On St. Augustine and predestination

So some friends of mine told me their professor had said that St. Augustine was the "predestination guy" (ok, this wording is a paraphrase of a paraphrase of a blurb) and elaborated upon his explanation of this, which I have forgotten.  The answer is not a simple yes or no, because first you have to establish what you mean by predestination, and then you have to see that there is a tension that is paradoxical - but not contradictory - between the necessity of grace and the action of the free will, both of which the holy Doctor taught.  The truth in this matter is a sort of a thing like the Trinity or the two natures of Christ, where it is too easy to want to fall into the Scylla and Charybdis (or Sirens and Calypso) of oversimplifying errors that lie temptingly on either side, and St. Augustine performed the heroic task of steering between the errors of the Manichees on one side and the Pelagians on the other.

Catholics today, I think, have an allergy to the word "predestination" because of the way that Calvinists have misused it (also of note is how they pretended to hide behind the aegis of the Doctor of Grace).  "Those He foreknew He also predestined," St. Paul tells us, but this is not to be understood so as to exclude real human choices.  Why?  For one thing, if the responsibility for human choices does not lie with individual human persons, but with God, then who is the author of evil deeds?  Clearly God.  But this is inimical to Catholic teaching and to St. Augustine.  Nor does God positively will anyone to go to hell.

This post really does not do the subject justice; it needs a paper rather than a blog entry.  And you would do better to consult more authoritative sources than me.  I have read Confessions and City of God and some of the contra-Manichaean writings but none of the contra Pelagian, and I am hardly an expert.  I have "On Free Choice of the Will" in front of me, but I won't finish it in time for this post.  The editor explains in the preface that St. Augustine was a strong defender of "libertarianism" (not to be confused with the modern political movement), the view that man has "metaphysical freedom" (i.e. the intellect and will cannot be coerced like the body can), and who explicitly rejected determinism.

Accordingly, please read the whole of heading "II" of this article from the Catholic Encyclopedia, and perhaps this article on the heresy of "predestinarianism" and on the proper place of predestination in Catholic theology.

So the short answer is, I think, "Predestination, yes; predestination theories which reduce the eternal salvation of the elect and the eternal damnation to one single cause, namely the will of God to the exclusion of man's free choice to cooperate or not to cooperate with grace, no."

P.S. I have not covered all the details in this short post; for instance, "the" teaching of St. Augustine is not an absolutely precise thing since he did modify some of his positions over time, and as Aurelius points out, did tend toward more rigorous predestination later in life when he needed to champion grace against the Pelagians and semi-Pelagians, but even there I don't think you'll be able to find an instance where he denies the freedom of the will as described above (not to imply that Aurelius said anything of the sort).  This was also a good comment because it reminded me that I didn't say anything about the different opinions a Catholic may legitimately hold in this regard.  The two main schools of thought are the Molinist, which lays more emphasis on man's freedom and Thomist, which lays more emphasis on God's grace (there is also apparently an "Augustinian" which is explicitly approved, but I don't know the details).  The Dominicans and Jesuits argued about this for ages until the pope decreed that both systems were acceptable and neither side could charge the other with heresy (more).  I don't know all the details about the various shades of Calvinism, but Jimmy Akin (himself a convert from Calvinism) in a 1993 article assures me that many who consider themselves Calvinist don't have to change all that much to bring themselves into line with a proper Thomistic conception of grace, and some (those who affirm neither "double-predestination" nor a Calvary offered for some but not all) may not really have to change at all.