Thread: A quote from Augustine ????!!

Can anyone of you please tell me if Augustine ever said this:"He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent". I ran across this in an old pamplet put out by Woodrow Knoll of the "Back To The Bible" fame. If this is an accurate quote from Augustine, what writing did it come out of. I would like to know because, from everything I know about Augustine, it looks like it has been intentally taken out context. Once again, I am in debt to you all. Bob Chapman

I was just searching the internet. Everyone likes to quote it but no one likes to refrence...

If Augustine did say that, he said it earlier in his life. That is not in line with his more standard thought. Later in life he said, "I use to entertain ideas of "free-will," then the grace of God prevailed. If Augustine said that, it justified him writing his [i:a2f88d6c25]Retractions [/i:a2f88d6c25]later in life to undo it. Then again, he may never have said it...

I too have searched the internet trying to trace the origin of this quote. I don't have the final word, but I can report the following:

Although many do attribute the quote cited above to Augustine, there is some reason to think that they are mistaken.

According to the Vatican website (re: Catholic Catechism), what Augustine said is this: "God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us." The source they gave is: St. Augustine, Sermo 169,11,13:PL 38,923. If this correct, the true quote is slightly different and the nuances shift from a Pelagian point of view to something entirely different.

Source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_cs...m/p3s1c1a8.htm

I found another source that attributes the quote in question to Catherine of Siena: "In Catherine's [i:b4dce82024]Dialogues[/i:b4dce82024], she makes explicit this connection between free will and God's love. After an introduction and discussion of the nature of suffering, Catherine asserts that although God "created us without our help, he will not save us without our help" (Dialogues, 23). This notion of free will is clearly quite different from that of Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas."

Source: http://www.whitworth.edu/academic/De...ta/d_cathe.htm

I welcome further input in ascertaining the accuracy of this information.

Thank all three of you for your replys. Bob Chapman

I think, perhaps, the quote you're looking for (as suggested above) came from sermon 169 of Augustine. It was preached in the year 416, and comes from an anti-Pelagian sermon...

Augustine (354-430): He was handed over, you see, because of our wrongdoing, and he rose again because of our justification (Rom 4:25). What does because of our justification mean? In order to justify us, to make us just. You will be God's work, not only because you are human, but also because you are just. It is better, after all, to be just, than for you just to be human. If it was God that made you human and if it's you that make you just, it means you are making something better than God made.
But God made you without you. You didn't, after all, give any consent to God making you. How were you to consent, if you didn't yet exist? So while he made you without you, he doesn't justify you without you. So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it. Yet it's he that does the justifying (in case you should think it's your justice, and go back to the dead losses, the wastage and the muck), for you to be found in him not having your own justice, which is from the law, but the justice through the faith of Christ, which is from God; justice from faith, to know him and the power of his resurrection, and a share in his sufferings (Phil 3:9-10). And that will be your power, your strength; a share in Christ's sufferings will be your strength.
God can only be loved by virtue of God's gift. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., ed., WSA, Part 3, Vol. 5, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., Sermons, Sermon 169.13 (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1992), p. 231.

Now apart from God's dealings with elect infants dying in infancy, or those unable to respond to the outward call of the of Gospel, namely idiots (and I mean "idiot" in the classic sense), it is true to say that God does not justify us apart from our wills, because by His mighty work in regeneration our wills are graciously disposed to appropriate Christ as He is freely offered to us in the Gospel.

In other words, this reference to Augustine apologetically by Roman apologists is very misguided to say the least.

Blessings,
DTK