Augustine
Christ and the Soul
The lofty theology of a book like City of God is always a little irrelevant. All of it may be true. A full understanding of the dispensation of salvation may be impossible without it. But in the end it is just another construction of the human intellect. Even if the intellect is aided by divine illumination, its triumphs are still fleeting ones.
How God deals with the human race may be a matter of speculative interest. How Christ redeems the individual soul is an urgent concern. The individual person has no other life but his own. The Christian who believes in his God and longs to be united with him deems all other concerns secondary, however important. The abuse this zeal fosters is selfish concentration on personal salvation at the expense of a caring involvement in human affairs, but to Augustine such concentration is always self-defeating. The path to personal salvation lies through a future of personal self-abnegation in the love of God and of neighbor. Paradoxically (that word again), to save one's soul means abandoning all morbid preoccupation with self by immersion in self-effacing love. "He who would save his soul must lose it." (Matthew 10.39) Thus, it is "microtheology" that presents Augustine's vision of Christianity in its fullest development and that attracted the fiercest controversy. In the last two decades of Augustine's life, the Pelagian controversy forced him to examine his views on these subjects with passionate care. What emerged in that period was a fuller statement of principle and a working out of logical consequences, but not a new theology.[1]
The rudiments of the Augustinian theology of grace can be seen as early as the first book of the Seven Various Questions for Simplicianus, written ...