G.E. Moore once said that he was never puzzled by the world but only by what philosophers said about it. One has the sense of both the truth and the perversity of that comment in reading Harrison's book on Augustine.
Her thesis is that those scholars who swim in the wake of Peter Brown's acclaimed biography – a biography, as she implies, in which the author make his case both more compelling and less accurate by his over-heated style – and who see the ‘Reply to Simplicianus’ (henceforth the ‘Reply’) in 396 as a revolutionary turning point in Augustine's theology are mistaken. In the steps of Madec she argues for substantial continuity: in 396, she thinks, Augustine was compelled to admit that the hopes for post-lapsarian human freedom with which, while pondering Paul, he had been wrestling for several years, must be relinquished, and that his original view (consistent since his conversion) that even the beginning of faith (‘initium fidei’) depends on God must be reaffirmed.
Harrison calls the ‘Reply’ a ‘profound evolution’ whereby Augustine proposes with a clarity hitherto unachieved that even the ability of man to turn for help to God is a divine gift (p. 128), but applauds Madec's view that Augustine saw nothing ‘dramatic’ about it (pp. 151-153). Elsewhere she again speaks of ‘a new clarity’ but sees this as essentially ‘a new terminology’, marking less a revolution than an enforced realization that a standard account of free will, however apparently useful against the Manichaeans, is to be rejected as incompatible with what Augustine had believed since his conversion.
Throughout her discussion Harrison rather confusingly tends to lump together three unacceptable accounts of Augustine before 396: that he was a proto-Pelagian – holding that we are sufficiently graced since birth to be able to live the Christian life; that we are able to co-operate with the necessary divine grace to act well; that (more subtly) the change in 396 was not just about the necessity of grace for every good ‘action’ but its necessity even for us to be able to throw ourselves on God's mercy: that too, Harrison normally claims, being an ‘act’ which the early Augustine urges us to attribute to God alone.
Harrison has three groups of scholars in her sights: those who, she thinks, still hanker for a minimally revised version of the old and discredited thesis of Alfaric that Augustine's original conversion was to Neoplatonism ‘rather’ than to Christianity; those who offer what she sees as virtually a variation on this whereby though Augustine had always accorded considerable weight to God's grace, before 396 he still optimistically believed in human perfectibility through some kind of cooperation between that grace and the remains of human freedom (this group would include Brown himself, Paula Fredriksen, James Wetzel, Patout Burns and others); finally those whole-hoggers who see 396 as marking the appearance of what Gaetano Lettieri calls a ‘second Augustine’, the terrifying apostle of a religion of fear and arbitrary divine omnipotence: the purveyor of what Kurt Flasch dubbed a ‘logic of terror’.
In writing in the adversarial mode for specialists there is always the risk of flogging dead horses: with a view to hammering home the interests of the genuinely ‘Augustinian’ Christianity of Augustine's earlier writings Harrison sometimes dilates at length – especially in the second half of her book – on what has been (or has been shown to be) blindingly obvious. The spectre of Alfaric has long been exorcized and the ‘two Augustines’ bogey, in Lettieri's version, has been speared with lethal precision by Cipriani.
Which features then of Harrison's thesis seem right and interesting and which wrong and misleading against Brown and his epigoni? She is certainly right to think that the principal revolution in Augustine's thought was the conversion itself, in the recognition by Augustine both before and after 396 that the Neoplatonists who had delivered him from materialism had quite inadequate ideas of how to approach the heavenly kingdom they had adumbrated, since they knew nothing of Christ's incarnation nor of the extent of our present parlous condition; but she is wrong to argue that in 396 Augustine simply reasserted what he had always really held but had been tempted, in the course of anti-Manichaean polemic, to evade. She is right to think that Augustine was always inclined to attribute all to grace, but wrong to deny that for a while – even inconsistently – he also thought that grace, freely sought by the believer, could generate perfection in this present life. Her attempts to explain away as mere aspirations Augustine's own remarks about perfectibility for a few splendid Christians give the game away (e.g. p.64; p. 196 n.2). No scholar ever supposed that Augustine thought, any more than the Stoics or Plotinus thought, that the number of such perfectibles would be large. On this point Harrison is inclined to read Brown (and others) somewhat ungenerously.
More serious in its implications is that Harrison underplays the emphasis of Augustine himself on the revelation of truth he believed he had come to see in writing the ‘Reply’ to Simplicianus. Harrison is good on showing, against the neglect of Brown's partisans, how Augustine struggled, as he himself said, in the years before the ‘Reply’ to defend a stronger account of human freedom after the fall, but she minimizes the effect on his mentality of his definitive resolution of the matter in favour of the grace of God: precisely the effect which Brown and Fredriksen have rightly emphasized, though they left out or misconstrued too much of the immediately preceding history. For it is normal in the history of ideas that although a basic ‘truth’ may lurk behind a man's thought before he explicitly and unambiguously recognizes it as such, the effect of such recognition is still brutally decisive; for him – and often for others – the world cannot be the same again. In this respect the ‘two Augustines’ people get something right, though their own rendition of the ‘second Augustine’ is rarely accurate and their account of the earlier too much a construct of wishfully liberal aspiration.
In arguing as she does, Harrison believes herself to be in line with the approach of Augustine himself in the ‘Retractations’: namely that (for example) although he was not specifically dealing with Pelagianism but with Manichaeism in the work ‘On Free Will’, his views there should not have been used by Pelagians in support of their own position. Augustine himself observes that in ‘On Free Will’ he was treating not of the free choice of the will but of the origin of evil, and therefore that he had no need to discuss predestination and God's preparation of the human will, thus speaking only incidentally of grace. Many have accused him of bad faith over such remarks. Harrison accepts his ‘apologia’ and establishes it as accurate insofar as she can show that grace is certainly allocated its due importance when it happens to be mentioned in ‘On Free Will’. But it is the sheer unambiguous nature of Augustine's thought in the ‘Reply’ which is so striking – and which, when not defending himself against Pelagian detractors, Augustine himself recognizes. Pelagius was wrong to claim that Augustine supported him in ‘On Free Will’, but he would have been nearer the mark if he had said that at least one part of Augustine's mind was with him over our native ability even after the Fall to call on God. It would be surprising, were Harrison right about Augustine's rather limited change of mentality in 396, that he not only chose immediately to write the ‘Confessions’, which seems to me and to others to be ‘evidence’ for the ‘new theology’, but proceeded apace, as soon as opportunities arose, to immerse himself in the details of predestination and to fall into the logical pitfalls of a view of omnipotence and its effects on theodicy which that new theology seemed to demand of him. And I pass over the well-documented insistence of the later, but not the earlier, Augustine on the inability of even the greatest saints to eliminate sexual temptations and the fear of death.
So Brown would seem to be right (though for the wrong reasons) about the psychological effects of 396, Harrison about the fact that the nature of the ‘Reply’ should hardly be considered a complete volte-face in the light of Augustine's whole history since his conversion: rather it is the culmination of an increasing awareness of the implications of a set of ideas which, individually, and at least in part in combination, Augustine had long accepted or come to accept – but no less stark and devastating for that. It is easy to see, with hindsight, that perhaps the ‘Reply’ was inevitable, but Augustine himself never had quite our hindsight at his disposal. Ironically, on this point at least, Brown may have the last laugh; perhaps Harrison has failed to put herself adequately in Augustine's shoes in 396.
