. 7.

(119) Teske (1995: 169).

(120) Geerlings (1978: 136–7).

(121) Div. Quaest. 83 65: quantum autem intersit inter hominem quem dei sapientia gestabat per quem liberati sumus, et http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 34/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship caeteros homines.

(122) Div. Quaest. 83 65. Again, the problem of positing two wills in Christ is present here.

(123) Div. Quaest. 83 75.

(124) En. Ps. 15.5: non enim restitues mihi quod non amisi, sed restitues his qui amiserunt eius claritatis notitiam; in quibus quia ego sum, mihi restitues.

(125) En. Ps. 4.2. That Christ 'learns' in his members is also found in Tr. Ioh. 21.7, although from the context it is not clear whether Augustine is referring here to Christ in his earthly life or in his eschatological state.

(126) Pecc. Mer. 1.65.35–66.36.

(127) Pecc. Mer. 2.48.29.

(128) Pecc. Mer. 2.48.29: Sed quia in eo erat similitudo carnis peccati, mutationes aetatum perpeti uoluit ab ipsa exorsus infantia, ut ad mortem uideatur etiam senescendo illa caro peruenire potuisse, nisi iuuenis fuisset occisus.

(129) Mend. 27.13: Ac per hoc nescire se finxit, ut aliquid aliud illa velut ignorantia sua significaret.

(130) C. Max. Ar. 9.1.

(131) Cf. Richard (1922: 86): 'For Augustine, Christ during his mortal life had the knowledge of [the beatific] vision, and knowledge gained through human experience…It is this doctrine which the great Scholastic doctors analyse; but it is explicitly there in St Augustine, and remains explicit in the great Greek doctors.'

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8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship

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The AntiPelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396430

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Dominic Keech

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Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN13: 9780199662234 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001

The Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ

Dominic Keech

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 6 addresses the issue of the origin of the soul in Augustine's thought, and its impact on his Christology. It observes with R. J. O'Connell that Augustine never gives a definitive answer to this question, and never fully discounts the Platonist (thereafter Origenist) theory of a fall from souls to earthly bodies from a premundane realm. It revisits Augustine's description of Christ as 'dominical human' (homo dominicus) and 'assumed human' (assumptus homo), reading both as suggestive of an Origenist Christology. This is further substantiated by examining his depiction of humanity, created seminally 'in Adam'; and his identification of Christ assuming a humanity 'without foregoing merits', and by implication preexistent. An analysis of his Christological exegesis of Wisdom 8.19 ('I received a good soul by lot') concludes these fragments, which, when pieced together, point to a latent understanding of the humanity of Christ drawn from the thought of Origen of Alexandria.

Keywords: soul (origin of), soul (fall of), R. J. O'Connell, De Peccatorum MeritisDe Anima et eius Origine, dominical human (dominicus homo), assumed human (assumptus homo), creation in Adam, grace Christology, Origen, De Principiis

My investigation in the previous chapter began by attending to Julian's criticism of Augustine's Christology as crypto Apollinarian, a charge made against the backdrop of his more commonly cited attack on the biology of Original Sin. By Augustine's failure to account for the transmission of sin in the soul from one person to another in the act of sexual reproduction, Julian could only construe a sinless Christ in such a system as a soulless human. I argued that Julian's case http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 1/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship begins on a strong footing, where Augustine's understanding of Apollinarianism is seen to be both conventional and unpenetrating, reflecting the inability of his Latin predecessors to comprehend the core point at issue in this essentially Greek debate. Added to this, Augustine's scattered comments on the inner life of Christ appear to place him firmly in an Alexandrian mode of thinking, in which the active presence of the Word in the Incarnate Christ obfuscates the properties characteristic of human nature, which, according to the rule of communicatio idiomatum, should be accounted for in his one person. As I indicated, Augustine's confusion arises from his definition of concupiscentia carnalis, which unwittingly equates sinfulness with the conditions of human embodiment. Thus a Word who comes 'in the likeness of the flesh of sin' is compromised from the outset, being unable to hypostasize the 'personhood of the nature' he comes to redeem without also instantiating its ill effects on the will. We are left with a Christ who conforms externally to the pattern of fallen humanity, while apparently lacking a fully human soul, which would necessarily require him to have 'sinful flesh' proper and not merely its likeness.

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I want here to return to Julian's question of the origin of sin in the reproductive act as a new avenue for resolving the problem of Christ's soul in Augustine's theology. A concomitant part of his attack on Augustine focused on his inability— or unwillingness—to pronounce clearly on the soul's origin. At Contra Iulianum 5.17.4, Augustine gave Julian short shrift on the issue, reiterating a longstanding refrain: 'Why do you retreat to that most obscure question, about the soul? What remains hidden concerning the (p.191) soul can either be learned with some effort or, like many other things in this life, can remain unknown without detriment to salvation.'1 Yet the interconnectedness of the two issues is undeniable: if a moral fault can be explained as affecting a psychophysical nature in some way, and if human ensoulment can be exactly situated in the physical conditions and process of reproduction, Augustine's model of Original Sin can be allowed to stand. For Julian, Augustine had managed to justify neither, and, to Augustine's detriment, his commonplace denial of a solution to the question of the soul's origin weakened his own defence.

This chapter is, therefore, an attempt to uncover Augustine's understanding of the origin of Christ's soul, in order to resolve the inconsistencies in his account of human sinfulness in general and Christ's sinlessness in particular. At the outset I will make clear that I do not believe Augustine was conscious of the unevenness of his portrayal of the sinless humanity of Christ, or the reasons for it. Neither do I believe that the Augustinian corpus as a whole yields clearcut statements about the origins of Christ's soul that will afford this book an easy conclusion. My approach will, therefore, be eclectic and to a degree speculative, all the time looking for latent clues from which Augustine's position on Christ's soul can be pieced together to form a coherent narrative of the development of his Christological thought.

I will begin by tracing Augustine's reflection on the origin of the soul, particularly in his anti Pelagian works. With Robert J. O'Connell, I shall argue that Augustine maintained a discreet ambivalence about the topic alongside a subtextual belief in its fall from an original, premundane existence. Augmenting O'Connell's thesis from within my foregoing receptioncritical survey, I suggest this can be ascribed to his reception of the works of Origen as well as those of Plotinus. Looking for evidence that Augustine applied a 'fall' protology within his Christology, I turn first of all to his description of Christ as 'the human of the Lord,' homo dominicus, and the 'assumed human', homo assumptus. By advancing a new reading of Augustine's theory of the seminal causes (rationales causae) at the basis of all created beings, and the creation of man in Adam, the 'seminal nature' (natura seminalis), I will suggest that both Christological terms indicate the assumption of a fully individual person in the Incarnation. Analysing Augustine's description of the process by which such a humanity is assumed, I will suggest that his characterization of the Incarnation as a divine gift, effected without regard to Christ's prevenient merits, confirms this reading, as only human persons can be said to 'merit' salvation. Questioning the logic of the abstract concept 'meritless human', I offer two passages in which Augustine gives ample hearing to the proposition that Christ uniquely merited the Incarnation, only to reject it with confused and (p.192) uncomfortable alacrity. Taken together, all of these factors contribute to my final conclusion, that Origen's idea of the unfallen soul of Christ was a key element of Augustine's early Christology. Constrained first by the Origenist and later by the Pelagian controversy, this picture of the preexistent human life of Christ would remain undeveloped in Augustine's mature thought, to the detriment of his treatment of the sinlessness of Christ, and the eventual collapse of his argument against Pelagianism.

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Robert J. O'Connell and scholarship on the soul's origin All of the most recent surveys of Augustine's theology of the soul's origin have necessarily had to engage with the work of Robert J. O'Connell, which has been set in the midst of Augustinian study to some as cornerstone and to others as stumbling block since the publication of Augustine's Early Theory of Man in 1968. I do not wish here to review the response of the entire scholarly community to the work of O'Connell, nor to detail his findings in full.2 It will, however, be useful in this context to lay out the broad strokes of his argument stated in The Origin of the Soul in St Augustine's Later Works, the fruition of O'Connell's earlier monograph.3

The central thesis of the book reduces to the claim that, in spite of Augustine's apparent vacillation on the issue, he persistently maintained a discreet belief in a fall of the soul into the body from a heavenly state after the model articulated by Plotinus, principally in Ennead 4, only at the end of his career modifying his opinions to cohere with his earlier reading of Romans 9–11. Underlying O'Connell's book is the assumption that Augustine's attraction to a Platonist mysticism of 'ascent' from a fallen to a restored heavenly state existed alongside an initially quite separate theology drawn, first from Pauline exegesis, and then the exigencies of the Pelagian controversy. In all of this, O'Connell relies heavily on AnneMarie de la Bonnadière's reclassification of the publication timelines of Augustine's major works, advancing on her conclusions and positing major revisions of De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, De Trinitate and De Genesi ad Litteram. On the basis of these revisions, O'Connell argues that early references to the fall of the soul were excerpted by (p.193) Augustine from later editions of these works as the difficulty of the issue became clearer to him. While he notes the importance of the topic in the Origenist controversy, O'Connell maintains the consensus view of Augustine's engagement with its dominant players, as he makes clear with reference to the exchange between Augustine and Orosius: 'The refutations [of Priscillanism and Origenism] in the Ad Orosium do not, as Courcelle has observed, suppose any direct "personal knowledge" of Origen on Augustine's part prior to Origen's teachings [represented] in the Commonitorium. If he himself had shared, up to this time, any of Origen's views, he would have done so unwittingly and innocently.'4 Thus his discussion of Augustine's protology is a question subordinate to and dependent on the broader issue of his reception of Plotinus.

O'Connell singles out De Libero Arbitrio 3 as the locus classicus and earliest example of Augustine's statement of his 'fallen soul' protology, extant alongside a later revision of this position in the same text. At 3.57.20, Augustine writes of the descent of souls from their heavenly home with God, in order to animate and govern the bodies born of the first man, now infected with mortality by sin. Having forgotten their past life, these souls must struggle against the twin punishment of ignorantia and difficultas in order to regain their prior state and redeem their bodies:

If, however, souls, existing in some secret place made by God, are sent to inspire and rule the bodies of each individual person who is born, they are sent for this purpose: to take proper charge of the body, which is born from the punishment of sin (which is to say, the mortality of the first human). This consists in chastening it by the virtues, and subjecting it to its appointed and lawful servitude, so that those virtues may prepare a place of heavenly incorruption for it in due order and time.

si uero in dei aliquo secreto iam existentes animae mittuntur ad inspiranda et regenda corpora singulorum quorumque nascentium, ad hoc utique mittuntur officium, ut corpus, quod de poena peccati, hoc est mortalitate primi hominis nascitur, bene administrando, id est castigando per uirtutes, et ordinatissimae atque legitimae seruituti subiciendo, etiam ipsi comparent ordine ac tempore oportuno caelestis incorruptionis locum.5

A second and more specific variation on this theme, in which souls fall through their own sin, follows shortly after:

If souls which exist elsewhere are not sent by the Lord God, but come to inhabit bodies of their own accord, it is quite simple to see that the creator can in no way be held responsible for whatever ignorance and difficulty results from their own will.

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8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship si autem alibi animae constitutae non mittuntur a domino deo, sed sua sponte ad inhabitanda corpora ueniunt, facile est iam hoc uidere, quicquid ignorantiae (p.194) difficultatisque secutum fuerit earum propriam uoluntatem, nullo modo creatorem hinc esse culpandum.6

In the following chapter, O'Connell detects what he believes to be a later revision: Augustine admits here that it would be rash to affirm any one of the four possible protologies that appear plausible to him:

It is not fitting for us rashly to affirm any one of these four propositions concerning the soul: that they come from propagation; that they are made newly in individuals, in whom they are born; that they are sent by God into the bodies of those who are to be born having existed elsewhere, or that they fall into them of their own accord.

harum autem quatuor de anima sententiarum, utrum de propagine ueniant an in singulis quibusque nascentibus nouae fiant an in corpora nascentium iam alicubi existentes uel mittantur diuinitus uel sua sponte labantur, nullam temere adfirmare oportebit.7

As Carol Harrison notes: 'He makes no attempt here to judge between the different theories, but simply demonstrates how they are congruent with his basic conviction that humanity's present penal state is not unjust, but part of God's equitable providence.'8 The four equivocal options of Traducianism, Creationism, and a sending or falling of souls would remain standard in Augustine's response to the question throughout his maturity.

Of central importance to the evolution of Augustine's outward agnosticism on the origin of the soul, O'Connell argues, is his gradual rejection of the relationship between the merit gained by an individual soul in the celestial state and its final election to eternal life; such merit would by extension account also for the condition of any one soul's bodily life on earth. This shift is negotiated in the mid390s. Having in De Diversis Quaestionibus 83 accounted for the salvation of individuals on the basis of their elliptically put occultissimis meritis9 the Expositio Propositionum subsequently saw Augustine attribute it to God's foreknowledge of future human faith.10 Reaching his mature position in the Ad Simplicianum, he came to designate faith itself as an unmerited gift of grace, all notion of merit being projected into the life of grace post donum, in the light of the commonly held demerit of Adam. From this stable and final position, Augustine would reject a fall–election connection but not a connection between the fall of the soul and its initial, earthly (p.195) embodiment. Only in the light of the Pelagian controversy did he realize the need to integrate his theology of merit with this tendency towards approving the soul's origin in a fall from premundane life. As a result, De Trinitate 13, De Civitate Dei 14, and De Genesi ad Litteram 10 propose a synthesis in which Adam as 'transindividual personage' contained the life of all subsequent souls together (commune) in himself, and from whose sin they descended to bodies to assume their individual (propria) lives: 'Qua contemplative soul…this would permit him to be the totality of "human nature" in which all once commonly participated; as such, his fall from the spiritual paradise of contemplative union with God could indeed be our common fall as well.'11 This is a new formulation, fully in debt neither to Plotinus nor to the maiores on whose authority Augustine had defended his teaching on Original Sin. As O'Connell admits in summary: 'It seems doubtful whether Augustine's is any longer a theory of the "origin of the soul" in the conventional sense applied by both parties in the controversy; he may have come a good way toward explaining the origin of the whole man ("totus homo") who, body and soul, was the incarnate subject of original sin.'12

O'Connell's thesis is clearly controversial, and has been widely criticized. From a methodological perspective, it presupposes Augustine's philosophical dependence on Plotinus; that conclusion is by no means easily proven, as the very numerous studies arguing for Augustine's reception of Porphyry alongside or instead of Plotinus, have shown.13

Furthermore, in the light of the argument of this book, O'Connell's exclusion of Origen's work from the sources available to Augustine in adopting a fall model of the soul's origin must be contested. However, his delineation of the sheer mass of ambivalent material in the Augustinian corpus relating to the origin of the soul does point to a significant lacuna: Augustine never denies knowledge of something (p.196) lightly, and his reasons for doing so are always complex. While I leave the detail of O'Connell's argument to the interested reader, I want to revisit Augustine's treatment of the soul's http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 4/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship origin in the context of his anti Pelagian works, and with it his more specific handling of the origin of Christ's soul. As a preliminary to this, I shall briefly survey the context for Augustine's reflections on both issues in the years after 412, which are once again to be found in the Origenist controversy.

The origin of the soul in the Origenist and Pelagian controversies The problem of the soul's origin was not new to Christian discourse at the beginning of the fifth century. Carol Harrison calls it a 'Late Antique obsession': 'Its spectral presence lies behind many of the debates concerning human sinfulness and the nature and transmission of Adam's sin in the early church, precisely because it remained a live question, bequeathed from one generation of Christian theologians to another, lurking unresolved and unanswered among some of the most sensitive issues of the faith.'14 A standard conundrum of classical Physics, it had repeatedly drawn the attention of both Plato and Aristotle, and found its expositor par excellence in Plotinus.15 In the West, Tertullian had attempted a Christian treatment of the question in his own De Anima; later, Ambrose would give characteristically allegorical attention to aspects of the issue in De Isaac vel Anima. At the end of the fourth century, Nemesius of Emesa offered a full scale theological anthropology, paying due attention to the soul's origin and nature, in his De Natura Hominis. Augustine himself produced two works on the soul's characteristics (though not specifically its origin) in the 380s, the De Immortalitate Animae and De Quantitate Animae. Never a subject of foreground dispute at the early ecumenical councils, the nascence of the soul and the process of its embodiment remained an open question outside mainstream orthodoxy, allowing the writings of both Tertullian and Lactantius (erstwhile Traducianists) to be accepted into the Patristic canon by Western writers.

The rising tide of debate about the soul's origin in the West at the turn of the fifth century cannot be separated from the publication of Origen's De Principiis in Rufinus' translation of 398. For the first time, Origen's speculative treatment of the origin of the soul was available to a Latin audience in a complete edition. The subtleties of Rufinus' translation notwithstanding, (p.197) De Principiis frequently turns to this issue,16 handling it in both an abstract and speculative vein, and in relation to the election of Jacob and Esau (Rom. 9), whose differing status under the divine judgement is ascribed to the sins of their respective souls in a premundane state.17 Origen's most vivid (and perhaps most quoted) pronouncement on the origin of the soul in that work is found at De Principiis 2.8.3. Book 2 opens by arguing that all living animals have souls: cattle, men, and angels possess them as a special gift;18 nor can it to be doubted that Christ possessed a soul, as all of these possess rational feeling and movement.19 The evident imperfection of the soul raises the possibility that it is capable of falling away from God, a point corroborated by the etymology of the word ψυχη , as Rufinus translates: 'We must ask whether perhaps the word "soul", which is psyche in Greek, is not so formed because of the cooling down of the soul from its more excellent and divine state, from which the word has been translated: seeing that it has cooled from its natural, divine warmth, it is now situated—really and etymologically—in the place where it now exists.'20

Origen finds a partial proof for his theory in the figure of Esau, condemned in later life for prenatal sins, and thus born in unfavourable relationship to Jacob. While the mass of souls may have fallen from a heavenly life as a kind of communal mind, to many and diverse embodiments in present reality, this is not true of the singular soul of Christ, as 2.6 makes clear. This soul was made with the Word, 'one spirit, in preeminent degree' (principaliter unus spiritus)21 through its love and virtue, whereas, 'on account of the faculty of free will, variety and diversity have taken hold of each and every soul'.22 Like iron placed in a furnace, the union of love between the Word and this soul rendered the distinction between the two imperceptible. Likewise, the presence of the Word with the soul effected its complete sanctification: as fragrant oil, he allowed his human vessel to emit only sweet aromas. For all that such a Christology and its underlying theological anthropology is evocative and attractive, it should, however, be read in the light of the intentionally experimental remit of De Principiis as a whole. Origen makes clear in the preface of the work that his speculative reflections on doctrinal matters are always subordinate to the certain doctrine laid out in the Apostolic Teaching.23

(p.198) Following the publication of the translation, Rufinus was swiftly accused of holding the opinions he had laboured to bring to a Latin audience by Jerome's friends, Marcella and Pammachius, who took their complaint to http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 5/35

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Anastasius of Rome. Rufinus' response contained the seeds of the entire debate to follow:

But if anyone asks me what I think, I confess that I have read different things on this topic in the works of a great many writers. I have read some who say that the soul is poured out along with the body through the transmission of the human seed; and this they confirm with what declarations they can. I think that Tertullian or Lactantius among the Latins thought this, and probably quite a few more. Others claim that God makes souls daily and pours them into bodies when they are formed in the womb. Others still think that souls were made once long ago, when God created all things from nothing, and that he now distributes them to be born in bodies as his judgement decrees. Origen thought this, and not a few other Greeks. When I read each of these positions, I say—with God as my witness—that I do not hold anything about this matter to be immediately certain or definite; but I leave it to God to know what is true, and whether he will deign to reveal it to anyone himself.

Si autem et de me quid sentiam quaeritur, fateor me de hac quaestione apud quamplurimos tractatorum diuersa legisse. Legi quosdam dicentes quod pariter cum corpore per humani seminis traducem etiam anima defundatur, et hoc quibus poterant adsertionibus confirmabant. Quod puto inter latinos tertullianum sensisse uel lactantium, fortassis et alios nonnullos. Alii adserunt quod formatis in utero corporibus deus cotidie faciat animas et infundat. Alii factas iam olim, id est, tunc cum omnia deus creauit ex nihilo, nunc eas iudicio suo dispenset nasci in corpore. Hoc sentit et origenes et nonnulli alii graecorum. Ego uero cum haec singula legerim, deo teste dico quia usque ad praesens certi et definiti aliquid de hac quaestione non teneo, sed deo relinquo scire quid sit in uero et si cui ipse reuelare dignabitur.24

Four years later in 403, Jerome made his final break with both Rufinus and Origen in his Apology, pouring scorn not only on Rufinus' work as translator and traditor of proscribed texts, but also for what he construed to be his prevarication about the origin of the soul: 'On Origen alone you do not equivocate. For you say, "Origen thought this." So, I will question you: did he think it rightly, or wrongly? I do not know, you say. Why then do you send me couriers and a ceaseless flood of heralds, to try to teach me to know what (p.199) you do not?'25 Yet, as I shall show, Jerome's own position after the dust had settled was no less ambiguous or closed to criticism. Once the issue of the soul's origin had been claimed by Jerome for his anti Origenist cause, it would admit even less of an easy solution under a theological lens.

De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione 2 and 3

In my analysis of De Peccatorum Meritis in Chapter 2, I observed that this book reveals an Augustine quite aware of the connection between the protology of the soul, the doctrine of Original Sin, and its implications for a theology of infant baptism. Sensing the threat of Rufinus the Syrian's conflation of the doctrine of Original Sin with an Origenist fall of souls to his own theological reputation, and confronted by the emissary of Rufinus' theology in the person of Caelestius of Carthage, Augustine set about defending the authority of his own teaching on the Fall. The closing chapter of the second book contains the first ambivalent reference to the problem of the soul's origin in the anti Pelagian works, in terms that would be frequently repeated throughout the controversy. Offering a final exposition of Romans 8:3, Augustine observed that the 'likeness of sinful flesh' proves the reality of 'sinful flesh' possessed by all. Attempting to account for the soul's need of salvation along with its sinful flesh, he proposes two solutions: either the soul is propagated from and with sinful flesh, or it is 'mixed with the flesh of sin which weighs it down' (carni peccati aggrauanda miscetur).26 However, this latter option risks impugning the justice of God, in sentencing an innocent soul to punishment in the body. Disappointingly, Augustine abruptly leaves the issue hanging, promising another treatise specifically about the soul at a later date, and advising caution when attempting to resolve questions on which Scripture remains silent. Having recalled the manuscript of De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione 1 and 2 from Marcellinus in 412, he returned once again to the problem in book 3, completed some months later. His approach is curious, quoting from Pelagius only to sidestep the problem the text so clearly outlines:

For [Pelagius] says, if only the flesh is given by transmission, and not the soul, the flesh alone possess transmitted sin, and it alone deserves punishment (for they think this); and they say it is unjust, for a soul born today to bear so http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 6/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship ancient a sin as Adam's, but not to be from the mass of Adam.27

(p.200) Pelagius rightly recognizes the difficulty of the issue, as Augustine observes: 'he does not say "the soul is not transmitted", but "if the soul is not transmitted"' (non enim ait, quia anima non est ex traduce, sed si anima non est ex traduce).28 However, if it cannot be proven that the soul comes to the body by propagation, it likewise cannot be shown that it would not merit the punishment of sin through another mode of embodiment. He and Pelagius should rather keep silence on such a mysterious matter, which would in any case require a discrete treatise of its own. Although both passages end with this promise, Augustine would not write De Anima et eius Origine until 421, and only then in response to the explicit and highly abrasive attack of Vincentius Victor. I shall return to this important work below.

In the intervening nine years, Augustine wrote reluctantly about the origin of the soul at the urging of his correspondents. Having returned the completed three books of De Peccatorum Meritis to Marcellinus in 413, he received a letter from him in the same year, inviting a more spacious discussion of the problem, and citing De Libero Arbitrio 3 to him: 'however, assigned to inferior bodies after sin, rational substance rules its body not only by choice, but as the laws of the universe are accustomed to permit.'29 Augustine responded by stating his present position as consistent with that found elsewhere in his early work: he had never intended to prefer any one model of the soul's origin and embodiment, as the reasonable application of both a 'descent' and 'Creationist' account to Ecclesiastes 12.7, 'and the spirit returns to the God who gave it' (et spiritus redeat ad deum qui dedit illum) proves; however, Scripture says nothing clear on the matter.30

Epistles 164, 143, and 166

Shortly afterwards, Augustine received a flurry of letters from his old friend Evodius, now bishop of Uzalis. The resulting exchange is interesting not least for the light it throws on Augustine as an unwilling correspondent, ignoring letters31 and clearly showing his irritation at Evodius' criticism of his Christology in Epistle 137.32 Evodius' letter (Epistle 163 in the Augustinian corpus), sent in 414, indicates an awareness of Augustine's earlier correspondence with Marcellinus, and suggests that the question of the soul's origin was (p.201) widespread, in asking which of the theories of the soul could rightly be applied to Christ. Replying in Epistle 164, Augustine addressed the issue through Evodius' prior request that he explain the harrowing of hell.

It is incorrect to believe that Christ's soul died when he went to liberate the departed from bondage, he writes; on the contrary, the soul dies only through sin, from which Christ was entirely free, and the devil is discharged as the overlord of humanity only when a sinless soul trumps his rights in dying without sin. In what follows, Augustine applies only two of his four preferred protologies to Christ. If all souls are derived from that of Adam, that of Christ must have been cleansed in the assumption of his human nature; conversely, if souls are created and inserted into bodies from which they are infected with the contagion of sin, Christ's soul evaded a sinful nature by taking a body in the likeness of sinful flesh. Augustine adds a final disclaimer, excluding any suggestion that souls are placed penally into bodies to atone for sins committed elsewhere and making clear that this position has no bearing on the question of Christ's soul.33 While apparently answering Evodius' enquiry, Epistle 164 is evasive and fails to comment on Evodius' (and Augustine's own) 'four options' in their entirety. Furthermore, the problem of ascribing to Christ an unbalanced human nature, possessing a sinless soul within fleshly confines that very closely reflect ordinary, sinful nature, is left unaddressed. The difficulty of not indicting the justice of a God who inserts new and sinless souls into sinful bodies either fails to occur to Augustine, or again falls victim to his own confusion on the issue, in spite of his clear understanding of the problem expressed in De Peccatorum Meritis 2 and 3. And, while he rejects the idea that embodiment is effected as the divine punishment for premundane sin, other varieties of a fall or descent protology go unmentioned.

In the same year, Augustine's first correspondent, Marcellinus, pursued Jerome for an answer to his question, apparently unsatisfied with Augustine's Epistle 143. In 415 Jerome replied briefly but courteously: Marcellinus' relative Oceanus has a copy of his Apology, in which he lays out his opinions on the origin of the soul. In any case, Jerome tartly adds: 'To be sure, you have there Augustine the bishop, a holy and learned man, who can teach you viva voce, as they say, and explain his opinion; or I should rather say my opinion, put in his own words.'34 Shortly afterwards Marcellinus was executed, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 7/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship leaving Augustine to reply to Jerome's letter in his own Epistle 166, under the guise of commending to him Paul Orosius, now en route to Bethlehem.35 Alluding to the recent debate De Libero Arbitrio 3 had provoked, Augustine opens with a restatement (p.202) of his equivocal position on the soul's origin, taken from the same book. However, the majority of the letter is given over to a careful critique of Jerome's own Creationist theology.

Augustine first lists the reasons for which this theory cannot be erroneous. Creationism, he writes, is not to be discounted on the grounds that God is said in Genesis to have finished his work on the sixth day, as the creation of souls from the prototype of humanity made in God's image is a work of continuing providence, not a new creation. Similarly, the apparent waste of infant souls through early death does not bring the goodness of their creation into question, as God administers all things with perfect wisdom. Likewise, the creation of souls in time is no obstacle to their being immortal, as the flesh of Christ proves that God is capable of making the temporal eternal by his will. Lastly, the embodiment of souls in the offspring of the evil is also to be considered a work of God's wisdom, which can readily bring good from evil.36 The substance of Augustine's objection to Creationism is the more weighty, as it threatens to overturn his whole anti Pelagian project if convincingly defended: 'I therefore ask, what is the reason for the condemnation of infants? For I do not see that any sin can be in souls while in infancy, if souls are newly made as individual entities for individual infants; nor do I believe that any one of them is condemned by God when he sees it has no sin.'37

Jerome replied in 416, characteristically avoiding the content of the letter. The delicacy of the question now required silence, and Augustine should attend rather to joining him in the fight against the Pelagians. He ends with an intriguing postscript, apologizing that, owing to lack of amanuenses, he cannot send Augustine 'that edition of the Septuagint that is punctuated by asterisks and obelisks' ([editio septuaginta] quae asteriscis ueribus que distincta est).38 This cannot be anything other than the Hexapla of Origen, or a work derived from it. It would appear that Jerome wished to cease communicating not only on matters of contentious theology with his African correspondent, but also to remove himself from further censure as a supplier of suspicious texts to Augustine.

In his first anti Pelagian treatise, and in correspondence with Marcellinus, Evodius and Jerome, Augustine repeatedly rejects a single solution to the problem of the soul's origin. Insisting that his opinions had remained consistent since the writing of De Libero Arbitrio, he publicly affirmed the possibility that any one of the four commonly discussed protologies might be correct. In the absence of direct scriptural authority privileging one over the others, he (p.203) accordingly refused to commit himself to any one theory. However, writing to Jerome, he excluded Creationism as incompatible with his own teaching on Original Sin and its punishment. In his letter to Evodius, he likewise ruled out a fall model connected to penal embodiment. As would soon become apparent in De Anima et eius Origine, Augustine's insistence on the incorporeality of the soul further removed Traducianism as a solution to the problem. None of the texts cited above seriously considers a 'descent' protology, nor do they articulate clearly a 'fall' model in which the sinful soul is joined to a body to redeem its tendency to vice, precisely the position suggested in De Libero Arbitrio 3.20. This is all the more strange given that Augustine elliptically refers to the 'mixing and weighing down' (quo carni peccati aggrauanda et miscetur) of the soul with the sinfulness of the body at De Peccatorum Meritis 2.59.36, as a viable alternative to Traducianism.

De Anima et Eius Origine: the longawaited treatise

Augustine had promised in the second book of De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione to issue a treatise dealing specifically with the soul's origin. This he finally did in 421, though under the duress of further controversy distinct from, though related to, the recent Pelagian crisis. In 418, he had responded to a letter from Optatus, bishop of Mauretania Tingetana, asking for his current opinion on the issue of the origin of the soul. His tone was cordial and measured, repeating the refrain: I have never committed myself on this point, and it remains of secondary importance so long as the doctrine of Redemption is rightly held.39 Nonetheless, he continued, the two most commonly approved theories remain problematic, as Creationism implies the unjust damnation of souls, sinful only because of the quality of their bodies, and Traducianism veers towards a corporeal conception of the soul.40 In the absence of a clear solution to the problem, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 8/35

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Augustine repeated Jerome's advice: concentrate on the immediate threat of Pelagianism. Their heresy is dangerous, not because they deny the propagation of souls from Adam, but because on that basis they argue against the transmission of Original Sin. Bolstering the point, Augustine quoted Pelagius:

He says, 'If the soul is not given by the transmission of the seed, but the flesh alone contains the transmission of sin, it alone deserves punishment. It is unjust that a soul, born today but not of the mass of Adam, should bear an ancient sin not its own; for it is (p.204) not credible that God, who remits the sins of each individual, should impute to an individual a sin which is not his own.'

Si anima, inquit, ex traduce non est, sed sola caro tantum habet traducem peccati, sola ergo poenam meretur. Iniustum est enim ut hodie nata anima non ex massa Adae, tam antiquum peccatum portet alienum, quia nulla ratione conceditur ut Deus qui propria peccata dimittit, unum imputet alienum.41

All protological speculation, Augustine continues, must be founded upon what is surely known of redemption, as Zosimus has made clear in his letter: no one is called ransomed but he who was formerly made captive to sin.42 However, Augustine offered Optatus one certain opinion, to be held whatever the general theory of the soul's origin might be: Christ contracted no sin from Adam. If souls are individually created, his was also, and placed in the likeness of sinful flesh; if propagated, his was cleansed in the taking or not received by sinful propagation.43 This statement is identical with that made in Epistle 164; Epistle 190, however, contains the seeds of Augustine's final position as O'Connell depicts it, that 'when they existed originally in their parents, they were not yet the kind of creatures that exercised their own individual lives' (cum essent originaliter in parentibus, adhuc ipsi nulli erant qui suas et proprias uitas agerent).44 Christ's soul as an individual creation or propagated and 'cleansed' entity aside, it remains unclear what it would mean for his soul to have been 'in Adam' before individuation, subsequently not to have contracted sin by propagation from Adam's fall. Even more mysterious is Augustine's claim that Christ's soul may not have come from the Adamic, preindividuated soul at all; unfortunately, he does not pursue the point. Epistle 190 passed into the hands of one of Optatus' presbyters, Peter, at whose home it was found and read by Vincentius Victor. A recent convert from Rogatism,45 (p.205) Vincentius took issue with Augustine's agnostic stance on the soul's origin, and wrote a twovolume critique of his position to Peter. Once detected by the bearer of Optatus' initial letter to Augustine, Renatus, it was sent to Augustine.

The resulting treatise of 421, De Anima et eius Origine, was published as a collection of four lengthy letters, to Renatus (book 1), Peter (2), and Vincentius Victor (3 and 4). The full content of the work is convoluted and repetitive. In part, this is due to the complexity of Vincentius' own position (arguably unintelligible taken as a whole), which combines a corporeal conception of the soul with an account of its emanation from God's own substance, together with a highly confused account of merit, in which the soul before embodiment deserves neither good nor bad, but once in the flesh is considered to have merited defilement through it.46 Replying to Vincentius in book 4, Augustine applies a standard of intellectual limitation on his position, which can be read as a defence of his own agnostic stance on the origin of the soul throughout his mature works. Vincentius begins from the assertion that knowing the origin of the human soul falls within the remit of ordinary selfknowledge. Augustine counters this with the fact that knowledge of our present physical biology and even our infancy is itself bounded, apart from any question of the soul's primal state.47 It may be the case that we have forgotten this knowledge, or never knew it to begin with, but the point is irrelevant, as we are as fully ourselves before we remember a forgotten datum as afterwards, even when in remembering we are restored to ourselves.48 The extent of our present intellect and will is cloudy to us, and both faculties require the augmentation of grace to reach their full dimension. This is the essence of faith, the acknowledgement of our limits in openness to their expansion by God. In promising his life to Christ, Peter did not know the extent of the power of his own will, which would finally be led to martyrdom.49 The resurrection itself comes under the heading of those things not yet fully known, and is not to be doubted as a central article of the faith.

Two related features of the treatise call for comment. First, in responding to Vincentius' own theory of the origin of souls, Augustine discusses only (p.206) Traducianism and Creationism. These, combined with a variety of Emanationism, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 9/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship comprise Vincentius' stance. There is no explicit mention of either a fall or descent model, so common in Augustine's general approach to the topic, although the question of merit (crucial to both) is treated in the course of tackling Vincentius' understanding of the soul's condition following embodiment. Secondly, Augustine heads his consideration of the limits of human knowledge of the primal state with the proposition that it might have been forgotten or never known. However, while he devotes considerable space to an exposition of the nature of memory and forgetting, he does not fully explore the possibility that this knowledge was never possessed to begin with. The central reflection on memory is reminiscent of Augustine's meditation on the expanse—and limitation—of memory at the heart of Confessiones 10, itself an original reworking of Enneads 3.3.2:

And whosoever tries to learn of this is told quite rightly: 'Do not seek the things that are too high for you, neither search for those things above your strength.' For it is not that these things are higher than our stature can attain, but that they are higher than our intelligence can reach; and they are beyond the strength of the power of our human capacity to penetrate. And yet, it is not the heaven of heaven, nor the measure of the stars, nor the limit of the sea and the earth, nor the depth of the deeps: it is we who have not the power to understand ourselves. We surpass the small measure of our own knowledge, who are higher than ourselves and beyond our own strength. We cannot grasp ourselves, even within who we are. However, we are not on that account to be compared to cattle, because we cannot discover who we are within: and you think to compare us to the cattle, if we have forgotten who we are, even though we knew it once.

Et quisquis fuerit conatus haec discere, non frustra ei dicitur, Altiora te ne quaesieris, et fortiora te ne scrutatus fueris. Neque enim altiora sunt quam potest nostra statura contingere, sed quam potest nostra coniectura comprehendere; et fortiora quam potest vis humani ingenii penetrare: et tamen non est coelum coeli, non dimensio siderum, non modus maris atque terrarum, non infernus inferior: nos sumus, qui nos comprehendere non valemus; nos modulum scientiae nostrae altiores fortioresque superamus; nos non possumus capere nos, et certe non sumus extra nos. Nec ideo comparandi pecoribus, quia id quod sumus non penitus invenimus: et comparandos nos pecoribus putas, si quod fuimus obliti sumus, si tamen id aliquando noveramus.50

Augustine appears to be working out an ironic subtext here, recalling his own past work in an analysis of the limitations of memory, in a text whose 'primal state' is found in the works of Plotinus. Viewing it under O'Connell's critical lens, we may read the passage as a covert and very subtly ironic reminder of the two theories of the soul's origin, which go unmentioned elsewhere in the work. Reviewing Augustine's own promise of 412, we are, however, left with a text that is disappointingly inexplicit. Far from resolving his opinions in public (p.207) discourse, it makes only a fraction of the possible solutions to the problem public and defines his own position as essentially and permanently ambiguous. It would remain so throughout his final works against Julian, Augustine having by this time moved the terms of the debate by situating 'unindividuated' souls in Adam. Inevitably, his loose ends leave the question of Christ's soul hanging as well.

In all of his literary engagement with the question of the soul's origin, Augustine remained aloof and defensive. Where a secondary issue among the theologically literate had become an item of interest and lively debate in the closing years of the fourth century, Rufinus of Aquileia's translation of De Principiis, and his subsequent acrimonious row with Jerome, catapulted any discussion of the issue in Origenian terms to a position of acute controversy. In his early works, Augustine had been careful to couch his exploration of a Christian Platonist fall/descent protology in detailed disclaimers. After the exposure of Rufinus of Syria as the ultimate source of Caelestius' theology in 412, these disclaimers alone remained in Augustine's writing, along with a refutation of the importance of the issue tout court. While he maintained the formal possibility that souls are created afresh for each newly propagated body, his attack on Jerome in Epistle 166 effectively reveals his rejection of the theory. Similarly, although Augustine acknowledges the currency of Traducianism within historic Christian discourse, his suspicions of the theory (centred on its suggestion of the corporeality of the soul) rule it out as a 'live' solution to the question. What remains, by his own admission, are a variety of protologies in which the soul is held to have existed in a prior life, before falling, descending, or being divinely sent to embodiment. In a complex and ironic move, the superficially negative method of De Anima et eius Origine rather suggests that it is precisely the soul's http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 10/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship forgotten origin in a premundane life that makes its embodiment an unknowable mystery. Yet this remains a suggestion, to be weighed against his repeated rejections of the debate altogether.

In his anti Apollinarian polemic, Augustine reiterated the orthodox truism: in order to save humankind, Christ must possess a fully human soul. His engagement with the issue of the soul's origin notwithstanding, a sustained treatment of the origin of Christ's soul is absent from his whole work. The closest Augustine comes to pronouncing on the topic in Epistle 180 is, once again, equivocal: if souls are created for each individual, Christ's was created sinless; if they are propagated, his was cleansed in the assumption, or not taken from the same source as sinful humanity. Having implicitly rejected both Traducianism and Creationism, Augustine cannot seriously apply the first two options to Christ. This leaves the tantalizing question: from where else but the fallen humanity of Adam can Christ's soul come?

Because it is impossible to answer this question directly from within the Augustinian corpus, the remainder of this chapter will be an attempt to piece (p.208) together several related aspects of Augustine's Christology, to find an implicit doctrine of Christ's soul beneath them. Inasmuch as the texts will permit such a reading, I want to argue that Augustine's early use of the phrase 'human of the Lord' or 'dominical human' (homo dominicus) should be reclassified as an Origenian designation for the humanity of Christ, and I will explore its relationship to the terms 'human assumed/taken up' (homo assumptus and susceptus) found elsewhere in Augustine's earlier works. In their suggestion that the Incarnation sees the takingup of an already existing human person, these phrases are problematic, and have given rise to a rich seam of scholarship on the debt of Augustine to Antiochene Christology. While I shall attend to this question and its bearing on my broader reading of Augustine as (by contrast) the inheritor of an Origenian Christological tradition, my main focus will be on the precise character of the Incarnate humanity indicated by these terms. I shall then expand these observations by turning to Augustine's description of the process by which the homo of the Incarnation is taken up without regard to his prevenient merits. In the context of his broader theology of predestination and election, I shall investigate whether such a characterization of this humanity as one having no merit to gain salvation makes theological sense. The disjunction—and commonality—between these two varying accounts of the Incarnation will point towards the 'white elephant' in Augustine's Christology. This is not, after all, Apollinarianism, but rather an undeveloped and latent belief in Christ's human preexistence, and with it his unfallen soul. I shall find confirmation of this in two crucial texts, taken from Epistle 140 and De Genesi ad Litteram 10.

A case of mistaken identities? Augustine and Christ, Dominicus Homo As I indicated in my Introduction, making a neat survey of Augustine's Christology is hindered not only by the size and chronological spread of his works, but also by the wide variety of images he uses to describe the Incarnation. Among the more mysterious is his use of the term homo dominicus, the 'human of the Lord' or 'dominical human', found in seven works between the years 386 and 395. The swift disappearance of the term in 395, its ambiguous theological content, and its roots in a number of controversial streams of theology make it a fixed datum of scholarship on Augustine's Christology. Here, my interest centres on excavating what it can tell us about Augustine's attitude to the prehistory of Christ's humanity. Before looking in detail at his use of the term and plotting its origin in the tradition preceding him, it is worth noting once again the significance of this time span. The year of (p.209) Augustine's conversion—386—initiated his retirement from rhetoric and retreat to Cassiciacum. In 395, he was elected to the episcopate. Before this crucial event, Augustine had been immersed in scriptural study, writing his first fulllength commentaries not only on Genesis, but also on the letters of Paul. After 395 would come the Ad Simplicianum, beginning the trajectory of Augustine's mature teaching on sin and grace. His use of the term homo dominicus therefore falls within his formative passage from neophyte to bishop; it ceases just as the Origenist controversy was beginning to accelerate.

Reviewing his use of the phrase at the end of his career, Augustine commented:

I do not see how it is correct to refer to the Mediator of God and humanity, the human Christ Jesus, as 'the human of the Lord', since he is Lord in a unique way. Is it not possible to call him or her 'the human of the Lord', who is part of His holy family? And, as I have said, I have read this in Catholic authors who write with a most divine http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 11/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship eloquence. But (and I have said this everywhere) I said I did not realize that then. Later, I saw that the phrase should not be used of Christ, although its use could be defended with a measure of reason.

sed non uideo utrum recte dicatur homo dominicus qui est mediator dei et hominum homo christus iesus, cum sit utique dominus. dominicus autem homo quis in eius sancta familia non potest dici? et hoc quidem ut dicerem apud quosdam legi tractatores catholicos diuinorum eloquiorum. sed ubicumque hoc dixi, dixisse me nollem. postea quippe uidi non esse dicendum, quamuis nonnulla possit ratione defendi.51

By his own account, after 395 he had rejected the phrase for not being Christologically specific enough, even though it had been taken from sound sources; homo dominicus could be used to describe any baptized Christian, and not only the Incarnate Son.

The majority of the texts that refer to the homo dominicus present the term simply as a synonym for Christ, without significant doctrinal emphasis.52 A minority are more unusual, and suggest that the Incarnation involves the assumption of an already existing, personal entity. I give them here more fully (p.210) as a result, beginning with the subject of the above Retractationes entry, De Sermone Domini in Monte 2.20.6:

None will be permitted to disregard the Kingdom of God, when his onlybegotten will come in the human of the Lord from heaven, not only in a way intelligible to the mind but also visibly, to judge the living and the dead.

nulli autem licebit ignorare dei regnum, cum eius unigenitus non solum intelligibiliter sed etiam uisibiliter in homine dominico de caelo uenerit iudicaturus uiuos et mortuos.

Although the main point of concern here is undoubtedly the second coming, the final subclause is suggestively ambiguous, depending on whether de caelo is taken with homine dominico or uenerit. While the latter is evidently consistent with credal and scriptural language of the Word's descent from heaven, the former nonetheless makes grammatical sense and finds a parallel in 1 Corinthians 15:47 (secundus homo de caelo caelestis in Augustine's text). What the 'human of the Lord from heaven' might be, is left unamplified.

En. Ps. 4.2 comes demonstrably closer to inferring a 'person assumed' Christology. Augustine's text is Romans 5:5 ('God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit'), which amplifies Psalm 4:1 ('In my tribulation you have enlarged me'). Exemplifying the hopeful cry of the graced human, these texts cannot, however, be applied to Christ:

This text is correctly understood of the person who believes in Christ and is illuminated; but I do not see how it can be applied fittingly to that human of the Lord, which the Wisdom of God took up. For he was never, at any time, deserted by Wisdom.

quod in persona eius qui credens in christum illuminatus est, recte accipitur; in ipsius autem dominici hominis, quem suscepit dei sapientia, non uideo quemadmodum hoc possit congruere. non enim ab ea aliquando desertus est.

It should be noted that Augustine directly compares the human persona crying out to God to the homo dominicus: persona here is a locus of experience and agency, a thing that God can desert with tangible results, a feeling thing. This, too, is seemingly what the Son of God assumes and has never (note the perfect tense) left.53 More unexpected still is Augustine's exposition of Psalm 8. In paragraph 10 of the Enarratio, he distinguishes between 'human' and 'Son of Humanity', the former being the earthly man typified by Adam, the latter those who (p.211) 'bear the image of the heavenly human' (portant imaginem caelestis hominis). Thus the words of the psalm, 'What is the human, that you are mindful of him; or the Son of Humanity, that you visit him?' (quid est homo, quia memor es eius, aut filius hominis, quoniam tu uisitas eum?) are to be apportioned between the two types of humanity. This makes perfectly good sense where God's mindfulness of sinners and sanctifying visitation of the saints is in mind; its meaning is less clear when http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 12/35

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Augustine turns to Christ: 'The Son of Humanity was first visited in that human of the Lord, which was born from the Virgin Mary' (filius igitur hominis primo uisitatus est in ipso homine dominico, nato ex maria uirgine).

If the divine visitation is attendant on a prior attainment of the 'image of the heavenly man', and the homo dominicus is the first to be graced with such a visitation, the moment of his prior sanctification arises as an open question. Is Augustine referring to the Incarnation from the Virgin itself as the occasion of God's selfpresentation to Christ's humanity, or to some time before it? The text is too elliptical to judge accurately. At which point the humanity of Christ might have approximated that of the Adamic man alone is likewise left open, although Augustine's treatment of Romans 8:3 elsewhere reveals his correlation of Christ's humanity with both fallen, graced, and saved humankind.

As this brief examination of the texts shows, the phrase homo dominicus in Augustine's early works is not put to consistent use, being either a broad cipher for 'Christ' or veering uncertainly towards a 'person assumed' typology. Drobner's 1986 study of the meaning of persona in Augustine's Christology admits some confusion about his abandonment of the phrase,54 and glosses it (perhaps a little redundantly) as a reference to Christ as 'a human elevated out of the normal level of humanity'.55 Its interest, however, lies as much in its origin as in its vague application, as Grillmeier highlighted in his seminal article on the history of the term: '[Augustine] took it over from others, and used it without independent reflection or analysis as an expression denoting the human reality of Christ.'56 His now authoritative article on the designation κυριακος ἀνθρωπος /homo dominicus shows clearly its changing fortunes throughout the fourth and fifth centuries in both the East and West, through Athanasius, Severus of Antioch, and Marcellus of Ancyra, Didymus, and Jerome.57

(p.212) The author whose use of the term appears most closely to anticipate that of Augustine is Didymus the Blind, who attributes the words of the psalmist to Christ the κυριακος ἀνθρωπος ,58 and who uses the phrase with specific reference to Christ's human sinlessness.59 Altaner has argued that Didymus is to be identified with the plurally named tractatores catholicos of Retractationes 1.19.8, it being almost certain that Augustine knew De Spiritu Sancto in Jerome's translation of 389. Altaner argues this from Augustine's characterization of the Holy Spirit as the digitus dei, found in De Spirito Sancto 20 and reproduced in Quaestiones in Heptateuchem 2.25, of around 420.60 However, Goulven Madec has since proposed that Augustine's use of homo dominicus in his early writing points decisively to a reception of Didymus shortly after the publication of Jerome's translation.61 Of particular interest here is De Spirito Sancto 51, not only for its attribution of the words of the psalmist to the domincus homo, but also in its final reference to Luke 1:35:

Indeed, that this voice comes forth from the person of the human of the Lord, which the onlybegotten Son of God deigned to assume from the Virgin, is clearly confirmed out of this text: for he is the right hand of God, as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles. For he was made from the seed of David according to the flesh and born of the Virgin, after the Holy Spirit had come upon her, and the power of the Most High had overshadowed her.

Et certe vocem hanc ex persona Dominici Hominis proferri, quem unigenitus Filius Dei assumere dignatus est ex virgine, ex ipso loco manifeste comprobatur, quia ipse est dextera Dei, sicut scriptum est in Actibus apostolorum, quod factus sit ex semine David secundum carnem, genitus de Virgine, Spiritu sancto superveniente in eam, et virtute Excelsi obumbrante eam.

As I have shown, the majority of Augustine's references to the dominicus homo occur in the context of expositing the Psalms, as is the case here. Likewise, Augustine appears to follow Didymus in writing of the homo dominicus as something the Word assumes in the Incarnation, together with its undertone of preexisting personhood. Furthermore, Didymus treats the Christology of the virginal conception out of the text of Luke 1:35, in a manner that reflects that of Origen, and that became increasingly fundamental to Augustine's Christology through the 390s. Presuming that Augustine was in receipt of De Spiritu Sancto after 389, and that he recognized in it a Christology of the virginal conception bearing a family likeness with that of Origen, it is not unreasonable to conclude that he absorbed the shorthand homo dominicus (p.213) into his own work from it. Augustine's rejection of the phrase after 395 is further http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 13/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship explained by anchoring Didymus' use of the term in a prior work of Origen, a lineage about which Augustine became gradually more cautious after 395, as he observed Jerome distance himself from Origenism, and Didymus within it.

Grillmeier's history of homo dominicus Christology begins in Alexandria with Athanasius, the context that subsequently defines its homoousian, generally orthodox and eventually rather bland credentials.62 However, I believe some further tinting can be added to the story of its development by returning once again to the Origenian corpus, to a text apparently unnoticed by Grillmeier. In the first book of his commentary on John, Origen writes:

However, we hear of a man who is said to be coming after John, who was made before him and was in existence before him, so that we would also learn that the human of the Son of God, the man who was mixed with His divinity, was older than His birth from Mary. John says he did not know this man. But how did he not know Him when he leapt for joy when he was yet a babe unborn in the womb of Elizabeth, when the voice of Mary's salutation sounded in the ears of the wife of Zachariah? Ponder, therefore, whether the words 'I know Him not' may have reference to the period before the bodily existence.

Ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀνὴρ πρὸς τούτοις λέγεται ὀπίσω Ἰωάννου ἐρχόμενος, ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ γεγενημένος καὶ πρὸ αὐτοῦ ὤν, ἵνα διδαχθῶμεν καὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ τὸν τῇ θεότητι αὐτοῦ ἀνακεκραμένον πρεσβύτερον εἶναι τῆς ἐκ Μαρίας γενέσεως, ὅντινα ἄνθρωπόν φησιν ὁ βαπτιστὴς ὅτι οὐκ ᾔδει. Πῶς δὲ οὐκ ᾔδει ὁ σκιρτήσας ἐν ἀγαλλιάσει ἔτι βρέφος τυγχάνων ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ τῆς Ἐλισάβετ, ὅτε ἐγένετο ἡ φωνὴ τοῦ ἀσπασμοῦ τῆς Μαρίας εἰς τὰ ὦτα τῆς Ζαχαρίου γυναικός; Ἐπίστησον οὖν, εἰ δύναται τὸ οὐκ ᾔδειν κατὰ τὰ πρὸ σώματος λέγειν· 63

(p.214) In a piece otherwise unconcerned with the development of dominicus homo language, Vogt glosses τὸν ἄνθρωπον τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ as 'the human of the Son of God; in Latin later rendered "homo domini" or "homo dominicus"'.64 The thrust of both 'the human of the Son of God' and 'the human of the Lord' is undoubtedly in the same direction, in referring to a human (in some cases person, in others, nature) belonging to the eternal Son, the divine Lord. Although this is the only extant instance of the phrase in the Origenian corpus, it nonetheless provides a basis from which Didymus might have taken the term in his study of Origen's work, and perhaps the Alexandrianeducated Athanasius also. I would, therefore, argue that Augustine adopted the term on the basis of its broadly Alexandrian pedigree, perceiving the relationship between Didymus and Origen on the basis of their shared provenance and translation by Jerome, and confirmed by a reading of De Spiritu Sancto. His better knowledge of the politics—and potential watchwords—of Origenism from 395 must be included as a factor in his eventual rejection of the phrase. This further nuances a reading of his Retractationes entry, in which the term is not fully repudiated, but classified as Christologically inadequate.

Thus far, I have outlined Augustine's mixed use of the term homo dominicus in his works prior to 395, drawing attention to this date as the termination of his period of theological reeducation and the beginning of his assumption of episcopal authority. I have also suggested that its source in the works of Origen provided the motive for his rejection of the phrase as the polemical discussion of the theology of Origen increased around him. Noting that several of the passages in which Augustine refers to the homo dominicus resonate with a 'person assumed' Christology, the question of his attitude to the preexistence of Christ's humanity remains unresolved. I therefore turn to other evidence in the Augustinian corpus, which can be used to illuminate his teaching on the origin of the human nature (or indeed, person) of Christ, and with it his soul.

Homo Dominicus: Assumptus Homo?

Closely related to and enlarging upon the term dominicus homo is the problematic phrase assumptus/susceptus homo, common to both Eastern and Western writers through the fourth and fifth centuries. Its history culminates in Cyril of Alexandria's attack on Nestorius in the approach to the council of Ephesus. While I have no intention here of exploring in depth these later Eastern assessments of the terminology, it will be useful to sketch briefly the chief objections to the phrase: first, that it implies the existence of Christ's (p.215) humanity prior to the Incarnation, which, once assumed, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 14/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship situates two persons within the hypostatic union; and, secondly, that the Trinity becomes a quaternity of persons once the

Incarnation has taken place. In the mode of traditional Patristics, the fault of this Nestorianism is to be attributed to the literal exegesis of Antioch, in which the human experience of Christ was emphasized, and a Word–human model of the Christological union preferred. This is to be contrasted with an Alexandrian approach (of which Apollinarianism forms the extreme example), whose allegorical exegesis more readily interprets the human life of Christ in terms of the hidden divine activity underlying it, and privileges a Word–flesh model of the union, presuming the ontological continuity of the Word and the human soul. Clearly, the Alexandrian tradition was also capable of envisioning a preexistent human life of Christ, as the work of Origen shows. However, such a life in this context is dependent on the eternally willed co inherence of all spiritual humans in the life of the Trinity, united to it through the love of the Son; the human soul of Origen's Christ, therefore, has no existence apart from his union with the Word, which in turn forms the theological possibility of the Incarnation. The occurrence of assumptus homo language in the Latin Fathers before 431 has, therefore, been a point of acute concern to scholars seeking to reconcile the plurality of Christological language outside the councils to the flattening discourse of the ecumenical documents. Within this stream of scholarship, the question of Augustine's commitment to an 'Antiochene' 'person assumed' Christology has been thoroughly debated. Easy conclusions on the issue have once again been dispersed by his shifting, imprecise language and the difficulty of placing him within a clear tradition of theological reception.

I want to begin this examination of homo assumptus language in the Augustinian corpus with Augustine's own disclaimer: whatever his use of the term, in his maturity he understood fully the problem of assigning two persons to Christ and enlarging the Trinity as a result. In De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, he wrote:

This is that unspeakably accomplished, unique takingup by the Word of a human, so that he might truly and correctly be called Son of God and Son of Humanity at the same time: Son of Humanity according to the human taken up; and Son of God according to onlybegotten God taking him up. On this account, we believe in a Trinity, not a Quaternity.

ipsa est illa ineffabiliter facta hominis a deo uerbo susceptio singularis, ut filius dei et filius hominis simul, filius hominis propter susceptum hominem, et filius dei propter suscipientem unigenitum deum ueraciter et proprie diceretur; ne non trinitas, sed quaternitas crederetur.65

(p.216) Immediately following this treatise, in De Dono Perseverantiae, Augustine made the same point once again, correcting his vocabulary in the process:

I say: the faithful believer who believes in him also confesses a true human nature, which is our own; however, it is uniquely taken up by God the Word and elevated into the only Son of God, so that he who takes up and what he takes up might be one person in the Trinity. For it is not made a Quaternity by the addition of the humanity assumed, but it remains a Trinity.

fidelis, inquam, qui in eo ueram naturam credit et confitetur humanam, id est nostram, quamuis singulariter suscipiente deo uerbo, in unicum filium dei sublimatam, ita ut qui suscepit et quod suscepit una esset in trinitate persona. neque enim homine assumpto quaternitas facta est, sed trinitas mansit.66

The subtle change illustrates perfectly the problem facing any analysis of Augustine's use of the word homo in a Christological context: he rarely makes explicit whether it designates the individual or the collective, leaving only context to guide the reader.

The authoritative survey of homo assumptus language in the Patristic corpus remains H. M. Diepen's article of 1963, issued as a conclusive response to the longrunning discussion of its orthodoxy among French and Belgian scholars through the first half of the century. Diepen distinguishes between three different kinds of homo assumptus Christology: that which truly asserts a dipersonal Christ and implies the preexistence of his human identity; a 'mystical' Christology, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 15/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship which associates the homo assumed with Christ's ecclesial Body, and a 'grammatical' approach in which homo is properly interchangeable with humana natura. Augustine, he argues, falls firmly in the third category, although he also uses the term in its ecclesial sense.67 Noting the common undertones of both homo dominicus and assumptus homo language, he suggests that the former was rejected for seeming too like a formal namedesignation for Christ, while the latter is merely a heightened form of ordinary vocabulary applied to the Incarnation. As should be clear from my argument above, this does only partial justice to the abruptness and chronological context of the term's disappearance from the Augustinian corpus. Crucial to his argument for a 'grammatical' use in Augustine is the observation of its application alongside a monopersonal, diaphysite Christology in which the communication of idioms is also emphasized. Epistle 187, of (p.217) 417, is taken to prove the first point: 'It is clear that by a certain unique takingup of that human, it was made one person with the Word' (Est plane, quod singulari quadam susceptione homine illius, una facta est persona cum Verbo);68 De Agone Christiano 25.23 substantiates the second: 'Thus we say that the Son of God suffered and died in the human whom he bore' (sic Filium Deum passum et mortuum dicimus in homine quem portabat). Although the first citation bears out Diepen's argument, the obvious absence of the verbs assumere/suscipere in the second should be noted. Epistle 219, of 418, in which Augustine commends Leporius to his own bishops in Gaul after having corrected the mistakes in his Christology, is taken to show a clear awareness of the pitfalls of dipersonalism well in advance of De Praedestinatione Sanctorum:

He was not judging certain things correctly, nor did he understand rightly when he denied that God was made man, lest an unworthy change or corruption should follow in the divine substance, which is equal to the Father; nor did he realize that he was covertly introducing a fourth person into the Trinity [because of this].

non recta quaedam saperet nec uera sentiret negans deum hominem factum, ne uidelicet substantiae diuinae, qua aequalis est patri, indigna mutatio uel corruptio sequeretur, nec uidens quartam se subintroducere in trinitate personam.69

The risk of denaturing the Trinity through a deficient Christology is evidently uppermost in Augustine's mind here, yet this is something effected by a change to the divine substance, where the Son is fractured in his eternal (impassible) and Incarnate (passible) aspects; no mention is made of two persons subsisting in the Incarnation. Further evidence for the conflation of 'Antiochene' and 'Alexandrian' motifs is found in Augustine's letter to Evodius of 415, in which he refers to the 'human…who was fitted to the unity of the person of the Word of God, that is, to the only Son of God, by a wonderful and unique taking up' (homo…in unitatem personae uerbi dei, hoc est unici filii dei mirabili et singulari susceptione coaptatus est);70 here, 'in Christ, the Word and the human is one person' (in Christo uerbum et homo una persona est).71 However, in the same passage Augustine makes the curious assertion: 'the human comes into the Word; the Word does not come into the human as something that can be changed, and for this reason the Son of God is said to be together with the human that has been taken up' (homo autem uerbo accessit, non uerbum in hominem conuertibiliter accessit; atque ita et filius dei simul cum homine suscepto dicitur).72 By 415, Augustine's teaching on the incapacity of the human to approach God was already established; what the 'human comes into the Word' might mean in this context is therefore doubly mysterious.

(p.218) For the few reservations I have levelled against Diepen's study above, his analysis of the lexical 'looseness' of Augustine's Christology cannot be faulted: Augustine certainly uses homo assumptus language alongside vocabulary that suggests a substantial union of two natures in one person. However, his summary comments lead to my substantive criticism. Observing that 'at a certain time in his life, Augustine was truly a theologian of the assumptus homo',73 he goes on to remark on the predominance of the motif in the context of Augustine's early, Platonically inspired works. However, this vitiates against his overall conclusion, that 'our Doctor consented to use substantially inexact formulas, quite simply in order to conform to the customs received in the African churches'.74 Any conscious reception of specifically African, Christological vocabulary cannot have begun in earnest until well into Augustine's ministry, the period that simultaneously sees a marked development in his critical reassessment of Christian Platonism. In this historical muddle, I believe Diepen is missing the theological mark. What he and other readers of the homo assumptus trope fail to consider http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 16/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship is the possibility that Augustine did not confuse the terms used to distinguish between an individual and a corporate identity, but declined to make the distinction a hard and fast one altogether. To expand my point, I want to turn briefly to Augustine's interpretation of Genesis, and his later characterization of human creation 'in' and 'as' the corporate Adam.

De Genesi ad Litteram and creation in Adam

In his work of 1987, O'Connell argued that Augustine attempted to resolve the question of the soul's origin in his maturity by pushing his exegesis of Romans 5:12 into his theology of creation. If the punishment for Original Sin committed in Adam is shared by all, all must first have been created in and with him, in a single, incorporated, and mystical identity. While Augustine articulates this position most clearly in his late works against Julian, it cannot be understood apart from his much earlier attempts to comment on the book of Genesis, and to resolve the apparent conflict between the two accounts of creation given in books 1–3. In the 380s, De Genesi adversus Manichaeos had advanced a figurative exegesis of the creation narrative, the creation of humankind as perfect spiritual beings in Genesis 1 being contrasted with the history of human embodiment in Genesis 2 and 3. While the priority of the work is the refutation of Manichaean dualism, its debt to Origen and Ambrose is evident not only in hermeneutical method, but also in direct textual reception, which I have indicated in Chapter 2. Because the work (p.219) substantially precedes Augustine's exegetical development of the mid390s, and is in many ways anomalous among his readings of Genesis, I will pursue its contents no further here. Of greater interest to this study is De Genesi ad Litteram. Begun around the turn of the fifth century and published in 416, it developed in tandem with Augustine's conflict with Pelagianism.

In his early work De Diversis Quaestionibus 83, Augustine had attempted to outline a Christian development on the Platonic doctrine of prephysical Forms, claiming their creation by and in the intelligence of God,75 and the capacity of the soul to behold them in the intelligible realm within the beatific vision.76 De Genesi ad Litteram returned to the theme, treating Genesis 1 as an account of the simultaneous creation of the rationes causales, the spiritual forms conceived within the Word from which the temporal creation of Genesis 2 and 3 would unfold. In book 5 of the work, he sums up his foregoing treatment of Genesis 1 by accounting for the change, development, and fruition of creation in the present as an act of divine providence, when God 'unfurled the ages which he put in place as a connected sequence when they were first established' (explicat saecula, quae illi, cum primum condita est, tamquam plicita indiderat) within his own mind, the eternal Son.77 Resting from creation on the seventh day, God beholds the work of the creation effected through six prior days, which are, however, a single divine act, one creative day; he rested in himself, and 'he presented the day which he had made six times with those creatures he had made, not temporally, in alternating sequence, but in the order which is known according to their rational causes'.78 Turning to the creation of man in time in book 6, Augustine carefully explains the distinction between the simultaneous and temporal creations:

Now, however, it is the case that those things are in one way finished, and in another way unfinished, which God at the first created simultaneously and are being evolved (p.220) out of the succession of time. They are finished indeed, because they have nothing in their proper natures, by which they traverse their course through time, which was not made in them in their rational causes. They are likewise unfinished, because they were like seeds of future things which are to be uncovered in fitting places through the course of time, from darkness into light.

nunc autem, quia et consummata quodam modo et quodam modo inchoata sunt ea ipsa, quae consequentibus euoluenda temporibus primitus deus simul omnia creauit, cum faceret mundum—consummata quidem, quia nihil habent illa in naturis propriis, quibus suorum temporum cursus agunt, quod non in istis causaliter factum sit, inchoata uero, quoniam quaedam erant quasi semina futurorum per saeculi tractum ex occulto in manifestum locis congruis exerenda.79

Humankind as a creature possessing both body and soul is to be included among these 'completed beginnings', any suggestion that the human ratio causalis contained only the soul is to be rejected, along with the proposition that souls are punished for the sins committed in the intelligible realm by being 'thrust down…into different bodies on account of the merits of their different sins' (pro diuersorum meritis peccatorum in diuersa corpora…detrusas).80 However, while http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 17/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship

Augustine shortly afterwards clarifies the distinction between the animalis body of Adam in paradise and the spiritalis body promised to the saints,81 he leaves the quality of the body's ratio causalis unexplained. It is difficult to imagine how this would be different from the soul's potential to animate a body, making it in turn the body's rational cause.

This elision is further complicated in Augustine's later works, where the concept of the rationes causales is clumsily transferred into the discussion of the propagation of sinfulness. This is most clearly displayed in De Civitate Dei 13, in the course of describing the punishment for Adam's sin:

We all were one in him, when all of us were the one of him, who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before sin. Form was not yet created and distributed to us individually, in which we might live as individuals; but the seminal nature, from which we would be propagated, was already in existence. When this was vitiated by sin, constrained by the chains of death, and justly damned, there was no other condition of humanity from which the human could be born.

omnes enim fuimus in illo uno, quando omnes fuimus ille unus, qui per feminam lapsus est in peccatum, quae de illo facta est ante peccatum. nondum erat nobis singillatim creata et distributa forma, in qua singuli uiueremus; sed iam erat natura seminalis, ex qua propagaremur; qua scilicet propter peccatum uitiata et uinculo mortis obstricta iusteque damnata non alterius condicionis homo ex homine nasceretur.82

Where De Genesi ad Litteram depicts Adam as the inheritor and instantiation of the human ratio causalis, the later text speaks of Adam himself as the cause and 'seminal nature' from which human individuation follows. This attempt (p.221) to justify the doctrine of Original Sin results in a blurring of the division between the seminal and temporal creations, Adam's fall as ratio causalis in whom all are corporately present now implicitly taking place in a pretemporal Eden.

My first observation attendant on this shift in vocabulary is that Augustine does not sharply define the human individual in contrast to corporate, human identity in his discussion of the rationes causales and seminal creation in Adam. This is not the same as stating that human persons all possess human nature, and share an identical set of characteristics proper to it. Augustine goes further than this, first in the suggestion that all humans are derived from an intelligible prototype; and, latterly, in his depiction of Adam as a 'corporate individual' straddling both the intelligible realm and present history. In and from him, individuals are irreducibly corporate in character. Where Augustine writes of the Word taking up a homo, this therefore cannot mean that the divine nature instantiates (or hypostasizes) human nature in the abstract, because Augustine does not conceive of such a thing in isolation. His is not the common fault of Latin synecdoche, as Diepen would have it. Rather, homo susceptus appears to indicate the conjunction (to use Augustine's own word) of the Word with a human individuality that is always corporate, because all humans are Adam, and Adam is all humanity. By Augustine's own admission, this human preexists the present historical world, both as an abstract ratio causalis and as Adam, totus homo, the corporate Human in whom all persons subsist.

Before proceeding further, I want to register my own doubts about the logic of this position. In the writings of another theologian, an unexamined description of Adam as the source and seed of all humankind would be acceptable; it is, after all, warranted by Scripture. However, as I have tried to show, the conflation of such language by Augustine with a Christianized Formtheory simply makes no sense. In order to account for the total sway of Original Sin over humankind, Augustine collapses the narrative of Adam's historical Fall back into the intelligible realm where Adam is the human natura seminalis; by the lights of De Genesi ad Litteram, this would involve the Fall taking place within the mind of God, a position Augustine would clearly find untenable.

Augustine's problem, I believe, lies in explaining the propagation of sinful nature from an individual's historic act. Augustine cannot situate the Fall in ordinary history as an act of a truly individual Adam, because human persons do not presently contain the seeds of their children's souls; his rejection of materialist Traducianism makes that certain. Nor, however, can he fully maintain the individuality of Adam when characterizing him as a natura seminalis, making talk of http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 18/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship his culpability and its transmission to his offspring a nonsense. Transferred into a Christological context, this results in a mess: while Augustine uses the traditional terminology of the homo susceptus with his 'composite Adam' in mind, I do not believe he fully conceived where to (p.222) situate such a figure, or any 'assumed human' derived from him. This muddle only thickens when Augustine attempts to apply his theology of election and predestination to the Incarnation. Contrasting the demerit of the massa peccati with the sinless humanity of Christ, Augustine describes it as having no merits at all. However, he is also unable to account for the origin of Christ's soul, the subject of merit, and its recipient.

Christ, incarnate by unmerited grace Augustine's insistence that grace is a gift unmerited by fallen humans, and which must first be present for the inspiration of their love, needs little introduction. Already present in the Ad Simplicianum, it came to prominence in De Natura et Gratia and received its fullest treatment in the works for the monks of Hadrumetum and Marseilles, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum and De Dono Perseverantiae. Situated in tandem with Augustine's general teaching on the absolute necessity of grace is his depiction of Christ as one made a particular recipient of grace through the takingup of his homo. While the extent of Augustine's doctrine of sanctification is unique, suggestions within his work of a 'grace Christology' are not. The gospel witness to Christ's special reception of the Holy Spirit only begins to indicate the scriptural resources available for describing the Incarnation in terms of a divine choice, election, and adoption. However, as even this basic vocabulary shows, such a description is open to a minimization of the Incarnation, where adoptionism (in its most extreme variant) dilutes the personal subsistence of divine and human in Christ. Augustine was well aware of the fault, admitting it as his own early position at Conf. 7.25.19.83 As I have repeatedly shown, the multifaceted nature of Augustine's Christology precludes it from classification in terms of 'grace Christology' alone, in turn removing it from the mainstream discussion of Nestorianism and its opponents. It is perhaps for this reason that the most recent survey of the topic, Donald Fairbairn's Grace and Christology in the Early Church, makes almost no mention of Augustine, concentrating instead (p.223) on Theodore, Nestorius, Cyril, and Cassian.84 His justification for choosing Cassian over Augustine as the exemplar of Western Christology on the eve of Ephesus merits pause. While the overwhelming size of the Augustinian corpus provides the methodological reason for focusing on an author of slimmer letters, Fairbairn suggests that Augustine's teaching on predestination had begun to sully his reputation in Rome by the 420s, causing Leo to prefer Cassian as the exponent of orthodox, Western Christology. He therefore represents 'what the choir, rather than the soloist, was singing'.85 For all of this, Cassian's De Incarnatione remains a classic source for the later Latin depiction of Christ as the homo dominicus and susceptus; Grillmeier describes his use of the terms as 'unproblematic' because they represent the conventional, confused vocabulary of theological Latin.86 I want to suggest that another factor in Leo's preference for Cassian may have been a recognition that Augustine's teaching on predestination, closely correlated with Christology, had already led to unbalanced theological results.

Augustine's application of grace terminology to the Incarnation is highly varied and complex. In order to underline this, I want to begin from a Mariological perspective, observing the comparatively fixed and almost axiomatic language of grace Augustine applies to the Blessed Virgin. From the mid390s, Augustine describes her creation as a special act of grace, a particular divine choice of the second person of the Trinity. Although the verb eligo is most inclusively translated as 'choose', here it is clearly connected to Augustine's theology of creation and Fall, predestination and election. The importance of this motif for his Mariology appears to have been noted only by Luigi Gambero, who classifies it as its 'central theme,' concluding emphatically that 'Mary, then, is a pure grace of the Lord, given to the incarnate Word and to all humanity'.87 The year 395 sees its appearance in generalized form, where Augustine speaks of the 'female sex, through which he chose to be born' (femineum sexum, per quem nasceretur elegit).88 De Sancta Virginitate of 400 comes closer to the individuality of Mary, referring to the 'Virginity…from which he chose to be born' (uirginitas…de qua nasceretur (p.224) elegit).89 With the birth of the Pelagian controversy, Augustine refined his language further, as these examples from 411–12 reveal:

He who made the human wished to become a human; to be created from a mother, who created his mother.

Voluit fieri homo qui fecit hominem, creari de matre, qui creavit matrem.90 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 19/35

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Therefore it was given to the Virgin Mother to bring forth a holy seed by her pious faith, not according to the law of the flesh of sin (which is to say, without conceiving by the movement of carnal concupiscence); he created her in order to choose her, so that he could choose to be created from her.

ideo uirginem matrem non lege carnis peccati, id est non concupiscentiae carnalis motu concipientem, sed pia fide sanctum germen in se fieri promerentem quam eligeret creauit, de qua crearetur elegit.91

He came into the Virgin, who was before the Virgin. She whom he created, he chose; he created her in order that he might choose her.

uenit in uirginem, qui erat ante uirginem. quam creauit elegit, quam eligeret creauit.92

While these citations combine the verbs creare and eligere in more or less chiastic fashion, Augustine also includes the Virgin in the predestining will of the Son in Tractatus in Ioannem 8.9, written in the first decade of the fifth century: 'Before he was born from her, he knew his mother in predestining her; and before God created her, from whom he would be created as a human, he knew his mother.'93 Leaving the historically later question of Mary's complete exemption from Original Sin to one side, it should be noted that all these examples envisage a process of creation by God's elective will, a particular 'choosing into being'. Using the language of predestination alongside that of creation, Augustine contrasts the making of Mary with the creation of the massa peccati, whose possession of the grace of creation is fragmented and whose hope for the grace of salvation remains to be disclosed. In the case of the Virgin, these two graces are reintegrated in a single gift of life.94

(p.225) Augustine's treatment of the Incarnation in terms of God's special, elective, or predestining grace can be traced in gradual development from the mid390s. The letter to the Romans (1:4) provided a convenient entrée for Augustine's handling of the topic, in Paul's description of Christ, 'predestined Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead' (qui praedestinatus est filius dei in uirtute secundum spiritum sanctificationis ex resurrectione mortuorum). Completely eliding the passage in the Expositio Propositionum, Augustine addressed it in the Epistolae ad Romanos Expositio Inchoata of 394–5. Christ, he writes, is not shown to be the Son of God because of his resurrection; others too have been raised from the dead; rather: 'He was predestined by a certain preeminence of resurrection, because he was predestined from the resurrection of all the dead; that is to say, he was designated to rise in front of and before all others.'95 Augustine's theology of Christ the mediator is not far below his exegesis, with his humanity as the object of God's predestination firmly in view. While the majority of Greek authors prefer the reading ὁρισθεντος (destinatus) to προορισθεντος (praedestinatus), consequently glossing the passage with reference to the eternal Son,96 Augustine follows the precedent set by the Vetus Latina and the Romans commentary of Ambrosiaster, which similarly relates Christ's predestination to the resurrection.97

(p.226) Although the connection between the Incarnation of Christ and the gift of the resurrection as parallel works of grace is left unamplified in Augustine's early works, the early Enarrationes in Psalmos show his growing interest in Christ's human experience of God's favour and help. Thus Enarratio in Psalmum 27 depicts Christ's human prayer to his own divine nature, beseeching the continuation of its sustaining presence;98 Enarratio in Psalmum 16 refers to the virtus of the Word as that by which the Incarnation is enabled to bring in the Kingdom,99 and Enarratio in Psalmum 3 states that the union of the Word with the homo susceptus by means of his soul empowers his endurance of the passion.100 This attention to the lived experience of Christ, dependent on the indwelling divine Word, forms the precondition for Augustine's mature description of the Incarnation as an act of grace accomplished without regard to the prior merits of the human Christ. As might be expected, this motif comes to marked prominence in the course of Augustine's anti Pelagian writings, and has been described as the 'most distinctive stage of the evolution of Augustine's Christology'.101

This Christological counterpoint to Augustine's teaching on the necessity of grace to salvation, and the incapacity of human will to effect its own sanctification, was already recognized by the fifth century. In his catena of Christological http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 20/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship citations from the Augustinian corpus collected to refute Arianism, Apollinarianism, and Nestorianism, Vincent of Lérins three times quotes passages in which the grace of the Incarnation is effected notwithstanding Christ's 'foregoing merits' (praecedentibus meritis).102 Van Bavel notes the distinction made by Augustine between the habitual graces given to humankind and the singular grace of the Incarnation, alongside a receptionanalysis (p.227) ultimately rooting Augustine's theology in the exegesis of Ambrose.103 Bernard's survey of the relationship between Christology and sanctification in Augustine's thought notes the importance of the theme in passing, without further examination.104 A more provocative line of enquiry about the motif has been pursued between McWilliam Dewart and McGuckin, focusing on its roots in Augustine's reception of the work of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and its connection to his homo susceptus Christology.

McWilliam's 1979 case for an Augustinian reception of Theodore's De Incarnatione proceeded from a number of bases. Observing first that Augustine had from the 390s resorted to homo susceptus language to describe Christ as 'a uniquely graced man, the exemplar of true wisdom because uniquely and personally united to the Wisdom and Word of God', she then finds its later corollary in his description of the Incarnation as a unique grace, which first appears in De Peccatorum Meritis of 412.105 The text is an important one:

To the human lifted up through pride, the humble God descends in mercy, displaying clear and manifest grace in that human whom he took up out of such great love for his members, who participate in that love. Conjoined to the Word of God, by which he was at once Son of God and the Son of Humanity, even he did not act by the foregoing merits of his own will. Without doubt, it was fitting for him to be unique: had there been two, or three, or more (if such a thing were possible), it would not have come about by the gift which properly comes from God, but by human free will.

ad elatum hominem per superbiam, Deus humilis descendit per misericordiam, gratiam claram et manifestamque commendans in ipso homine, quem tanta prae participibus suis caritate suscepit. Neque enim et ipse ita Verbo Dei conjunctus, ut ipsa conjunctione unus filius Dei et idem ipse unus filius hominis fieret, praecedentibus suae voluntatis meritis fecit. Unum quippe illum esse oportebat: essent autem et duo, et tres, et plures, si hoc fieri posset, non per Dei proprium donum, sed per hominis liberum arbitrium.106

McWilliam notes that Augustine here also refers to the homo assumed, in continuity with his earlier terminology, and remarks: 'It should be noted, in view of possible misunderstanding, that Augustine was not here presenting a serious argument against Jesus having merited the incarnation, simply because no such argument seemed to him at that time necessary.'107 The body of her argument centres on a reading of Augustine's Epistle 187 (the treatise De Praesentia Dei to Dardanus) in which he situates the Incarnation on a continuum of God's presence to his creatures. While God is in some way with those who yet do not possess him, he inhabits his saints and allows them (p.228) to draw near to him by means of the virtuous life.108 This is not always something known by the indwelt person, as the divine adoption of baptized infants suggests,109 and as is proved in the case of both John the Baptist110 and (rather differently) Jacob and Esau.111 While the presence of God in the saints is akin to his presence in the Temple, the case of Christ is unique, grace being the means whereby his humanity was taken up and made one person with the divine nature.112 Concluding his argument, Augustine returned to the question he had raised at De Peccatorum Meritis 2.27.17: if human goodness were a factor in human redemption, could there have been more than one Christ? The answer is a resounding no:

Who would be so sacrilegious to dare to claim that any soul could become another Christ through the merit of his free choice? How could one soul alone have merited to belong to the person of the onlybegotten Word through free choice (which is given to all in common and by nature) had not this unique grace effected it? Such grace is rightly a matter for our preaching, but we may not rightly wish to stand in judgement on it.

quis enim tam sit sacrilegus, ut audeat adfirmare aliquam posse animam per meritum liberi arbitrii, ut alter sit christus, efficere? ut ergo ad personam uerbi unigeniti pertineret, quo pacto per liberum arbitrium communiter http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 21/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship omnibus et naturaliter datum una sola anima meruisset, nisi hoc singularis gratia praestitisset, quam fas est praedicare, de qua nefas est uelle iudicare?113

While the point at issue is the singularity of the grace given in the Incarnation, it should be noted that Augustine does imply that the soul of Christ possesses merits, though these are fully the result of the divine grace preceding them.

McWilliam's main line of enquiry is not, however, theological but philological. Discerning seven textual parallels between Epistle 187 and Theodore's De Incarnatione, she proceeds to gather Augustine's use of homo susceptus language and his consideration of the Incarnation in terms of grace into a consciously adopted Antiochene framework. In his response to her argument, John McGuckin states baldly of these parallels: 'In none of them can I find any synonymity of language, only the commonality of the theme of God's presence in his saints',114 a judgement with which I am inclined to agree. The doctrine of the degrees of the divine presence he situates rather in a general Neoplatonist milieu, being found in Plotinus, Porphyry, and particularly the Christology of Marius Victorinus' Adversus Arianos. While this appears to be a more likely source for Augustine's treatment of the theme in Epistle 187, I believe McWilliam Dewart and McGuckin both miss the central problem behind Augustine's description of Christ's humanity as an entity without any merits of its own to deserve the Incarnation.

(p.229) To begin with, it should be noted that, wherever Augustine describes Christ in this way, he implies that Christ's humanity is already under the divine discernment of merits before it is taken up in the Incarnation. A person cannot not have merits without first being a person; natures cannot deserve blessing or punishment. Christ's 'human', therefore, has some kind of existence before it is taken into union with the Word. This contrasts sharply with Augustine's seemingly parallel handling of the humanity of Mary, whose very creation is described as a discrete grace. Nowhere does Augustine draw such a connection in a direct Christological context. This can be explained for two related reasons. Augustine never supposes Christ's possession of humanity separate from the corporate Adam: he is an 'original' human in the fullest sense, to be assumed, not created into the Incarnation. Secondly, to propose the creation of a fresh human without any Fallguilt (subsequently to be assumed sine meritis praecedentibus) would raise the question what relationship such a human would have to the fallen humanity it is sent to save.115 However, because Augustine situates the humanity of Christ within the corporate Adam, he must explain how such a humanity is free from Adam's punishment. Simply repeating that Christ has no prevenient human merits, he advances the point but does not fully justify it. Leaning heavily on Romans 8:3 and the virginal conception as the means by which sin is not propagated to Christ's flesh addresses half of the issue; however, this does not account for the status of Christ's soul. As I highlighted above, in Epistle 190, Augustine had proposed a twofold solution to the problem: if souls are propagated from Adam, then either the Word cleansed it in the assumption, or he assumed it from some other source.116 Unfortunately, the letter contains no further indication of what that source might be.

I believe this confusion in Augustine's Christology can finally be ascribed to his ambiguous reception of a broadly Origenist account of the preexistent union of the human soul of Christ with the Word of God in the premundane realm. Augustine never fully committed himself to any one general theory of the origin of souls, and the spectre of their fall from a heavenly life persisted even into the works of his maturity; this much the ironic subtext of De Anima et eius Origine makes clear. More openly, Augustine fully maintained the existence of a prehistorical creation in the mind of God in his theory of the rationes causales. He attempted to integrate this with his teaching on Original Sin, but his confused depiction of the totus Adam gives the lie to his true position: that the prehistory of present existence is a place of shared, individual agency, where the vicissitudes of fallen life began. In order to maintain the (p.230) sinlessness of Christ's soul alongside the claim that it is truly an 'original' human of the Adamic stock, such a theory requires that Christ's soul never participated in Adam's sin, never to fall from its celestial life. I believe Augustine recognized this, but, in the aftermath of the Origenist controversy, was prevented from fully working out its implications in his writing. I offer two crucial texts in support of my theory, which reveal Augustine's quiet and uneasy deliberation on the topic.

The issue of lots: De Gratia Novi Testamenti and De Genesi ad Litteram 10 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 22/35

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Augustine's Epistle 140, subtitled De Gratia Novi Testamenti, was written in the early months of 412. In the Retractationes, Augustine situated the work within his concern, not only for the rise of Pelagianism, but also for the receding Donatist controversy.117 Occasioned at the request of his friend Honoratus (about whom little else is known), it addressed a series of five exegetical questions,118 gathering them together in a synthetic exposition of the nature of grace, the gift of the New Testament. Augustine opens the letter by contrasting the promise of the Old Testament with its fulfilment in the New,119 before focusing more closely on the Christological aspect of salvation history in paragraph 3. Trademark features of Augustine's Christology abound: the Word of God suscepit itaque hominem in order to make God intelligible to human understanding;120 Christ in his humanity possessed both a true human anima and ratio, contrary to the Apollinarian heresy;121 coming in the likeness of sinful flesh, his cry of dereliction on the cross embodied the suffering of his Church within him.122 At 21.8, Augustine lifts his exegesis of Psalm 22:6 (ego sum uermis, et non homo) directly from Origen's Homilia in Lucam 15.123 At 30.12, he turns to verses 10 and 11 of the same psalm: 'For (p.231) you have drawn me out of the womb; my hope on my mother's bosom. I have cast myself on you from the womb; from my mother's womb, you are my God' (Quoniam extraxisti me de uentre, spes mea ab uberibus matris meae. In te iactatus sum ex utero; de uentre matris meae Deus meus est tu). Initially treating the verse as a common human exclamation, in the following chapter Augustine notes that 'there are some who think…that this text applies to our Head' (non defuerunt qui hoc…ad ipsum caput nostrum pertinere sentirent). In the form of a servant, Christ can refer to his father as God; thus the psalm is spoken from his humanity, and tu extraxisti refers to the preservation of Mary's virginity after the divine delivery of her child. Augustine then raises the question: if Christ's spes in God pertained from the time of his earliest infancy (ab uberibus matris meae), might he also have hoped in God in his humanity while in the womb? The next verse appears to suggest that Christ hoped in God only after (ex) he had left the womb (utero). Yet, he doubts such a reading: even there, Christ would have lived, moved, and had his being in God; and he would surely have hoped in God while in the womb as well. Augustine offers a surprising alternative to resolve this textual ambiguity:

Otherwise, perhaps we ought to believe that the infant only then received a rational soul, and that it was lacking while he was still within his mother's womb; and that the same soul that was then added to his flesh, was until that point clinging to God. In this scenario, we should consider the words, 'I have cast myself on you from the womb,' to have been said according to that same flesh, just as when he says, 'I have been given a soul by lot' from the womb, the soul which was cleaving to you.

nisi forte credendum est iam nato animam rationalem accessisse, quae intra uiscera matris adhuc ei defuisset, et, quoniam eadem anima, quae carni iam natae addita est, deo inhaerebat, ideo secundum eandem carnem dictum esse existimandum est: in te iactatus sum ex utero, tamquam diceret: eam sortitus sum animam ex utero, quae tibi cohaereret.124

Glossing Psalm 22 with Wisdom 8:19–20 ('But I was a child of singular gifts, and received a good soul by lot', Puer autem eram ingeniosus, et sortitus sum animam bonam) results in the suggestion that the soul of Christ adhered to God, before being united to his flesh in childbirth. Augustine quickly withdraws from the idea, 'since the reason for the arrival or arising of the soul lies hidden in the depths of nature' (cum ratio de aduentu uel exortu animae in tanto naturae profundo sic lateat). Nonetheless, Augustine did not consider the question raised worthy of review or critique in the Retractationes.

In the course of discussing the origin of the soul in De Genesi ad Litteram 10, Augustine returned to the text of Wisdom. In characteristic fashion, chapter 3 sees three theories of the soul's origin set out sequentially: Traducianism, a kind of 'spiritual Traducianism' rooted in Augustine's early (p.232) suggestion that Adam himself be considered a ratio causalis, and Creationism.125 At paragraph 11 chapter 6, Augustine looks for scriptural material in support of each. Wisdom 8:19–20, he admits, seems to affirm that souls come to bodies from above, and are not propagated from a single prototype (an option not included in chapter 3). However, the vocabulary of the text is problematic: sortitus sum suggests a kind of heavenly lottery, which deals bodies to souls on the basis of their respective merits.126 From Paul's letter to the Romans, it is known that 'even before [Jacob and Esau] were born, they had done nothing good or bad' (Rom. 9:11), http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 23/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship which argues in any case against using the text in such a manner of any human. Augustine promises to deal with the passage later on, noting that 'we should not ignore those (whether they are in error or have thought quite rightly), who think that this was said specially and uniquely about that soul of human of the Mediator of God and humans, Jesus Christ'.127

Augustine finally takes up the text fully at 32.18, beginning with a caveat. Although other aspects of the book of Wisdom seemingly cannot be ascribed to Christ, the same can also be said of some of the psalms, which are commonly exposited as being said in his person. However, Wisdom 8:19's reference to the puer…ingeniosus certainly appears to cohere with Luke's depiction of Christ teaching the doctors in the Temple. Coming back to the problem of Traducianism in parenthesis, Augustine observes that such a theory would implicate Christ's soul in its parents' sin, a possibility clearly precluded by his evident wisdom even in infancy. His conception of the Virgin, in the likeness of the flesh of sin, deals with the sinfulness of his flesh: 'for he was not conceived in the way in which she had been conceived; nor was his flesh the flesh of sin, but the likeness of the flesh of sin';128 yet the sinlessness of his soul remains unsolved. Augustine answers cryptically that he would rather think it came from the source of Adam's soul than from Adam himself (unde adam quam de adam). His final reflections are worth quoting in full:

(p.233) Perhaps the author of the book of Wisdom said, 'I have received a good soul by lot' (provided that it is correct to apply these words to Christ), because things which are gifted by lot are usually given by God from on high. Or (and we can say this confidently), perhaps he said it lest anyone think that that soul was elevated to so high a summit, on account of some prior works of his; so when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the word 'lot' presented itself, and the writer used it to remove any suspicion of foregoing merits.

et fortasse ideo ait: sortitus sum animam bonam—si tamen hoc de illo oportet intellegi—quia solent quae sorte dantur diuinitus dari, aut, quod fidenter dicendum est, ne uel illa anima aliquibus operibus praecedentibus ad tantum apicem subuecta putaretur, ut cum ea uerbum caro fieret et habitaret in nobis, ad auferendam suspicionem praecedentium meritorum sortis nomen accessit.129

This is a remarkable volteface. Having initially found Wisdom 8 to be problematic because it is most easily accommodated to an Origenist doctrine of the soul's fall by merit, Augustine makes precisely the opposite observation when applying the verse to Christ. Here, the divine sors of Christ's soul comes by chance, without regard to prior merit at all. Augustine then abruptly changes the subject to an exposition of Hebrews 7.

I begin with a word on sources. While Augustine twice roots his exploration of Wisdom 8 in the opinion of prior exegetes, I have been unable to find any parallel treatment of the text by other authors in terms of the soul of Christ. Indeed, the only other Latin commentator on the verse prior to Augustine is Ambrose; his concern is, however, entirely different.130

Because the overall handling of the text in De Genesi ad Litteram 10 is made in evident discussion of Origen's theory of the fall of souls, I believe it safe to conjecture that the Christological exegesis of the text should be situated in a now lost work of Origen, available to Augustine in translation. In the absence of parallel readings in other Latin authors, it is, of course, impossible to suggest which.

I believe the subtle shift in Augustine's exegesis of Wisdom 8, from Epistle 140 to De Genesi ad Litteram 10, points clearly to his reception of an Origenist Christology, alongside an inability to reconcile it to his developed teaching on Original Sin. Having already compromised his response to the question of the soul's origin by his confused depiction of Adam, the eternal form and the historical individual, Augustine found himself similarly unable to account for the origin of Christ's soul, and with it his human sinlessness. From his reading of De Principiis and Rufinus' Apology, the outline of Origen's protology was well known to him; many of its features were shared with Plotinus' theory of the fall of souls, to which he had given a warm hearing early in his career. In his early exegesis of Romans, he had tested Origen's conception of prenatal (p.234) merit, suggesting that the occultissima merita of Jacob and Esau explained their eventual destinies under the divine judgement. As an experiment, the interpretation had been abandoned. However, Augustine's use of http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 24/35

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Origen's exegesis continued, not least in his treatment of the virginal conception. Elaborating his teaching on the punishment of sin in tandem with his depiction of Christ in its likeness, Augustine increasingly committed himself to an intransigent, hamartiological materialism, to which only a 'fall' theory of the soul's origin could form the logical counterpart. The exigencies of both the Origenist and Pelagian controversies prevented this, leaving the inner mechanics of Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin expediently obscure. Both Epistle 140 and De Genesi ad Litteram 10 represent an attempt to reconcile Augustine's subconscious Origenism to his mature doctrine of grace: the soul of Christ, adhering to God before his earthly life, was given by divine choice to Jesus's flesh. God performed this without regard to its merits; merit that only a person, a complete individual, can possess. All of Augustine's subsequent references to Christ, Incarnate regardless of his praestantissima merita, are founded upon his deeper inability to reconcile his Christology with his doctrine of creation and Fall. In the previous chapter, I attended to Julian's attack on Augustine's Christology as Apollinarian; I found apparent substance in his claim, where Augustine's Christ thinks, feels, and acts as the Word, to the exclusion of the human character he has assumed. On present second sight, Julian fails to see the picture in its entirety. Too careful a Platonist to be an Apollinarian, Augustine would always maintain the formal distinction between the soul and its creator. For the saint and the elect soul of Christ, however, this distinction might not always be so visible. The predominance of the Word in his Christological psychology is better explained by recourse to De Principiis, and its depiction of the unfallen soul of Christ.

What was beforehand situated in the will was changed by the influence of lengthy custom into nature. And, therefore, we must believe that there was a human and rational soul in Christ, and not think that he had any capacity for sin, even as a possibility.

quod in arbitrii positum, longi usus affectu iam versum sit in naturam. ita et fuisse quidem in Christo humana et rationabilis anima credenda est, et nullum sensum vel possibilitatem eam putandum est habuisse peccati.131

While Origen's admission of the eternal coinherence of Christ's soul in the Word allowed him to affirm—and justify— Christ's sinlessness with integrity, it is unfortunate that the intellectual liberty was not given to Augustine to do the same.

(p.235) Conclusion In the previous chapter, I offered an apparent vindication of Julian of Eclanum's criticism of Augustine's Christology, by highlighting the frequent passages in Augustine's work that emphasize the indwelling and active divine presence in Christ, at the expense of his human characteristics. Finding this to be consistent with Augustine's inability to pinpoint the precise fault of Apollinarianism in his antiheretical works, I gave a positive hearing to Julian's contention that a Christ who inherits the flesh of sin cannot have a fully human soul, as this is fully denatured along with the flesh in Augustine's account of the Fall. In this chapter, I returned to the theme, changing my focus to Augustine's handling of the problem of the soul's origin. Working from the basis laid by R. J. O'Connell, I accepted his depiction of Augustine as privately committed to a fall model of the soul's origin, while maintaining a political ambivalence on the issue in public discourse. However, I took issue with his claim that such a protology can be explained only by Augustine's continuing adherence to the teaching of Plotinus into his maturity. By contrast, I suggested that Origen, just as much as Plotinus or Porphyry, must be counted among the sources available to Augustine in forming such a theology of creation. Concentrating my survey on Christology, I turned to Augustine's early descriptions of Christ as the dominicus homo and as homo assumptus. Newly classifying the former as the invention of Origen in his Commentary on John, I argued that Augustine's sensitivity to the rising politics of the Origenist controversy should be taken as the major reason for his abandonment of the phrase in 395. Viewing both terms together in the light of his theology of the rationes causales and the creation of humanity in Adam, persona seminalis, I suggested that they both presuppose a preexistent, human as the recipient of the assuming Word. Further noting that Augustine's language of salvific merit is only ever applied to individual human souls, I questioned what it might mean for him to describe the Incarnation as a grace that takes place sine meritis praestantibus. Not very much, I suggested, until Augustine's tortuous interpretation of Wisdom 8 is taken into account. As both Epistle 140 and De Genesi ad Litteram 10 reveal, Augustine's talk of Christ, the human without merits, constitutes a late reversal from a prior reception of Origen's Christology. Here, the human soul of Jesus is elected http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 25/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship to become Incarnate precisely because of its foregoing goodness and love, on account of which he can assume the 'likeness of the flesh of sin' without subsequent defilement. Expediently moving away from only half this formulation in his own Christology, Augustine's mature theology would remain permanently disjointed, offering an incomplete Christ to a race condemned and incapable of its own salvation.

Notes:

(1) Quid fugis ad obscurissimam de anima quaestionem?…hoc quod de anima latet, aut ex otio discitur; aut, sicut alia multa in hac vita, sine salutis labe nescitur.

(2) But for one representative response: in an otherwise polite exchange of views with Frederick van Fleteren (1993), O'Connell's respondent referred to his entire academic project as a 'cul de sac', which had begun and ended with mistaken historical assumptions. For the same line of argument see also O'Daly (1974, 1984, and 1987: esp. 15–20, 199–207); also Fortin (1969), Madec (1970), and Mary T. Clark (1971). By contrast, Peter Cary's recent series of monographs (2000, 2008a, b) are clearly launched from the basis established by O'Connell.

(3) O'Connell (1987).

(4) O'Connell (1987: 141).

(5) Lib. Arb. 3.57.20.

(6) Lib. Arb. 3.58.20; emphasis added.

(7) Lib. Arb. 3.59.21.

(8) Carol Harrison (2006: 182).

(9) Div. Quaest. 83 68.

(10) Prop. Rom. 68: 'But, because the Holy Spirit is given only to those who believe, God does not therefore choose works (which he himself endows when he gives the Holy Spirit, so that he can work for the good through love); rather, he chooses faith' (sed quoniam spiritus sanctus non datur nisi credentibus, non quidem dues elegit opera quae ipse largitur cum dat spiritum sanctum, ut per caritatem bona operemur sed tamen elegit fidem).

(11) O'Connell (1987: 318).

(12) O'Connell (1987: 329).

(13) The classic reading of Augustine's debt to both Plotinus and Porphyry remains that of Courcelle (1950); his suggestion of a Milanese readership of both authors configured around Simplicianus and Ambrose naturally finds a sympathetic hearing here. The case for a predominant Porphyrian influence was staked by O'Meara (1959), subsequently to be criticized by Hadot (1960). Theiler's monograph (1933) attempts a forensic reconstruction of Porphyry from the Augustinian corpus, and hinges less on the question of Augustine's own philosophical commitments. Beatrice (1989) situates Porphyry's De Regressu Animae and Philosophy from Oracles (taken as one work, the argument of O'Meara 1959) at the centre of Augustine's conversion to the Catholic faith; in places his argument is simply bizarre, as when he ascribes Augustine's early Photinianism to Porphyry's characterization of Christ as a human of superior wisdom, while simultaneously defaming Christians (p. 259). Almost as overgenerous in its estimation of Augustine's dependence on Plotinus is Cary (2000), which includes seventeen of the Enneads in Augustine's reading of Plotinus (pp. 158–9 n. 11). Madec (1989: 44) maintains a welcome ambivalence about the issue: 'Augustine does not otherwise trouble himself to satisfy our curiosity about the contents of these mysterious "Books of the Platonists", of which he makes no other http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 26/35

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(14) Carol Harrison (2006: 182).

(15) Plotinus reviews Plato's pronouncements on the origin of the soul in the Phaedo, Cratylus, Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus at the beginning of Ennead 4.8.

(16) Cf. Princ. 1.4; 1.6.2 ff; 1.8; 2.8; 3.1; 3.3.4 ff; 3.5.4; 4.2.7 (Koetschau).

(17) Princ. 3.1, in particular.

(18) Princ. 2.8.1.

(19) Princ. 2.8.2.

(20) Princ. 2.8.3: requirendum est ne forte et nomen animae, quod graece dicitur ψυχη , a refrigescendo de statu diviniore ac meliore dictum sit et translatum inde, quod ex calore illo naturali et divino refrixisse videatur, et ideo in hoc quo nunc est et statu et vocabulo sita sit.

(21) Princ. 2.6.3.

(22) Princ.: pro liberi arbitrii facultate varietas unumquemque ac diversitas habuisset animorum.

(23) The treatment of the origin of the soul in the preface (1.5) deserves consideration under such an interpretative scheme: 'Now, regarding the soul: whether it comes from transmission in the seed, so that its principle of existence or substance inheres in those corporeal seeds; or whether it has a different beginning, begotten or not begotten; or if it is given to the body from without, or not: this matter is not very clearly spelled out in the [Apostolic] Teaching' (De anima vero utrum ex seminis traduce ducatur, ita ut ratio ipsius vel substantia inserta ipsis corporalibus seminibus habeatur, an vero aliud habeat initium, et hoc ipsum initium si genitum est aut non genitum, vel certe si extrinsecus corpori inditur, necne: non satis manifesta praedicatione distinguitur). A similar approach is evident in Comm. Cant. 2.5, where a variety of options for the origin of the soul are laid out with equal measure as data for the soul to consider within itself, in the absence of clear scriptural information on the matter.

(25) Apol. 2.10: in solo origene non ambigis. dicis quippe: 'hoc sentit origenes.' interrogabo te: bene sentit an male? nescio, inquis. quid me igitur, missis tabellariis et creberrimis nuntiis, docere conaris ut sciam quid nescias?

(26) Pecc. Mer. 2.59.36.

(27) Pecc. Mer. 3.18.10: ait enim: si anima non est ex traduce, sed sola caro, ipsa tantum habet traducem peccati et ipsa sola poenam meretur—hoc enim sentiunt—iniustum esse dicentes, ut hodie nata anima non ex massa adae tam antiquum peccatum portet alienum.

(28) Pecc. Mer. 3.18.10.

(29) Ep. 143.5, paraphrasing Lib.Arb. 3.57.20: in corporibus autem inferioribus post peccatum ordinata [substantia rationalis] regit corpus suum non omni modo pro arbitrio, sed sicut leges uniuersitatis sinunt

(31) Evodius' Epistle 158 begins with a complaint that his previous questions had gone unanswered.

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(34) Ep. 165.1: certe habes ibi uirum sanctum et eruditum augustinum episcopum, qui uiua, ut aiunt, uoce docere te poterit et suam, immo per se nostram, explicare sententiam.

(35) That Augustine quickly dispensed with this difficult man cannot be insignificant; that he sent him to Jerome even more so. The politics of sending a rabid anti Origenist to Jerome are, to say the least, open to a number of interpretations.

(37) Ep. 166.21.7: huius igitur damnationis in paruulos causam requiro, quia neque animarum, si nouae fiunt singulis singulae, uideo esse ullum in illa aetate peccatum nec a deo damnari aliquam credo, quam uidet nullum habere peccatum.

(39) Ep. 190.3: 'Should the origin of the soul be hidden from us, no danger lies in it, as long as the way of redemption remains clear to us' (Unde si origo animae lateat, dum tamen redemptio clareat, periculum non est).

(43) Ep. 190.25.4: 'We may not doubt that the soul of the Mediator received no sin by way of transmission from Adam. For if souls are not propagated from others, where all are held in the propagation of the flesh of sin, how much less are we to believe that his soul could have come from the propagation of a sinful person, whose flesh came from the Virgin (not conceived by desire but by faith, so that it might be in the likeness of the flesh of sin, not the flesh of sin itself). But if, from the sin of the first sinful soul, others are held subject to sin because they are propagated from it, how certain is it that that soul, which the onlybegotten made fit to be joined to him, either drew no sin from it, or was not derived from it at all' (mediatoris tamen animam nullum ex adam traxisse peccatum dubitare fas non est. si enim nulla propagatur ex altera, ubi omnes tenentur propagata carne peccati, quanto minus credendum est ex propagine peccatricis animam uenire potuisse, cuius caro uenit ex uirgine non libidine concepta sed fide, ut esset in similitudine carnis peccati, non in carne peccati. si autem peccato primae animae peccatricis ideo ceterae tenentur obnoxiae, quia ex illa sunt propagatae, profecto illa, quam sibi unigenitus coaptauit, aut peccatum inde non traxit aut omnino inde non tracta est).

(45) A schism within the Donatist church, which arose after the election of Pimian to the see of Carthage on the death of Parmenian in 392; Rogatus was bishop of Cartennae.

(46) An. Orig. 1.6.6. Augustine condensed Vincentius' position into eleven errors, namely: (1) creation is not ex nihilo, and the soul is created by emanation, although it is defined as corporeal; (2) the creation of souls is both eternal and endless; (3) the soul loses its antenatal merit through the flesh; (4) through the flesh, the soul recovers its primal merit, though it lost this state through embodiment; (5) before sinning, the soul merited to become sinful in the flesh; (6) the unbaptized may hope for God's pardon of sin; (7) accidental death is capable of thwarting God's predestination for the baptized, cutting short their growth in grace; (8) Wisdom 4:11 'He was taken away so that falsehood would not deceive his soul' can be applied to the death of unbaptized infants; (9) all of the many mansions in God's house (John 14:2) are http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 28/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship part of the Kingdom; (10) the sacrifice of the Mass may fittingly be offered for the unbaptized; and (11) the unbaptized may hope for the Kingdom after the general resurrection (An. Orig. 3.1.1–19.12).

(47) An. Orig. 4.3.3.–5.4.

(48) An. Orig. 4.9.7.

(49) An. Orig. 4.9.7.

(50) An. Orig. 4.8.6; cf. Conf. 10.26.17.

(52) Div. Quaest. 83 36.2 speaks of the outstanding and unique exemplum Dominici hominis who demonstrated his power in great miracles. En. Ps. 1.1. ascribes to the homo dominicus the words of the psalm, 'Blessed is the one who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.' En. Ps.7.13 sees the homo dominicus as the sword of God, left sheathed at his first coming, to be drawn at his second; para. 20 of the same Enarratio attributes the words of the psalmist throughout to the homo dominicus. En. Ps. 8.11 describes the threefold temptation of the homo dominicus in concupiscentia carnis, inanis iactans, and curiositas, the classic Augustinian triad. With somewhat closer attention to the specifically human nature of Christ, Prop. Rom. 48 speaks of God's judgement on sin being 'destroyed and taken away in the human of the Lord' (in homine dominico destructa et ablata), on the cross. A single instance associates the phrase with the resurrected Christ, En. Ps. 4.1: the psalm is to be rightly interpreted either in the voice of the hopeful Christian or as uerba Dominici hominis.

(53) On the basis of this observation, I would question the comprehensiveness of John McGuckin's judgement (1990: 49): 'When Augustine speaks of a union in una persona, he does not mean that the psychological human subject of Jesus of Nazareth has been absorbed in or replaced by the subject of the Word of God. He does not use the word "person" in this psychological sense. In modern thought the term "person" refers to an individual rational identity. For Augustine it meant straightforwardly a principle or function of the unity of separate elements…For example, in the composite of human nature, according to fifth century psychology, personal unity joins together a soul and flesh. To be a human person is to have this kind of unity.' Even for a fifthcentury psychologist, a human person would also be the subject of the passions and the centre of a lived experience.

(54) Drobner (1986: 157): 'Why he laid it to one side is not indisputably clear.'

(55) Drobner (1986: 157).

(56) Grillmeier (1977: 43).

(57) Apol. 2.20 records an attempt by certain Apollinarians to sully his reputation while in the service of Damasus, by erasing the phrase from a work of Athanasius, only to reinscribe it as though it were an amendment made by Jerome himself. The implication here must be that the phrase was unacceptable to the Apollinarians in question, and that the erasure constituted an attempt to remove the term from a work authoritative in the tradition; what its content might have been for them, or for Jerome, is unfortunately left unclear.

(60) Altaner (1967b).

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(61) Madec (1999: 153): 'The influence of De Spiritu Sancto of Didymus the Blind, translated by Jerome in 389, should also be noted; it is the term homo dominicus…an expression that Augustine will criticize in the Retractationes (1.19.8), that suggests the relationship.'

(62) Grillmeier (1977: 292): it is 'applied to Jesus by reason of his union with the preexistent Son or Logos, whether the Incarnate Word be seen in his earthly or in his glorified state. Understood in this broad sense, the application of the term became enlarged as well as colourless'.

(63) Comm. Ioh. 1.32, l. 236. Origen's treatment of the status of Christ's soul in the womb in the passage in question is ambiguous. Blanc (1966: 177 n. 2) takes it as a straightforward reiteration of his teaching on the preexistence of souls: 'Origen imagines the soul of Jesus having a preexistence like that of all human souls…', and glosses his footnote on the text with the general remarks of his introduction (1966: 29): 'The same soul which the Son of God assumed had possessed an entirely spiritual existence, attached fully to God and his Word, before being sent by him to earth.' John's admission that he did not know Christ is, therefore, taken to indicate a lack of subjective knowledge on the Baptist's part, although the soul of Jesus was present to be known before embodiment. Consistent with his rejection of a hard and fast doctrine of the preexistence of souls in the unadulterated works of Origen, Edwards (e.g. 2002) reads John's utterance as a statement of fact: before coming to Mary's body, Christ was not there to be known. Origen's point is rather to underline the dignity of the rational soul in the womb (Edwards 2008: 33). Had Augustine known the text and detected the lectio difficilior, the furore surrounding the whole question of the soul's origin catalysed by overreading Origen may still have been a factor in his later aversion to the phrase homo dominicus, distantly rooted in the commentary.

(65) Praed. Sanct. 31.15.

(66) Don. Pers. 67.24.

(67) Cf. Quaest. Evang. 1.31: 'The Lord says this: the Kingdom of Heaven is like a human king, who makes a marriage for his Son; he says that the marriage is the Incarnate Word, because in that human who is taken up, the Church is coupled to God' (quod dominus dixit: simile est regnum caelorum homini regi qui fecit nuptias filio suo, nuptias dixit uerbum incarnatum, quia in ipso homine suscepto ecclesia deo copulata est); and En. Ps. 3.9: 'For in that human the Church too is taken up by the Word which was made flesh, and dwelt among us; for he has made us also to sit with him in the heavenly places' (nam in illo homine et ecclesia suscepta est a uerbo, quod caro factum est, et habitauit in nobis; quia et in caelestibus nos sedere fecit una cum illo).

(73) Diepen (1963: 235).

(74) Diepen (1963: 51).

(75) Div. Quaest. 83 46: 'There exist "principal ideas", certain forms or rational causes of things which are stable and unchangeable; they themselves are not formed, existing eternally and ever in the same manner, being contained in the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 30/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship divine intelligence' (sunt namque ideae principales quaedam formae uel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommutabiles, quae ipsae formatae non sunt ac per hoc aeternae ac semper eodem modo sese habentes, quae diuina intellegentia continenturi).

(76) Div. Quaest. 83: 'But among those things that have been established by God, the rational soul exceeds all, and is closest to God, when it is pure. It clings to him in love, inasmuch as (in a certain way) it is soaked in that intelligible light from Him, and being illuminated, it perceives (not with corporeal eyes, but through that principal sense of its own by which it excels: that is, by its intelligence) those rational causes, in seeing which it is most blessed' (sed anima rationalis inter eas res, quae sunt a deo conditae, omnia superat et deo proxima est, quando pura est; ei que in quantum caritate cohaeserit, in tantum ab eo lumine illo intellegibili perfusa quodammodo et inlustrata cernit non per corporeos oculos, sed per ipsius sui principale quo excellit, id est per intellegentiam suam, istas rationes, quarum uisione fit beatissima).

(77) Gen. Litt. 5.41.20.

(78) Gen. Litt. 5.46.22: cum diem, quem fecit, eis, quae fecit, sexies praesentauit non alternante spatio temporaliter, sed ordinata cognitione causaliter.

(79) Gen. Litt. 6.18.11.

(80) Gen. Litt. 6.15.9.

(81) Gen. Litt. 6.31.20.

(82) Civ. Dei 13.14; cf. also C. Iul. Imp. 2.177 and Nupt. Conc. 2.15.

(83) 'Because the Scriptures are true, I acknowledged that in Christ there is a whole human, not simply the body of a human, or an embodied soul without a mind, but that he was a complete human. I thought that he was preferred above all others, not as the person of Truth, but on account of a kind of great excellence of his human nature, and more perfect participation in wisdom…However, I admit that some time later I learnt how much the Catholic truth of the words "The Word was made flesh" is to be distinguished from the false teaching of Photinus' (quia itaque uera scripta sunt, totum hominem in christo agnoscebam, non corpus tantum hominis aut cum corpore sine mente animum, sed ipsum hominem, non persona ueritatis, sed magna quadam naturae humanae excellentia et perfectiore participatione sapientiae praeferri ceteris arbitrabar…ego autem aliquanto posterius didicisse me fateor, in eo, quod uerbum caro factum est, quomodo catholica ueritas a photini falsitate dirimatur).

(84) Fairbairn (2003).

(85) Fairbairn (2003: 16).

(86) Grillmeier (1977: 45). Cf. Inc. 2.3: 'You have taken up a human to liberate the world, and have not shrunk in horror before the womb of the Virgin' (Tu ad liberandum mundum suscepisti hominem, non horruisti uirginis uterum). Inc. 5.5: 'The prophet David speaks of him in the voice of His own person: "From the womb of my mother, you are my God", showing that the human of the Lord never existed apart from his union with God, in which in him the fullness of divinity would come all at once to dwell in the womb of the Virgin' (de quo etiam Dauid propheta ex persona ipsius dicit: de uentre matris meae deus meus es tu, ostendens utique quod numquam homo ille dominicus sine unitate dei fuerit, in quo in ipso statim uirginis utero plenitudo diuinitatis habitarit).

(87) Gambero (1999: 218).

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(89) Virg. 4.4; cf. also S. 188.3, written some time before 410: 'The almighty Son did not take virginity away from his mother at his birth, whom he chose in order to be born from her' (Matri omnipotens filius nullo modo virginitatem natus abstulit, quam nasciturus elegit).

(91) Pecc. Mer. 2.38.24.

(93) et antequam de illa natus esset, in praedestinatione nouerat matrem; et antequam ipse deus crearet, de qua ipse homo crearetur, nouerat matrem.

(94) In spite of the vividness of this motif, I have been unable to anchor its use by Augustine in any one tradition of reception. Van Bavel (1954: 100 n. 87) argues that its predecessors are to be found in Hilary of Poitiers's De Synodis and Novatian's De Trinitate 23. Although the former is concerned with the eternal predestination of the Incarnation as a whole, it is scarcely identifiable with Augustine's tight phrasing; the latter contains almost no relevant content at all. A similar treatment of the creation of the Virgin is, however, present in Cassian's De Incarnatione of 427: 'Thus you see not only that Mary bore him as one who was older than her; not only older than her, but also her maker! Giving birth to the one who gave her birth, she was made the parent of her Parent, since it was as easy for God to bring about his own birth as the birth of a human, and as simple for him to make a human come to birth, as for him to be born of a human' (uides ergo quod non solum antiquiorem se Maria peperit, non solum, inquam, antiquiorem se, sed auctorem sui, et procreans procreatorem suum facta est parentis parens, quia quam promptum utique fuit deo natiuitatem homini tribuere, tam promptum sibi, quam facile ut hominem nasci faceret, tam facile ut ipse ex homine nasceretur) (Inc. 4.2). In the Patristic testimonies that conclude the work, Cassian hints at the source behind his earlier statement, in Ambrose's commentary on Luke: 'Again, he writes in his commentary on Luke, "She was chosen as the one most preferred to bear God, who was betrothed to a man. For he tells that God was born of a Virgin, and calls the Mother of God Mary" ' (item in expositione euangelii secundum Lucam: quod ea potissimum lecta est ut deum pareret, quae erat desponsata uiro. natum certe ex uirgine deum praedicat, matrem Mariam dei nominat) (Inc. 7.25). Whether Ambrose might likewise have been the source for Augustine's broad conception of Mary's special election must remain a point of conjecture.

(95) Inch. Exp. 5.1: praedestinatus est quodam principatu resurrectionis, quia ex resurrectione omnium mortuorum ipse praedestinatus est, id est, ut prae caeteris et ante caeteros resurgeret designatus.

(96) Rufinus makes the distinction clear in his translation of Origen's commentary on Romans: 'Those who do not yet exist can be foreknown and predestined; but he who is and always has been in existence is not predestined but destined' (Praesciri ergo et praedestinari possunt illi qui nondum sunt, ille autem qui est et semper est non praedestinatur sed destinatur) (1.7.1). For a fuller examination of the Greek exegesis of the verse, see Schelkle (1956: 22–3).

(97) Comm. Rom. 1.4: 'He therefore who was made Incarnate, who hid what he was to become, was predestined according to the spirit of sanctification in power, to be revealed as the Son of God when he rose from the dead. As it is written in Psalm 84: "Truth has arisen from the earth." However, on that account Paul does not say, "predestined by the resurrection of Jesus Christ," but "by the resurrection of the dead", because the resurrection of Christ is attributed to the general resurrection' (hic ergo qui incarnatus est, qui quod esset latebat, tunc praedestinatus est secundum spiritum sanctificationis in virtute manifestari filius dei, cum resurgit a mortuis, sicut scriptum est in psalmo octogesimo quarto: veritas de terra orta est…ideo autem non dixit 'ex resurrectione Iesu Christi', sed 'ex mortuorum', quia resurrectio Christi generalem tribuit resurrectionem).

(98) En. Ps. 27.2: 'To you, Lord, have I cried; my God, do not take away the union of your Word from that condition by which I am human…From that condition, whereby the eternity of your Word does not cease to unite himself to me, may I http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 32/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship not be human as others are, who are born in the deep misery of this world' (Ad te, Domine, clamavi, Deus meus ne separes unitatem Verbi tui ab eo quod homo sum…Ex eo enim quod aeternitatis Verbi tui non intermittit unire se mihi, fit ut non sim talis homo quales sunt ceteri, qui nascuntur in profundam miseriam saeculi huius).

(99) En. Ps. 16.3: 'For my soul is your spear, which your hand takes up; that is to say, your eternal power, to subdue the reign of iniquity and divide the just from the unrighteous' (Anima enim mea framea tua est, quam assumit manus tua, id est, aeterna virtus tua, ut per ipsam regna debellet iniquitatis et dividat iustos ab impiis).

(100) En. Ps. 3.3: 'That human mind so clung, and in a certain way grew into, the supereminent excellence of the Word which took up the human, that it could not be cast off even by the humility of the passion' ([Mens ipsa humana] ita inhaesit et quodammodo coaluit excellenti supereminentiae Verbi hominem suscipientis, ut tanta passionis humilitate non deponeretur).

(101) McGuckin (1990: 45).

(102) Excerpta 8.l.71, 8.l.78, and 8.l.90.

(103) Where En. Ps. 44.19, 'God is anointed by God' (Unctus est Deus a Deo) corresponds to Hel. Ieiun. 10.36: 'This is the oil of gladness, by which Jesus Christ was anointed by God the Father' (hoc est oleum laetitiae, quo unctus est Iesus Christus a patre deo).

(104) Bernard (1965: 1–16).

(105) McWilliam Dewart (1979: 113).

(106) Pecc. Mer. 2.27.17.

(107) McWilliam Dewart (1979: 117).

(114) McGuckin (1990: 49).

(115) This is arguably a weakness in Augustine's Mariology, borne out by his discordant references to Mary's freedom from (and, conversely, possession of) actual and birth guilt; put to direct Christological use, such language would only intensify the problem.

(118) Viz. Christ's cry of dereliction; Eph. 3:17–18; the parable of the wise and foolish virgins; the meaning of the 'outer http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter7?print 33/35

8/8/2015 Election of the Dominical Human: Augustine and the Unfallen Soul of Christ Oxford Scholarship darknesses', tenebrae exteriores (Matt. 22:13); and of Verbum caro factus est (John 1:14).

(122) Ep. 140.18.6: 'He says this out of the person of the weakness of the flesh of sin, which he transfigured into what he took from the Virgin: the likeness of the flesh of sin. He speaks these words as the groom from the person of the bride, because in a certain way he has united her to himself' (Haec ex persona dicit infirmitatis carnis peccati, quam transfigurauit, in eam quam sumpsit ex uirgine, similitudinem carnis peccati. Haec sponsus ex persona sponsae loquitur, quia uniuit eam sibi quodam modo).

(125) Gen. Litt. 10.4.3.

(126) Gen. Litt. 10.12.7: 'As if in that fountain of souls (if there is any such thing) some should be good souls, others not good, which come out from it by a kind of drawing of lots, which deals a soul to each human; or else God makes some souls good, others not good, at the very moment in which people are being conceived or born, and from these a human receives the soul by lot which comes to him' (quasi aut in illo animarum fonte, si ullus est, aliae sint animae bonae, aliae non bonae, quae sorte quadam exeunt, quaenam cui homini tribuatur, aut alias deus ad horam conceptorum uel nascentium faciat bonas, alias non bonas, quarum quisque habeat sorte, quae acciderit).

(127) Gen. Litt. 10.12.7: neque enim neglegendi sunt, seu errent seu uerum sapiant, qui hoc specialiter et singulariter de anima illa dictum putant mediatoris dei et hominum hominis christi iesu.

(128) Gen. Litt. 10.32.18: quia non sic in ea conceptum est, quomodo fuerat illa concepta, nec ipsa erat caro peccati, sed similitudo carnis peccati.

(129) Gen. Litt. 10.33.18.

(130) Ambrose, Ep. 13.12.

(131) Princ. 2.6.5.

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The AntiPelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396430

Dominic Keech

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN13: 9780199662234 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001

Conclusion

Dominic Keech

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords

The Conclusion reviews the book's speculative method, and offers a summary narrative reconstruction of Augustine's theological development as argued in the foregoing chapters. Highlighting the intersection of personal and power politics in the construction of theological debate, it underlines the importance of the Origenist controversy in the negotiation of orthodoxy on the cusp of the fifth century. Noting Augustine's shifting appropriation of Origen's theology throughout his theological development, it identifies his attraction to Origen's Christology as a stable feature of his theological maturity. The book closes by raising questions of Augustine's Christology, and his doctrine of Original Sin, from a contemporary theological context.

Keywords: narrative, West, East, Christian philosophy, Simplicianus, Jerome, Origenism, Pelagianism, Christology, Original Sin

Every study of Augustine, whether of his life or thought, must confront two major challenges. The first lies in the vast amount of scholarly and popular material that continues to be produced about him, the quality of which is highly diverse. The second is the more pressing, and arises from the sheer subtlety of Augustine as man and thinker, to which his very many extant writings bear complex witness. I have suggested here that Augustine's account of Pelagianism must be seen as a single heresiological narrative among several within its own time. The same holds true of all of the many new investigations of Augustine in the present: they bear witness to but part of the reality of that man's achievement, motivations, and intellectual attractions. The danger in such writing lies either in reproducing established conventions http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter8?print 1/5

8/8/2015 Conclusion Oxford Scholarship that convey nothing new of Augustine's freshness, or in straying so far from the realm of probability that Augustine disappears from reasonable view. I hope that I have kept here to the mean between the two extremes, offering a reading of Augustine's engagement with Pelagianism and the theology of Origen that is both surprisingly new and reassuringly familiar. In doing this, I have tried to be as attentive to the aporias in the available evidence as to contemporary (though always subjective) accounts of events, believing that silences may speak louder than words where broader historical contexts demanded discretion, selfprotection, and an economical wisdom.

As a coherent narrative, my argument proceeds as follows. In the 380s, Augustine was to be found in Milan, learning the Catholic faith once again at the feet of Ambrose. For all that Ambrose's example as a powerful and intellectually acute bishop provided Augustine with a blueprint for the civilized Christian life, Milan served Augustine more favourably still as the centre of a network of likeminded men and women: educated, literary, and well connected. Here he came to know Simplicianus, to succeed Ambrose to the See of Milan, and Paulinus, who would champion Augustine's cause with vigour against Caelestius at the council of Carthage. In company with them, Augustine could claim acquaintance with Rufinus and Melania the Elder; Melania the Younger and her husband Pinianus; Paulinus of Nola and his household, and Pelagius himself. In Ambrose, this circle possessed an (p.237) exemplar of distinctively Latin and Roman catholicity, in which the Christian inheritance of the Greek East was absorbed and developed for an increasingly independent Western theological audience. What Ambrose wove into his preaching and dogmatic works for the defence of Nicene orthodoxy and the expansion of Roman Christianity, Rufinus would make explicit fifteen years later, by translating Greek theology for a largely non Grecophone public. This was perhaps a time of creative chaos, in which the cleavage of Western and Eastern Christianity was made ever clearer by the attempts of Latin churchmen to teach in harmony with their oriental colleagues, yet from an established tradition of Western theology and in the very different nuances of the lingua latina. Further behind this lay the ongoing tension in the story of the Empire, the holdingtogether of two interdependent cultures under a single political Pax.

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Augustine's education at Milan embraced the pagan past as much as it looked to the Christian future, heralded by the live voice of the traditio patrum. This was a recapitulation of his earlier liberal education, taking in Porphyry and Plotinus along with Marius Victorinus, Hilary, Ambrosiaster, Origen, and others. His precise view of the relative status of each within the proclamation of the gospel would fascinate and frustrate both his contemporaries and his successors. In all of this, the figure of Origen was taken as normative, one of the many voices from the postpersecution age for whom the exposition of Scripture constituted Christian philosophy, the Catholic discipline in its fullest sense. Before the controversy over Origen's writings, Augustine could draw on the translations slowly appearing from the scriptoria of Rufinus and Jerome, applying them with a light touch to his own maturing thought.

Moving to Rome, Ostia, and finally Thagaste, Augustine maintained his formative friendships from Milan, continuing to communicate by letter across the sea. Once ordained in 391, he would find them invaluable to his new project: the systematic reading of Scripture. Initial attempts to square his present with a Manichaean past resulted in the early works on Genesis. His accession to the episcopate at Hippo ran in tandem with a repeated and forensic examination of the Pauline corpus. Here, Augustine carefully kept his eye on prevailing fashions abroad, in the attempts of other Western commentators to articulate the literal meaning of Paul for a Latin readership. By 396, the publication of his first commentaries on Romans had cast him into the spotlight. Receiving the invitation of Simplicianus to treat more fully Romans 7–9, Augustine committed himself to engage in the current reinterpretation of those crucial chapters. And, because Origen's speculative extrapolation of scriptural exegesis found its most intrepid application here, Augustine could not ignore his findings. Perhaps already familiar with the use of Romans in De Principiis by word of mouth, Augustine obtained drafts of Rufinus' translation of Origen's commentary on Romans. These were added (p.238) to his wider reading, taking in particularly Ambrosiaster as the polar opposite of Origen's allegorical hermeneutic. When Pelagius finally arrived at the exposition of Paul a very few years later, his method would be the same. Origen's stature could not be ignored even in this very Western movement.

For Augustine, responding to Simplicianus acted as a literary digestif. His vacillating treatment of Romans 7:25, his http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter8?print 2/5

8/8/2015 Conclusion Oxford Scholarship application of a 'four ages' scheme to salvation history, and his uncertain reading of Paul on election came finally to settle. Augustine saw that the mystery of creation, confidently deployed contra Manichaeos in his first Genesis commentary, could only ever be completed by a mysterious salvation. The secret design behind the work of God's seven days found its corollary in his hidden judgement on the difficult ignorance of human experience. What Augustine had instinctively observed of the slightness of human power in De Libero Arbitrio was now recoded in the language of Scripture: the present indignity of human love proceeds from Adam's Fall, in which all are involved as in one lump. All the miserable confusion of history on the grand and small scale must be attributed to that one act of selfadmiration, the thrill of autonomy afterwards propagated from parent to child in the most selfloving of acts, sexual concupiscence. Augustine had cast the die for his own endgame, to be shown most graphically in De Civitate Dei. Humanity has fallen, its identity in love now permanently debased by the flesh, in a punishment of God both just and good. In this, Augustine was once again the syncretist, drawing together threads from his Christian predecessors, among whom Origen must be counted.

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In the hinterland of the Ad Simplicianum lie Augustine's conversations with Jerome, and his gradual understanding of the Origenist controversy in the East. This involved his episcopal brethren, raising acute issues about the nature of authority in the Church in matters of doctrinal development. More personally, it involved the works of Origen, which Augustine had been taught to receive with critical respect. As Jerome's conflict with Rufinus increased, it also placed Augustine in an intriguing position. As Jerome's junior and as yet early in his theological career, Augustine owed him a debt of gratitude for his service to Christian scholarship. As a bishop, Augustine could expect to be treated with commensurate courtesy. Augustine was a private ally of Rufinus, and so the tension between both dynamics could only be heightened. This explains the farce that ensued: Augustine's enquiries about the exposition of Scripture and the status of Origen were set to inflame Jerome from the beginning. In the middle of their correspondence Rufinus the Syrian left Jerome's monastery for Italy, taking Jerome's poison about the rise of dangerous Origenism in the West with him. This, he would suggest in his Liber, was now being repackaged in the Fall doctrine of the bishop of Hippo, the duplicitous sanitization of Origen's doctrine of the Fall of souls to embodiment.

(p.239) Whether Augustine knew of Rufinus' moves in Italy before Caelestius and Pelagius landed in Africa is uncertain. Once they were on his doorstep, their asceticism—and its theological basis—could not escape Augustine's scrutiny. At the council of Carthage, the Rufinian basis of Caelestius' teaching was exposed, in turn threatening to tar Augustine with the brush of Origenism. While that debate had been at least officially settled in Rome in 400, Augustine naturally wished to avoid the possibility of any such accusation. Thus began his lengthy preoccupation with Pelagianism. Pelagius' heresy was, initially, solely his own; but Augustine's later and closer reading of Pelagius' works permitted its elaboration into a system of errors, interconnected and perfidious as no heresy had been before. At the helm of the African episcopate, Augustine was anxious to evade the unsettled charges brought against Rufinus and Jerome himself. His tack was simply (though subtly) to change the name of the argument. Pelagianism may have been the new black, but the cut remained Alexandrine. Augustine marshalled his own allies to defend his teaching on sin and grace, but the publication of Jerome's Epistle 133 in 415 threatened to expose the elephant in the room once again: to approve the possibility of even theoretical impeccantia was pure Origenism reborn in Pelagian form. Augustine redoubled his efforts, hastily nuancing his position on the theoretical attainment of holiness in life before death. Augustine ensured his reputation by this manœuvre, until his death in 430; but this move also committed him to bear a burden of his own design in debate with Julian and the semi Pelagians, as he insisted on the traditionality of his own darkened vision of a very elusive hope.

In all of this, I do not believe that Augustine was actively deceitful or calculating. While he was more than capable of misdirecting confrontation and avoiding full intellectual selfdisclosure, he had none of the character of a Jerome or an Epiphanius of Salamis in using theology to abusive personal ends. In this book I have tried to read Augustine sympathetically, viewing him as the victim of his less scrupulous contemporaries and, indeed, his own intellect. Augustine's systematic treatment of the Fall of Adam, its integration with a reformed theory of the affections, and his dramatically new and consistent theology of history all command admiration. I am, however, convinced that this is a http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter8?print 3/5

8/8/2015 Conclusion Oxford Scholarship dangerous theology, and this is why it is necessary to understand the historical processes involved in its development. The Origenist and Pelagian controversies both pivoted on the restlessness of theological discourse at the turn of the fifth century. Human nature was the topic of both; both revealed the uncertainty of churchmen about authority within the Church, and both highlighted the insecurity of the Church as a whole about its place within a variety of philosophical dialogues stretching back into antiquity. The Origenist controversy did not reach a consensus about the nature of doctrinal development, nor about how the increasing power of episcopal, synodical, and conciliar modes of theological discernment might deal with (p.240) challenging and openended Christian thought that nonetheless stood within the 'great tradition'. Where Theophilus and Epiphanius found fault with Origen's speculations about the Fall of the soul and the character of bodily life, they also highlighted the inability of the Church to provide a workable and broadly acceptable contemporary alternative to the same set of underlying questions. This is clearly displayed in Augustine's confusion on the issue, and his unwillingness to announce the possibility that Origen's solution might in fact have been the best, within the broader framework of the Christian Platonism to which he otherwise publicly contributed. In their turn, the central actors in the Pelagian controversy replayed the same issues around ecclesial authority and the limits of theological systematization.

Augustine styled Pelagianism as a heresy precisely in order to draw attention away from those elements of his own thought that might have been open to the charge of Origenism. As I have tried to show, his method in all of this was intentionally ironic: he used Origen's Christological exegesis of Scripture consistently throughout his anti Pelagian works. This is a typically Augustinian cleverness, quietly questioning the nature of current definitions of orthodoxy and heresy from within an antiheretical corpus by drawing on the work of one counted a heretic. The time for a thorough and open investigation of the relationship between ecclesial authority and theological orthodoxy had not yet come, but the need for such a discussion was not unknown to those who possessed a range of powers to decree the content of right belief.

The place of Origen on the Western theological stage through the fourth to sixth centuries is important, because it provides an expansive perspective on these crucial issues. His works were clearly enjoyed and admired by many of those who established the Latin theological voice across Western Europe, from Hilary of Poitiers to Quodvultdeus of Carthage. In some cases, the works of these writers were maligned because of their reception of Origen (Cassian's 'Evagrianism' being a case in point); in others, they were not. Behind this lack of consistency lie the vague terms under which Origen's thought was attacked at the end of the fourth century, by individuals distant from each other and with quite different theological priorities. However much imperial support provided the Church in the conciliar age with a new ideal of diffused but consistent authority, standards of orthodoxy remained local and, perhaps above all, personal. That Augustine pushed his case against Pelagius in spite of the indifference of both Rome and Jerusalem, while ignoring the papal ban on Origen, makes this clear. This has potentially farreaching implications for our reading of the ecumenical councils and their decrees, presented in their own time and in a persistent tradition of ecclesiastical history as a golden standard of orthodoxy, held everywhere and always by all. My study here has focused on Augustine's reception of Origen in the context of his Christology. A truly thoroughgoing survey of all the verbal and mental echoes of Origen's theology in the Augustinian corpus might hope to shed significant light (p.241) on the character of theological discourse between the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, as well as enriching our understanding of Augustine. A substantial study of Origen's reception in the West within the same period might achieve considerably more, witnessing to the fragmentation, fluidity, and individuality of orthodox Christian thought in the high Patristic era.

I have made the case here that Augustine's Christology falls firmly within this depiction of Patristic diversity. It is already well known to scholarship that Augustine's teaching on the Incarnation is internally multifaceted, abundant with a variety of imagery, and lacking a sustained, dominant pattern. As a result, no isolated investigation has fully encompassed it. I hope that the importance of Romans 8:3 and its exegesis from an Origenian base will have been sufficiently proven in what I offer here. It is without doubt a major Christological thread that runs from Augustine's early works into his works directed against Pelagianism. While other aspects of his early thought disappeared from view in his http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter8?print 4/5

8/8/2015 Conclusion Oxford Scholarship mature works, this remained a constant, a sign that Augustine was capable of integrating the Incarnation within the development of his broader theological vision. The appeal to tradition must be counted as Augustine's primary motivation in perpetuating the same Christological exegesis of Paul throughout the anti Pelagian works. It is, however, testimony to the internal weakness of Augustine's anti Pelagian theology that his Christology finally failed to address the situation of humanity under sin as he conceived it.

As a consequence, this book joins the chorus of voices that continue to question the persistence of an Augustinian approach to sin and desire within Western Church and society. Even in its own time, his account of the Fall did not speak for the whole opinion of the Church. Related to the materialist Traducianism of his African predecessor Tertullian, not unconnected to the thought of Mani, and redressing elements of Origen's teaching, it is an eclectic synthesis produced at the behest of polemical imperatives. Deficient as Julian's understanding of grace might have been, his critique of Augustinian Original Sin was no heresy. It cannot be good enough to account for the transmission of sin in the seed by glossing from Scripture and texts from the Fathers. Whatever accounts for the persistence of cruelty and evil in human society cannot primarily be exemplified by the uncontrollable oblivion of orgasm. By the same token, however holiness is to be defined, it must be seen as a possibility for pilgrims on their way to the Kingdom in the world now, and not postponed to an otherwise imperceptible, future heavenly city. Augustine's anti Pelagian Christology makes clear that a crooked theory of sin leaves the 'likeness of sinful flesh' powerless to save. In following Origen's theology of the Incarnation, woven around the enigmatic words of Paul, Augustine saw rightly that Christ must be both familiar and alien if he is to transform human deficiency into human fullness. That fullness must include the flesh and all the desires that proceed from bodily existence, once assumed by the eternal Word for the salvation of all, if it is to be hoped for at all.

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