Education Quote by John Calvin

Calvin is doing something shrewd here: he recruits Augustine not as a gentle spiritual ancestor but as a strategic witness for the prosecution. In the Reformation courtroom, Augustine is the star expert whose testimony both sides want. By saying “Augustine does not disagree,” Calvin isn’t just citing a source; he’s tightening a noose around his Catholic opponents’ favorite authority and redirecting him toward a Protestant conclusion about human inability.

The line pivots on a calibrated pairing: reason and will are real “faculties,” yet their capacity to “choose good” is conditional. Grace isn’t a helpful boost to a basically functional moral engine; it’s the necessary power supply. Calvin’s subtext is that moral freedom without grace is a mirage - you can choose, but only within the boundaries of corruption. The asymmetry is the point: good requires grace’s “assistance,” evil arrives by default “when grace is absent.” Sin doesn’t need coaching. Righteousness does.

Context matters: Calvin is writing in a period when salvation is being renegotiated at the level of mechanics - what exactly happens between God’s initiative and human action. This sentence is polemical efficiency. It preserves human agency just enough to avoid fatalism while making divine grace the decisive actor. Even the grammar preaches: grace is present or absent; the human will responds, never leads. In a culture obsessed with merit, Calvin uses Augustine to argue that the most important choice is never purely ours to make.