THE PROVENANCE OF JOHN CALVIN'S EMPHASIS ON THE ...

is not wholly incompatible with Augustine, but, strictly speaking, is not Augustine. It is
not "Augustinian," but "Augustinianesque." 1052
Since Aquinas presented this concept as Augustine's, it is perhaps easy to see
that it would become so widely accepted and firmly entrenched in the tradition as
Augustine, such that its inheritors rarely if ever saw need to attribute the thought to
Augustine. That is to say, is it possible that the notion was so commonly assumed in the
Western theological tradition by the sixteenth century, and so commonly assumed as
authentically Augustine, that no one, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, was
compelled to explicitly identify it as Augustine? Might this not explain Erasmus'
formulation in his catechism cited in the previous chapter? Might this not explain
Calvin's emphasis on "the Spirit as the bond of our union with Christ," though without
attribution—ever? And does this not explain contemporary assumptions of Augustine
and Calvin, and the relation of their thought on this point?
As noted in the previous chapter, in his catechism of 1533, Dilucida et pia
explanatio symboli quod apostolorum dicitur, et decalogi praeceptorum, Erasmus
declares:
There is one divinity in the three, and the three are one God. The major divisions
in the creed arise from this truth. The Father holds first place, the Son holds
second, the Holy Spirit, who is love and an ineffable bond between the other
two, holds the third. . . . . The church is attached to [the Son] as the human body
is attached to its head. As that divine Spirit binds (conglutinate) the Father and
Son closely together, so too he fastens the church to Christ by an invisible and
indissoluble bond (adglutinat arcano et indissolubili vinculo). The mystical
body of Christ occupies the fourth part of the creed. 1053
1052 See the footnote above.
1053 Erasmus, "Explanation of the Apostles' Creed," 248. For the Latin, consult the citation of this
passage in the previous chapter.
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