Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings (continued)
INTRODUCTION
the Transcendent Good, loving the Good for itself, taking neither himself nor any created good as an absolute—this is the point of departure for spiritual liberty, a positive power of attachment to the Absolute Good, with a negative concomitant of detachment from the relative. In loving God, man makes God's will his own, and by thus doing his own will, he does more easily what he ought to do. Augustine expressed this psychological experience when he said: "Love and do as you please.' "With the Holy Spirit, by whose Gift we are justified, we take delight in this, that we sin not,—and that is freedom; without the Spirit we take delight in sin, and that is slavery."
So we see that for Augustine growth in freedom is personal growth, the harmonious development of the psychological powers of memory, understanding, and will through their attention to God, triune, to whom they are dynamically related and from whom they receive unity. This call to freedom qualifies personal existence, marking its likeness to God and its unlikeness to animals. Love is the key to this personal freedom "My love is my weight; by it I am carried wherever I am carried.''®' Love as the unitive force is the force of conversion. By graced freedom one becomes Godlike.
Augustine refused to let go of either free choice or grace as necessary for the return to God. While he emphasized free choice in writing against the Manichees and emphasized grace in writing against the Pelagians, his Christian anthropology includes both.
We, however, on our side affirm that the human will is so divinely aided in the pursuit of righteousness that (in addition to the free choice with which man was created, and in addition to the teaching by which he is instructed how he ought to live), he receives the Holy Spirit, by whom there is formed in his mind a delight in, and a love of, that supreme and unchangeable good which is God, even now while he is still "walking by faith" and not yet "by sight"; in order that by this gift to him of the down payment, as it were, of the free gift, he may conceive an
65. Augustine, Homilies on St. John's Epistles, V1.8. 66. On the Spirit and the Letter, 16. 67. Conf., XIIL.9.