79. Civ. Dei 22.29 (CCL 48:861–62); trans. Walsh and Honan, FOTC 24:503–5. (continued)
chapter 10
Controversies (IV)
Against the Pelagians
Augustine's final controversy centered on the issue of grace. This debate, more than any other, would come to define his legacy to later ages, earning him the title doctor gratiae ("teacher of grace"). For Augustine, grace was no wispy abstraction. It lay at the very heart of his life story. In Confessions, he set out the high drama of his conversion, how, after hearing stories of converts, this one-time-Manichee-turned-indecisive-Catholic-catechumen wandered into a garden in turmoil and tears, heard a child's voice, a call to "pick up, read," prompting him to seize a book of letters from another convert, St. Paul, and experienced, after reading just a few words from the Letter to the Romans, a profound conversion. In its wake, despite his successful secular career and a promising future, he chose to walk away, to abandon "the world," renouncing fame and power, wealth and marriage. Augustine the bishop, writing Confessions more than a decade later, looked back on that scene as an act of God, a moment of unmerited grace.
In the long interval between his experience in the garden in 386 and his writing of it in the late 390s, Augustine meditated deeply on Paul's letters and their intricate assertions on grace. Thinking through the implications came slowly.1 A grand commentary on Paul's letters never got beyond the opening verses of Romans. Around 394, he published a miscellany of reflections on Paul, drawn from a question-and-answer session held in Carthage.2 But in
1. For an analysis of the sometimes subtle, but significant shifts and stages in Augustine's thinking on grace, see the seminal work of J. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine's Doctrine of Operative Grace, CEASA 82 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1980). 2. Augustine published this as Commentary on Statements in the Letter of Paul to the Romans (Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistula apostoli ad Romanos, CSEL 84: 3–52). For the text and an analysis, see Paula Fredriksen Landes, Augustine on Romans, 2–49.