What does Martin Seligman say St. Augustine did to human progress?

Martin Seligman argues that belief in agency rose with progress in Greece across thought, the arts, technology, quality of life and political freedom, a trend that ran to about 350 AD. In 383 AD, he says, St. Augustine renounced human agency by teaching that any good act comes from grace God injects arbitrarily. That became church doctrine for almost a thousand years, which Seligman links to stagnation in all five areas.

• Seligman says Luther and Calvin went further than Augustine; Luther rejected Erasmus's 1524 essay On the Freedom of the Will a year later.
• Seligman says Protestantism grew more agentic from the 17th and 18th centuries and fed the last 200 years of progress.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Modern Wisdom (2026-10-24). Read the whole episode summary →

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