that happy state. Scripture

23. According to Augustine, De gestis Pelagii 23.
    [Saint Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 23, ibid., 193.—Trans.]
24. Epistula ad Demetriadem 8, 17.
25. According to Augustine, De gratia Christi I, 27, 30: “ad operandum” “ad facilius operandum.”
    [Saint Augustine, On the Grace of Christ, 1.27, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Schaff, trans. Holmes and Wallis, 228.—Trans.]
26. According to Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes dans l’antiquité chrétienne, ch. XI.
27. Romans 7:25 [sic].
    [The reference should read Rom. 7:24.—Trans.] 28. De Genesi contra manichaeos II, VIII, 32.
28. De concept. et gratia [sic], 33: “posse non peccare.”
    [The title of this work is actually De correptione et gratia, or in English, On Rebuke and Grace.—Trans.]

is strict on this point, and Saint Augustine himself relies on it.30 Our nature is tainted, and without baptism, man is destined for damnation (according to John II, 54). Saint Augustine sees proof of this in the universal desolation of the world and in the misery of our condition, of which he paints a powerful picture.31
But these are the secondary effects of original sin. Others more intimate and more irremediable will indicate the extent of our misfortune. First, we have lost the freedom of the “ability not to sin.”

We depend on divine grace. On the other hand, damnation is, in principle, universal. Humankind as a whole is doomed to the flames. Its only hope is divine mercy.32 From this, there follows another consequence: the damnation of unbaptized children.33
Grace is then made more urgent. And we are dependent on this grace from three points of view: in order for us to preserve our tainted nature, in order to believe the truths of the supernatural order,34 and in order to make us act according to those truths.35 But this highest grace which is faith we do not merit by our works. However, we can merit, to a certain extent, that of beneficence.36 In all cases, what determines our entire fate is Predestination. And Saint Augustine constantly returns to the gratuity of this doctrine.37 The number of the chosen, just as that of the outcasts, is set once and for all and invariably. Only then does God consider our merits and demerits in order to determine the degree of our punishment. What we cannot know is the reason why this is so. Our freedom is a freedom to refuse the highest graces on the one hand, and to merit the secondary graces on the other. Our spontaneity applies only to the interior of divine omnipotence.38

30. Psalm 50; Job 19:4; Ephesians 2:3; above all Romans 5:12; John 3:5.
31. Contra Iulianum I, 50, 54, P.L. vol. 45, col. 1072; De civitate Dei XXII, 22; I, 3.
32. “Universa massa perditione.” De diversis quaestionibus ad simplicianum I, quaestione II, 16.
33. Contra Iulianum III, 199, P.L. vol. 45, col. 1333.
    [Camus mentions this teaching in a lecture he gave at the Dominican Monastery of
    Latour-Maubourg entitled “The Unbeliever and Christians,” later published in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 72. The context is Camus’ defense of himself against the charge of pessimism: “I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. I was not the one to shout Nemo bonus or the damnation of unbaptized children.”—Trans.]
34. De praedestione Sanctorum 5, 7, 22.
35. Epistulae CCXVII.
36. Epistulae CLXXXVI.
37. Enchiridion XCVIII and XCIX. Epistulae CLXXXVI, 15. De dono perseverantiae, 17.
38. De Gratia et libero arbitrio 4.
39. The Word and the Flesh: The Trinity.We have grasped in reality what in Saint Augustine is specifically Christian. If we think back to Plotinian metaphysics, we will see the infinite distance that separates the two attitudes. Thus, at least we will not be misled by the frequent parallels between the two, and we will know to make allowances for Saint Augustine’s Christianity in his Neoplatonism. As we have seen, what he has drawn from the Platonic authors is a certain conception of the Word. But his role was to include Christ in this conception and from there to develop it into the Word made flesh of the fourth Gospel. We must therefore follow closely to understand what Saint Augustine has been able to ask of Neoplatonism. We will then show how these borrowed conceptions were transformed by the doctrine of the Incarnation.
    a) The Word: “[A soul of this kind (that is, a pure soul) will be where substance and reality and the divine are]—that is in god—there it will be with them and in him.”39But Saint Augustine says: “The ideas are certain original and principle forms of things, i.e., reasons, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence.”40He understands God through the heart, but also through intelligence. We see clearly that his conception is thus entirely philosophical, because the intelligible world that we marvel at reveals to us its secret. Our spirit, before the world, performs a double movement. Before the variety of beings produced by the intelligible, it distinguishes the idea that it encompasses, but its second effort synthesizes these ideas into a single reality that expresses them thus: “Then not only are they ideas, but they are themselves true because they are eternal and because they remain ever the same and unchangeable.”41
40. Plotinus Ennead IV, III, 24: “C’est en Dieu, dit Plotin que l’âme pure habite avec les intelligibles.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 4.3.24, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 111.—Trans.]
41. De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII, quaestione 46, no. 2, P.L. vol. 40, col. 30: “Les idées sont comme les formes premières ou les raisons des choses, stables et immuables, n’ayant point reçu leur forme éternelle par suite et toujours de même qui sont contenues dans l’intelligence divine.”
    [Saint Augustine, On Various Questions, 46, no. 2, in The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine: Eighty-Three Different Questions, ed. H. Dressler, trans. D. L. Mosher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 80.—Trans.]
42. De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII, quaestione 46, no. 2, P.L. vol. 40, col. 30: “Non solum sunt ideae sed ipsae verae sunt, quae eternae sunt, et ejus modi atque incommutabiles manent.”
    [Saint Augustine, On Various Questions 46, no. 2, ibid., 81.—Trans.]

“This reality,” which Saint Augustine understands in this way as pure intelligence and the highest truth, “is God.”42It is a Plotinian conception. What is at work here is the principle of participation. The ideas participate in everything divine. They are in it, and yet it is something more than them. We will reveal this relation better still through a vigorous text of de Trinitate:43“So because there is but one Word of God, through which all things were made (Jn. 1:1–6), which is unchanging truth, in which all things are primordially and unchangingly together, not only things that are in the whole of this creation, but things that have been and will be; but there is not a question of ‘have been’ and ‘will be,’ there they simply are; and all things there are life and all are one, and indeed there is there but one ‘one’ and one life.”44The Plotinian method shows through here. But the moment Saint Augustine incorporates this doctrine of the Word Intelligence into the theory of the Trinity, things change their meanings. Plotinus actually arranges his hypostases in a hierarchy and affirms the distance that separates the One from Intelligence. Saint Augustine, in his account, started from God, not as the source of the other two essences, but as the only nature of the Trinity. “The one God is, of course, the Trinity, and as there is one God, so there is one creator.”45

The three persons of the Trinity are therefore identical. From this there follow three fundamental consequences: the three persons have only one will and one operation. “They are supremely one without any difference of natures or of wills.”46 “It is therefore not the Word alone that

42. “I think, therefore he is.” If this has been compared to the cogito, it is also becausethe Augustinian God is an interior God.
43. In comparison to Enneads V, VII, 3; VI, VII, 3.
44. De Trinitate L, 4, G. I, no. 3. P.L. vol. 42, col. 888: “Puisque le Verbe de Dieu par qui tout a été fait est un; puisqu’il est la vérité immuable c’est en lui comme dans leur principe immuable que sont à la fois toutes choses: non seulement celles de ce monde présent, mais encore celles qui ont passé et celles qui viendront. En lui elles ne sont ni passées ni futures. Elles sont simplement et toutes sont vie et toutes sont un ou plutôt c’est une seule chose qui est, et une seule vie.”
    [Saint Augustine, On the Trinity, 4.1, no. 3, in The Works of Saint Augustine, vol. 5, ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. E. Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 154.—Trans.] 45. Contra Sermone 3.
    [“Unis quippe deus est ipsa Trinitas et sic unus deus quomodo unus creator [sic].” This passage is actually from Saint Augustine Contra sermonem Arianorum3.4. The text should read: “Unus quippe deus est ipsa Trinitas, et sic unus Deus, quomodo unus creator.” Saint Augustine, Contra Sermonem Arianorum, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century,vol. 18, Arianism and Other Heresies, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1995), 142.—Trans.]
45. Contra Maximinum II, 10.
    [“Ubi nullam naturam esse, nulla est diversitas voluntatum (sic).” The full title of Augustine’s text is Contra Maximinum haereticum Arianorum Episcopum. The passage should read: “Ubi nulla naturarum, nulla est diversitas voluntatum.” Saint Augustine, Contra Maximinum haereticum Arianorum Episcopum, in The Works of Saint Augustine:
    A Translation for the 21st Century, 18: 274.—Trans.]

has appeared on earth but the entire Trinity.” “In the Incarnation