God Owes Us Nothing.

I suppose it was bound to happen. For the past three years, Commonweal has been sending me books proclaiming theories of determinism: our overt behavior is really not what it seems, but the necessary action of a computer-like nervous system, basic sexual patterns, genes. It only stands to reason, then, that I should be asked to complete this series by reviewing a book on Divine Determinism, a.k.a., predestination.

Leszek Kolakowski's basic interest is the theology of Blaise Pascal. The first section of the book, however, is devoted to an extensive discussion of the Jansenist background of Pascal's thought. This section makes for hard reading--hard not only because the arguments of the Jansenists and their Jesuit opponents are intricate, but because they are so manifestly offensive. There is, for instance, a careful dissection of the doctrine of double predestination, a position not much discussed, I suspect, even in the descendent churches of John Calvin who thought well of the doctrine. The issue in double predestination as against simple predestination was whether when God elects some for salvation, he also elects some for perdition. The milder view is that God elects some for salvation, but he does not directly will anyone to perdition; he simply fails to give them the effective grace they would need to be saved. Kolakowski suggests that this is a distinction without a difference. Indeed.

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The proponents of predestination (double or simple), were alike in putting forth a view of God's action which seems not only to undermine moral effort, but would seem to most twentieth-century readers downright "immoral." Thus, Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) gives explicit approval to the work of an Irish monk that there is no salvation for dead unbaptized infants who, because they have not been cleansed of original sin, "go into eternal fire." Since it was also doctrine that the blessed rejoiced in the sufferings of the damned (rejoicing in God's justice), one must imagine the parents celebrating the suffering of their unfortunate infants. And what "justice" is there in "Original Sin"--the visitation of the fault of Adam on all his descendants? Pascal says that if one is troubled by this strange "justice," it only shows how different (and exalted) God's justice is from our miserable human conception.

Why all this stirring about election, predestination, and divine grace in seventeenth-century France? Kolakowski lucidly explains the various philosophical, religious, and social strands that created such heat over these arcane theological views. Basically, there were two world views battling for supremacy: the Renaissance "vision du monde...was based on...an optimistic belief in universal harmony and a network of correspondences between microcosmos and macrocosmos." In contrast was the vision--well expressed in Pascal--that the world is "alien, hostile, and threatening." By and large, the Jesuits adopted the first view, Jansenists the second. A benevolent God for a benevolent world would probably not condemn unbaptized infants to the fire, but more important, he would certainly be able to overlook the peccadillos of the libertin bourgeois and noblesse. There is no usury if the creditor takes the money as a sign of gratitude. Almsgiving is a duty, but only from our excess, but since hardly anyone has excess--even kings, etc.

These examples were lampooned by Pascal in the Provincial Letters as examples of the pernicious Pelagianism of the Jesuit Molinists. Casuistry and excuses for bad deeds are of no value--but neither are good deeds. The world is not benevolent, it is not a place of possible good deeds and plausible excuses; the world is unmitigated evil and sin from which we can only be rescued by divine action. We are not saved by works, but by God's free choice and grace. We are not paid back for our "goodness": God owes us nothing.

Such was Jansen's doctrine in his great unfinished treatise Augustinus. Kolakowski asks why the official church finally rejected Jansen and what seems to be the mainline of Augustinian theology. Jansenism was brutally suppressed by the state authorities, to be sure, not because of its theology, but because a Europe jittery from a century of religious warfare wanted no more sectarian conflict. The Jesuits "won" with the "semi-Pelagian" notion that humans "cooperate" with divine grace, they are not pawns of divine destiny. Kolakowski judges that it is well that the Jesuits prevailed since their view has been the church's open door to modernity's belief in change and progress. At the same time, however, he sees the quarrel between grace and goodness as a permanent tension within the Christian churches.

The second section of the book details what Kolakowski labels Pascal's "sad religion." He contrasts the Pascalian/ Augustinian position to a "tragic" view. In the tragic view, the protagonist is faced with nothing but morally wrong choices--the fault line is in the situation, not in the inherent evil of the one who acts. Under predestination the actor is wrong--unless she has been mysteriously elected by God's grace. As Kolakowski concludes, this view has "made many Christians wonder why divine justice should be called justice at all."

God Owes Us Nothing is a brisk, clarifying discussion not only of what seems at first a quarrel best forgotten, but of perennial issues for Christian faith--or for anyone worried about the "meaning of life." (Pascal's Pensees was not directed to believers, but to skeptics.) No matter how deep the Pelagian temptation, it finally fails somewhere before a doctrine of grace. God owes us nothing. But are the dreadful doctrines of predestination then not the inevitable outcome? Either we earn salvation through works (cooperative work even), or we are given salvation from God's mysterious will. A Christian must come to terms with Augustine, Calvin, Pascal, et al., and with all this machinery of election and divine determination. Modernity is, of course, appalled by predestination as an assault on human freedom and responsibility. However, the other, ultramodern, "scientific" books I have been reviewing for Commonweal recently seem delighted with cybernetic or genetic determinism--which seem to me to be just as destructive of human worth as the most ironclad Calvinism. Is determinism from above any better than determinism from below (genes)? Aren't both rejections of free will and human value?

However, this is only a book review, not a section of a Summa. I end with a suggestion. Augustine--who got us into this mess--was a unique figure who, it can be argued, invented the very idea of the individual and the will which is the mark of same. The Confessions is radically new: an autobiographical document, the story of an individual soul in dialogue with God. His question is not how to reduce or eliminate the will in terms of some general laws of nature, but how is this human individual will directed by that other will, the will of God. One can understand how the will of the general commands my will as a faithful soldier. Now, is "faithful soldier" just another word for "human automaton"? It often sounds that way in all the metaphysics of divine election, but that cannot be the case without evaporating the notion of "faithful"--along with "will" and "individual." For Augustine, the individual is grounded in the One God, not dissolved into the many genes. This powerful insight tends to get expressed in whatever available metaphysical theory is hanging around. To the extent that theory loves the universal, it has a hard time finding the individual--thus distorting a profound religious sensibility into grand and grotesque opinions about the machinery of destiny. Philosophizing about divine grace may be the root mistake.