A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In the process, Augustine’s thoughts about the nature of grace and salvation were pushed to ever more extreme positions, which can be traced both through The City of God and the long series of tracts which he wrote attacking Pelagian thought. Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God’s grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace. God has made the decision before all time, so some are foreordained to be saved through grace – a predestined group of the elect. The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam’s original fall, in which we all have a part through original sin: Augustine repeatedly uses the terrible word ‘lump’ (massa) to describe humanity in its state of loss. It is a word to which he often returned, associating it with Latin words for ‘loss’, ‘sin’, ‘filth’.