The later neoplatonists developed a subtle and somewhat paradoxical notion of passive or receptive power. I call it paradoxical because “passive power” almost seems like an oxymoron. In modern terms, it is hard to see how something purely passive could meaningfully contribute to an effect, or even be called a “power”. But in a neoplatonic context, active and passive powers function as correlative terms that collaborate — albeit asymmetrically — to produce effects. When a “patient” is properly prepared, an appropriate “agent” power is supposed to spontaneously come to dwell within it.

All the change is on the side of the patient, whereas what is called “agency” in neoplatonism belongs on the side of the eternal and unchanging. Exactly how a patient in time comes to be properly prepared to be receptive to an eternal agent when it was not before is admittedly rather obscure.

In his late polemics against Pelagius, Augustine treated the agency of grace as residing entirely on the side of the eternal, even going to the extreme of denying that grace in any way depends on the merit or innocence of the recipient. His point seems to have been that grace does not depend on any kind of self-will, no matter how virtuous or innocent it may be — that it is always only received as a gift.

However obscure the neoplatonic notion of the preparation of patients may seem, in the context of a problematic like that of late Augustine, the attribution of effective reality to passive powers suggests a way out of the impasse we are left with if we consider only grace and self-will. Merit or innocence could be considered as configurations of such “passive powers”.