Augustine in His Own Words
396, soon after his installation as bishop of Hippo, he got a letter from an old friend, Simplicianus, the elderly presbyter who had played a passing role in his conversion and who soon succeeded Ambrose as bishop of Milan. Simplicianus wanted help on interpreting certain thorny biblical texts, particularly from Paul's Letter to the Romans. Augustine's reply, To Simplicianus, on Various Questions, marked a quiet but decisive revolution in his thought, a landslide of new perspectives on grace and free will, on the history of salvation and the mystery of God's foreknowledge.3 When, soon after, he set about writing Confessions, those new perspectives wove their way into the very fabric of his autobiography.4 He came to see Paul's message of grace encapsulated in a single verse: "What do you have that you have not received? And if you have received it, why do you glory as if you did not receive it?" (1 Cor 4:7)5 Augustine thus looked back on his life not as a story of a man coming to truth after a hardfought intellectual quest nor coming to a more just way of life by willing his way to hard-earned virtues. He saw it, instead, as a story of grace, a mysterious, miraculous series of unearned gifts, graced insights allowing him to grasp some measure of truth and a graced fire of love fueling his heart to live out, however haltingly, some measure of virtue. In the 410s, this reading of the Bible and of his life—and of Christian life—would come under severe fire during the Pelagian controversy.
Pelagius (c. 350–c. 425) was of British origin, a lay ascetic who spent much of his career, from the 380s to around 410, in the city of Rome. The recovery of his writings in the early twentieth century, as well as the discovery in the late nineteenth century of a large dossier authored by allies and sympathizers, known as the Caspari corpus, has enabled historians to strip away centuries of polemic and sketch out a better grounded view of the man and the movement associated with his name.6 Pelagius moved among Rome's aristocratic families, serving as a tough-minded, no-nonsense, but deeply in-
3. Peter Brown's classic chapter, "The Lost Future," in Augustine of Hippo, 139–50, has been widely influential as an interpretation of this phase of Augustine's career. Goulven Madec, Saint Augustin et la philosophie, 69–75, and Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology, 14–19, have challenged this interpretation, stressing greater continuity before and after Ad Simplicianum. Despite their helpful caveats, most scholars remain in agreement with Brown's reading, not to mention Augustine's own self-assessment (retr. 2.1.3 [27]; praed. sanct. 4.8) that Ad Simplicianum was just such a decisive moment.
4. On this, see Paula Fredriksen, "Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self," Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 3–34.
5. Simpl. 1.2.9 (CCL 44:34). On Augustine's appeal to this verse and its place within his broader theology, see Pierre-Marie Hombert, Gloria Gratiae: Se glorifier en Dieu, principe et fin de la théologie augustinienne de la grâce, CEASA 148 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1996).
6. On these discoveries and their implications, see Gerald Bonner, Augustine and Modern Research on Pelagianism (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1972); see also his further reflections: "Pelagianism and Augustine," Augustinian Studies 23 (1992): 33–51, and "Augustine and Pelagianism," Augustinian Studies 24 (1993): 27–47. Other recent perspectives are in Mathijs Lamberigts, "Pelagius and Pelagians," in Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, 258–79.