Unigenitus Against Augustine: The Strange Case of a Condemned Doctor
Unigenitus Against Augustine: The Strange Case of a Condemned Saint and Doctor
A Strange Discovery
Did you know that Pope Clement XI once anathematized Augustine? The claim sounds outrageous at first hearing, almost like some Protestant polemicist’s exaggeration. But that was my reaction too when I first studied the bull Unigenitus (1713). This apostolic constitution was intended to strike down the perceived errors of Jansenism, a reform movement within Catholicism that drew heavily on Augustine to emphasize predestination, original sin, biblical devotion, and above all, the sovereignty of divine grace. In the process, Clement managed—perhaps unwittingly—to condemn one of Augustine’s most famous lines.
The third proposition listed for condemnation in Unigenitus runs as follows: “In vain, O Lord, do You command, if You do not give what You command.”¹ The logic of the statement is straightforward: God’s commands cannot be fulfilled by human effort unless God Himself supplies the grace to obey them. Without divine assistance, the whole moral enterprise collapses. But anyone acquainted with the Confessions will recognize this is not Jansenius’ invention. It is a word-for-word echo of Augustine: “Give what You command, and command what You will” (Conf. 10.29).²
Augustine repeats this line multiple times in the same chapter, turning it into a refrain that captures the essence of his theology of grace. God issues His commands freely, but He also bestows the gifts necessary to obey them. Without those gifts, His law becomes an unbearable weight. Augustine uses continence as an illustration: “You order us to practice continence. … No one can be continent unless it is given by You. You command continence: give what You command, and then command whatever You will.”³ For him, the command and the enabling grace are inseparable.
That Clement would anathematize this sentiment raises a serious theological problem. Augustine is not merely any Church Father—he is the Doctor Gratiae, the Doctor of Grace. His voice on the relationship between divine command and human ability is the very touchstone of Western soteriology. To anathematize Augustine on this point is, quite literally, to anathematize the central doctor of the Latin Church on the very doctrine for which he is most famous.
Jansenism and the Augustinian Legacy
The background here matters. Jansenism takes its name from Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, whose posthumously published Augustinus (1640) sought to recover Augustine’s teaching on grace in its pristine severity. Jansen’s book was nothing if not uncompromising. He insisted on the necessity of efficacious grace, denied the sufficiency of “mere” free will, and gave a reading of Augustine that leaned hard against what he saw as semi-Pelagian compromises within Catholic practice.
Naturally, this raised alarms in Rome. The specter of Protestantism loomed large. The Council of Trent had already condemned certain formulations of justification by faith alone, and here were the Jansenists sounding alarmingly close to Luther or Calvin. At least that was the perception. In reality, the Jansenists thought of themselves as hyper-Catholic, rooting themselves not in Geneva but in Hippo. They quoted Augustine constantly, mining his writings on predestination and grace to build a rigorist theology of salvation.
The controversy centered in France, where the Port-Royal convent became the nerve center of Jansenist devotion and scholarship. Figures like Antoine Arnauld and Blaise Pascal threw themselves into the cause, Pascal even composing his famous Provincial Letters to expose the casuistry of the Jesuits, whom he regarded as softening the moral demands of the Gospel. The Jesuits, unsurprisingly, fought back with equal vigor, branding Jansenism a Trojan horse of Protestantism. The papacy sided with them, condemning Jansenist propositions in a series of bulls across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
But when Clement XI issued Unigenitus in 1713, he went further than simply policing the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy. He condemned, wholesale, 101 propositions taken from the writings of Pasquier Quesnel, a French Oratorian associated with the Jansenist cause. Proposition three—the one lifted almost directly from Augustine—was swept into the net. And so, in the act of anathematizing Jansenism, Clement found himself anathematizing Augustine.
The Pelagian Echo
One cannot help noticing the irony. Pelagius, the British monk whose controversy with Augustine in the early fifth century defined Western debates on grace, had taken umbrage at precisely this Augustinian prayer. When Augustine wrote “Give what you command,” Pelagius considered it a denial of human moral responsibility. If virtue is God’s gift, he reasoned, then what becomes of free will? The human task collapses into divine determinism. Pelagius’ solution was to preserve the integrity of human freedom by insisting that God’s commands are themselves proof of our ability to obey.
That is why Pelagius rejected Augustine’s prayer as dangerous. And yet, by anathematizing proposition three, Clement XI effectively sided with Pelagius against Augustine. He ruled that it is not in vain for God to command something even if He does not supply the grace to obey it. The paradox is glaring: a seventeenth-century pope, in his zeal to defend orthodoxy, lands squarely in the Pelagian camp which Augustine had battled twelve centuries earlier.
A Precedent in Zosimus
Nor is Clement the first pope to find himself on the wrong side of Augustine. One could point to Pope Zosimus (r. 417–418), who initially sided with Pelagius against Augustine and the African bishops. In letters such as Magnum pondus, Postquam a nobis, and Quamvis patrum, Zosimus rebuked the Africans for condemning Pelagius too harshly.⁴ It was only under heavy pressure from the emperor Honorius and the Western episcopate that Zosimus reversed course, eventually condemning Pelagius as well.
The episode illustrates a recurring pattern: papal authority and Augustinian theology do not always align neatly. The papacy, concerned with institutional stability and political maneuvering, sometimes took positions that stood at odds with Augustine’s uncompromising doctrine of grace. Clement’s condemnation of proposition three is thus not an isolated anomaly but part of a longer tension between the papacy’s pragmatic needs and Augustine’s theological rigor.
The Weight of Unigenitus
To grasp the stakes, one has to appreciate how heavily Unigenitus was enforced. Benedict XIV later wrote in Ex Omnibus that the authority of Unigenitus was such that “no one can withdraw the submission due it or oppose it without risking the loss of eternal salvation.”⁵ That is as strong as papal language gets. Resistance to the bull, widespread in France, created enormous turmoil. Whole dioceses were divided between those who accepted Unigenitus and those who resisted it, sometimes at the cost of suspension or excommunication.
And yet the uncomfortable fact remains: proposition three, condemned on pain of damnation, is nothing other than Augustine. One wonders what a learned Jesuit in the early eighteenth century thought when he saw the parallel. Did he squirm? Did he rationalize that Quesnel’s context somehow twisted Augustine’s meaning? The latter was indeed attempted. Defenders of Unigenitus argued that the condemned propositions were heretical in the sense in which Quesnel meant them, not necessarily in the sense Augustine did. But this feels like an evasion. The words are the same, the sense nearly identical. A rose by any other name...
Augustine as Doctor of Grace
Why does this matter? Because Augustine’s status in the Catholic tradition is unique. The Church has many Doctors, but Augustine is the Doctor of Grace. His authority on the theology of grace is so central that Thomas Aquinas, at the height of scholasticism, regularly bowed to Augustine on these questions. To anathematize Augustine on grace is not simply to err in a minor way; it is to undercut the very doctrinal foundations of the Western Church.
And there is another layer. Augustine’s theology of grace was one of the driving engines of the Reformation. Luther was an Augustinian monk who cut his theological teeth on the Confessions and On the Spirit and the Letter. Calvin, though no monk, quoted Augustine more than any other Father, regarding him as the surest expositor of Paul. The Jansenists, then, were not wrong to claim him as their master. If anything, they were more faithful to Augustine than the papal condemnations allowed.
So when Clement XI anathematized proposition three, he not only anathematized Augustine but inadvertently gave Protestants more ammunition. Here, they could say, is proof that Rome will condemn even the greatest of its Doctors if his teaching does not suit the institutional agenda.
Concluding Reflections
Of course, one can nuance this further. Papal apologists are quick to point out that the bull’s condemnations are formally directed at Quesnel’s book, not at Augustine’s Confessions. The precise theological context, they argue, makes a difference. Augustine’s words are orthodox in his own setting, but heretical as Quesnel deployed them. Perhaps. But one cannot shake the sense that this is special pleading. The text is Augustine’s, the meaning essentially Augustinian, and the papal condemnation inescapably touches him.
I find myself circling back to the irony. The Church that venerates Augustine as the Doctor Gratiae also anathematized his most famous prayer. The pope who claimed to defend Catholic orthodoxy against Jansenism simultaneously condemned the very theology that had long been the backbone of Catholic teaching on grace. And in so doing, he echoed the objection first voiced by Pelagius.
History is rarely tidy. But here it is especially tangled. And perhaps that is what makes the episode worth remembering: it reminds us that the Church’s magisterium, for all its claims of infallibility, has often been shaped by the cross-currents of controversy, politics, and unintended consequence. The anathematization of Augustine in Unigenitus is one of those moments when the fault lines become visible—when the Doctor of Grace finds himself, astonishingly, on the receiving end of a papal anathema.
Notes
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Unigenitus Dei Filius, bull of Clement XI, Sept. 8, 1713, prop. 3.
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Augustine, Confessions, 10.29, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991), 201.
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Ibid.
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Zosimus, Magnum pondus, Postquam a nobis, and Quamvis patrum (418). For texts and discussion, see Boniface Ramsey, Ambrose (London: Routledge, 1997), 274–78.
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Benedict XIV, Ex Omnibus (1756), in Bullarium Romanum, vol. 14, 65.
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