Augustine (Aurelius
Augustinus) was one of the greatest theologians of Western Christianity. (In
his day the Mediterranean world consisted of an Eastern, Greek-speaking half
and a Western, Latin-speaking half, with different ways of looking at things,
and different habits of thought.) He was born 13 November 354 in North Africa,
about 45 miles south of the Mediterranean, in the town of Tagaste (36:14 N 8:00
E) in Numidia (now Souk-Ahras in Algeria), near ancient Carthage (modern Tunis,
36:50 N 10:13 E). His mother, Monnica, was a Christian (see 4 May), and his
father for many years a pagan (although he became a Christian before his
death). His mother undertook to bring him up as a Christian, and on one level
he always found something attractive about Christ, but in the short run he was
more interested in the attractions of sex, fame, and pride in his own
cleverness. After a moderate amount of running around as a teen-ager, he took a
mistress, who bore him a son when he was about eighteen. Theirs was a long-term
relationship, apparently with faithfulness on both sides, and the modern reader
is left wondering why he did not simply marry the girl. He never tells us this
(and in fact never tells us her name), so that we can only guess. It seems
likely that she was a freedwoman, and the laws forbade marriage between a
free-born Roman citizen and a slave, or an ex-slave.
When He was 19 and a
student at Carthage, he read a treatise by Cicero that opened his eyes to the
delights of philosophy.
He was from the beginning a
brilliant student, with an eager intellectual curiousity, but he never mastered
Greek -- he tells us that his first Greek teacher was a brutal man who
constantly beat his students, and Augustine rebelled and vowed never to learn
Greek. By the time he realized that he really needed to know Greek, it was too
late; and although he acquired a smattering of the language, he was never
really at home in it. However, his mastery of Latin was another matter. He
became an expert both in the eloquent use of the language and in the use of
clever arguments to make his points. He became a teacher of rhetoric in
Carthage, but was dissatisfied. It was the custom for students to pay their
fees to the professor on the last day of the term, and many students attended
faithfully all term, and then did not pay. In his late twenties, Augustine
decided to leave Africa and seek his fortune in Rome (41:53 N 12:30 E).
For a long time Augustine
was attracted by the teachings of Manicheeism, named for Mani, a Persian who
had preached kind of synthesis of Christianity with Zoroastrianism, the
dominant religion of Persia (around 32 N 54 E). Zoroaster had taught the
existence of a power of light, God, the supreme Creator, and of a dark and evil
power that opposed him. On the Zoroastrian (Parsi) view, the dark power was a
rebel against his creator, and doomed to ultimate defeat. Mani, on the other
hand, was a thoroughgoing dualist, who taught that there are two gods of equal
power and eternity, and that the universe is the scene of an unending battle
between light and darkness, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, soul and
body, etc. The Manichees as they moved west into the Roman Empire adopted many
traits of what is generically called Gnosticism. In particular, they advertised
themselves as being not an alternative to Christianity but as the advanced
version of Christianity, as the faith for the spiritually mature, the
intellectually gifted. They claimed that their beliefs were based on reason
rather than authority, and that they had answers for everything, at least as
soon as the learner was sufficiently advanced to comprehend them. They differed
from the classical Gnostics by not contrasting spirit with matter. On their
view, everything was composed of material particles, but these were either
light or dark. Since the mind was composed of light particles, imprisoned in
the body, a cage made of dark particles, something like the Gnostic contrast
between spirit and matter was there. Members were divided into an inner circle,
the "elect," who were expected to be celibate and vegetarian, so as
to avoid all those dark particles, and the "learners," of whom
considerably less was expected. Augustine signed up as a learner. He was at
first completely captivated, but then met with a series of disappointments. The
rank and file of the movement did not seem to be very clear thinkers. He met
the leaders, who were advertised as the Towering Intellects of the Ages, and
was not impressed.
Augustine prospered in
Rome, and was eventually appointed chief professor of rhetoric for the city of
Milan (45:28 N 9:12 E), at that time the capital city of the Empire in the
West. It should be noted that this was an extremely prestigious appointment. In
classical times, when laws were often made and issues voted on by huge public
assemblies, when even juries typically had several hundred members, and when a
man's public influence, or even on occasion his life, depended on his ability
to sway large audiences, rhetoric -- the art of manipulating an audience -- was
a skill that few men thought they could afford to neglect. (Socrates was one of
the few, and we know what happened to him!) The art, at first intensely
practical, had by Augustine's day become a display form admired for its own
sake. However, the admiration was there. Every lawyer, arguing a case, was
expected to give an eloquent speech, full of classical allusions and standard
rhetorical flourishes. And Augustine was at the top of the field.
In Milan Augustine met the
bishop Ambrose, and was startled to find in him a reasonableness of mind and
belief, a keenness of thought, and an integrity of character far in excess of
what he had found elsewhere. For the first time, Augustine saw Christianity as
a religion fit for a philosopher.
Soon after his arrival in
Milan, Augustine was plunged into two crises.
First, his mother arrived
from Africa, and persuaded him that he ought to give up his mistress and get
married. He agreed to a betrothal to a suitable young lady; but his betrothed
was too young for immediate marriage, and so the actual wedding was postponed
for two years. Meanwhile the mistress had been sent back to Africa. Augustine,
not ready for two years of sexual abstinence, lapsed back into promiscuity.
The second crisis was that
Augustine became a neo-Platonist. Plato, as interpreted by his later spokesmen,
in particular by Plotinus, taught that only God is fully real, and that all
other things are degenerations in varying degrees from the One--things are
progressively less good, less spiritual, and less real as one goes rung by rung
down the cosmic ladder. By contemplating spiritual realities, directing one's
attention first to one's own mind and then moving up the ladder rung by one to
the contemplation of God, one acquires true wisdom, true self-fulfilment, true
spirituality, and union with God, or the One. Augustine undertook this
approach, and believed that he had in fact had an experience of the presence of
God, but found that this only made him more aware of the gulf between what he
was and what he realized that he ought to be.
Meanwhile, he continued to
hear Bishop Ambrose. And finally, partly because Ambrose had answers for his
questions, partly because he admired Ambrose personally, and chiefly (or so he
believed) because God touched his heart, he was converted to Christianity in
386 and was baptised by Ambrose at Easter of 387. About 12 years later he wrote
an account of his life up to a time shortly after his conversion, a book called
the Confessions, a highly readable work available in English.
Ostensibly an autobiography, it is more an outpouring of penitence and
thanksgiving.
In a well-known chapter,
Augustine describes his conversion. His intellectual objections had lost their
force, and he was at a point where the difficulty was that he seemed unable to
make a commitment to living chastely, or unable to make a commitment, period.
He heard of a group of young men, Christians, one of whom decided to become a
desert hermit, whereupon the others, one at a time, made the same commitment,
encouraged and inspired by the examples of those in the group who had already
done so. (In many circles at that time, becoming a desert hermit had the same
overtones as joining the Peace Corps did for many young persons in the 1960's,
or joining the armed forces for many in the weeks immediately after the attack
on Pearl Harbor.) Augustine went aside to ponder the question, "How is it
that these young men can make so drastic a commitment, and I cannot take even
the first step of declaring myself a Christian?" He heard what seemed to
be a child's voice coming from next door, saying over and over, "Tolle,
lege; tolle, lege," or, "Pick up and read; pick up and read."
Since he could not think of any reason why a child would be saying that, he
took it as an omen, and picked up a copy of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. As he
opened it, his eye fell on the end of the thirteenth chapter:
The night is far gone, the day is at hand.
Let us then cast off the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light;
let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day,
not in reveling and drunkenness,
not in debauchery and licentiousness,
not in quarreling and jealousy.
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the flesh,
to gratify its desires.
As he read, he experienced this as God speaking
directly to him, convicting him of his past sins, and offering him forgiveness;
calling him to amend his life, and promising him the grace and power to do it.
He burst into tears, and surrendered. Later, he wrote:
Late have I loved Thee, O Lord; and behold,
Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee.
Thou was with me when I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call, and cry, and burst my deafness.
Thou didst gleam, and glow, and dispell my blindness.
Thou didst touch me, and I burned for Thy peace.
For Thyself Thou hast made us,
and restless our hearts until in Thee they
find their ease.
Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.
Thou hast burst my bonds asunder;
unto Thee will I offer up an offering of
praise.
Although written as an account of his life,
the Confessions keeps digressing into speculations about the
nature of time, the nature of causality, the nature of free will, the motives
of human action, etc.
Louis deWohl has written a
novel about Augustine, based mostly on the Confessions,
called The Restless Flame. I believe it is now out of print, but
try your library and your used-book store. It is an excellent introduction to
the man.
After his conversion,
Augustine went back to his native Africa in 387, where he was ordained a priest
in 391 and consecrated bishop of Hippo in 396. It was not his intention to
become a priest. He was visiting the town of Hippo (or Hippo Regius, now
Annaba, 36:55 N 7:47 E), was in church hearing a sermon, and the bishop,
without warning, said, "This congregation is in need of more priests, and
I believe that the ordination of Augustine would be to the glory of God."
Willing hands dragged Augustine forward, and the bishop together with his
council of priests laid hands on Augustine and ordained him to the priesthood.
(The experience may have colored Augustine's perception of such questions as,
"Does a man come to God because he has chosen to do so, or because God has
chosen him, and drawn him to Himself?") A few years later, when the Bishop
of Hippo died, Augustine was chosen to succeed him.
He was a diligent shepherd
of his flock, but he also found time to write extensively. He was an admirer of
Jerome, and wrote him a letter hoping to establish a friendship, but the letter
went astray. (In those days there was no public post office, and if you wanted
to send a letter to a friend in Athens, you entrusted it to someone you knew
who was travelling to Athens, or at least in that general direction, with instructions
to deliver it or pass it on to someone else who would oblige.) Jerome did not
get the letter, and the contents became public knowledge before he heard of it.
Augustine, in addition to saying how much he admired Jerome, had offered some
criticisms of something Jerome had written. Jerome was furious, and came close
to writing Augustine off altogether. However, Augustine wrote him a second
letter, apologizing and explaining what had happened, and Jerome was mollified.
They had a long and intellectually substantial correspondence.
Augustine's written output
was vast, and largely responsible for the fact that the entry for him in the
index of the Encyc. Brit. is more than a column long. His surviving works (and
it is assumed that the majority did not survive) include 113 books and
treatises, over 200 letters, and over 500 sermons. His work greatly influenced
Luther and Calvin, to the point where for a while Roman Catholic speakers and
writers were wary of quoting him lest they be suspected of Protestant tendencies.
We have already mentioned
his Confessions. A second great work of his is the book, De
Civitate Dei ("The City of God"). This was written after
Rome had been sacked by invaders led by Alaric the Visigoth. It is a reply to
those who said that the Roman Empire was falling apart because the Christians
had taken over; he discusses the work of God in history, and the relation
between the Christian as citizen of an earthly commonwealth and the Christian
as citizen of Heaven.
His third great work is his De
Trinitate ("On the Trinity"). Here, he discusses the
doctrine of the Trinity by undertaking to compare the mind of man with the mind
of God, since man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Augustine begins
by pointing out a Trinitarian structure in the act of knowing something. He
continues by pointing out a Trinitarian structure in the act of self-awareness.
He concludes by pointing out a Trinitarian structure in the act of religious
contemplation by which man sees himself as made in the image of God.
Augustine and
the Donatists
Almost a century before Augustine was born, the
Church in Africa had been torn apart by the Donatist controversy. For a brief
account of this controversy (and the Pelagian and other controversies of the
day), but a longer one than I am prepared to give here, I refer the reader to
the relevant section of the book, SKETCHES IN CHURCH HISTORY, by Canon
Robertson, which can be found at the URL address following: http://ccel.wheaton.edu/robertson/church-history/church-history.txt.
During the persecution of
the Church by the Emperor Decius, some Christian clergymen in Africa, or so it
was alleged, had stood firm against threat of torture, imprisonment and death
more consistently and nobly than others. The Donatists maintained that their
clergy derived their ordinations from clergy with very good records of
constancy under persecution, and that they were the Church of the Martyrs, as
opposed to the Church of the Sell-outs, which was everybody else. They further
held that sacraments received at the hands of unworthy ministers were of no
value. Or at least it seems that they held this. Augustine had a long
correspondence and controversy with them, and at one point they apparently
replied that they did not hold this, to which Augustine replied, "In that
case, will you kindly tell me what the controversy is all about, and what you
and I have been debating for the last eighteen months, and what your bishops
and ours have been out of fellowship with each other about for the last
century?" The controversy dragged on, with part of the dispute historical
(whether Bishop so-and-so, now seventy years dead, had really done what he was
accused of doing), and part theological. It seems clear that the Donatists, at
least most of the time, argued that the holiness of the Church depended on the
holiness of its members, especially its clergy. Against them, Augustine
maintained that the holiness of the Church is not derived from the average
level of virtue of its individual members, but is derived from the Holiness of
its Head, who is Christ.
Augustine and the Pelagians
In Augustine's day, a man from Britain named
Morgan, or in Latin Pelagius (means "islander" -- consider the words
"pelagic" and "archipelago"), began to preach, denouncing
what he saw as a slackening of moral standards. He saw professed Christians
living less than exemplary lives, and offering human frailty as an excuse. His
reply was: "Nonsense. God has given you free will. You can choose to
follow the example of Adam, or you can choose to follow the example of Christ.
God has given everyone the grace he needs to be good. If you are not good, you
simply need to try harder." Augustine asked him about original sin, and he
replied that there is no such thing. Augustine asked him why, in that case, it
was the universal custom to baptize infants, and he had no answer. Augustine
saw the teaching of Pelagius as totally undermining the doctrine that God is the
ultimate source of all good, and encouraging the virtuous and well-behaved
Christian to feel that he had earned God's approval by his own efforts.
Pelagius was condemned by Pope Innocent I, and then re-instated by Pope
Zosimus. Augustine refused to accept the judgement of Zosimus, and ultimately
won the day.
Near the end of his life,
the Vandals, a barbarian people with a reputation for wanton destructiveness
(hence our modern term "vandal"), who had earlier invaded Spain from
the north and settled down there (hence the province of Spain called
"Andalusia"), became involved in a civil war in Northern Africa, and
their troops invaded Africa in huge numbers. The leader of the losing side took
refuge in the town of Hippo, and the Vandals were besieging the town (which
they ultimately captured) when Augustine, bishop of Hippo, died 28 August 430,
aged 75.
LinK: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/home.html
