st. augustine is generally admitted, by roman catholics, anglicans, protestants and rationalists alike,
to have been the greatest of all the church fathers.
endless quotations might be adduced to prove this statement,
but it is sufficient to refer on one side to the catholic encyclopaedia,
and on the other to such writers as harnack and rudolf eucken.
the last mentioned alludes to him as
'the one great philosopher sprung from the soil of christianity proper'.
to the learned outside the christian community he appears
not merely as a doctor of the church,
but as holding a prominent position in the history of philosophy,
as a deep and original thinker for all time.
his writings, however, covered the whole range of christian ethics and doctrine,
and his teaching is consequently so many sided
(to the extent even sometimes of appearing contradictory),
that he has influenced all succeeding schools of christian thought.
this is the more striking,
when we remember that he was not a savant or a highly trained scholar like jerome,
but also that he developed into a very strict churchman,
and was distinctly limited by his position and environment.
yet the first question of any one seeking light from the fathers on a disputed point will be,
'what did augustine say about it?'\for he is sure to have said something,
so few things are there that he did not deal with;
and such weight does his view carry, that all schools try to prove
that their view was his
and to explain away any points in which he seems to differ from them.
'augustine, says martindale, shifts the theological center of gravity
from east to west.
handing on what religious inheritance the east bequeathed,
rescuing the riches of old and newer greece,
he romanized the double treasure.
he translated speculation into life
and thereby set the current of genuine catholic mysticism
(doctrine of immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding or
of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation..or ecstasy)
he infused christian activity with thought and thus inspired a true scholasticism.
indeed it is the power of his own life,
where to know was to love,
where search for truth was passionate,
that alone exp0lains his unequalled influx into the life of christianity'.
thus in A we see three things:
the speculation of the east,
the practical theology of the west
and the combination of the two in the supreme doctrines of grace and love
exhibited in the life and teaching of the man himself.
not only do the different lines of the past, both in east and west, converge in him,
but his own thoughts show the converging of the various elements of his own education.
an african by birth, he accustomed himself to the roman point of view during his life at milan and rome.
he imbibed the ideas of the far east through his association with the manichaeans;
the philosophy of plato and the neo platonists, which he studied,
made him acquainted with greek culture
and so his entire training fitted him to stand at the parting of the ways
and to point out to the world, when rome was sacked by alaric the goth,
and genseric the vandal was beating at the gates of his won city,
that the old civilization of rome was dead
and that for the future men must look to the christian civilization,
the 'City of God'.
the interest of A's life lies almost entirely in the education of his mind
and the development of his philosophical and theological position,
since although he always kept in touch with the outer world,
he never took any part in politics,
beyond the occasional encouragement of the authorities
to suppress a schism or heresy, or sometimes a plea for mercy.
he was born in 354 at thagaste in numidia and his parents were patricius and monica.
not much is known of his father, except that he was a man of somewhat low origin, who made a fair maintenance
and that he was a pagan, who was late in life converted by his wife.
but monica was one of the most beautiful characters in early church history.
her whole soul seems to have been bound up in augustine.
his early dissipations and his wanderings after strange gods were a deep grief to her
and when at last he was baptized, the work of her life seemed ended.
the relation of A to his mother runs all through his 'Confessions',
and is one of the most moving features of that great classic.
till he was 16 A was educated at a grammar school in his native town.
then he proceeded to carthage.
when 19 his attention was turned, by reading cicero's hortensius (a lost work), to serious thoughts,
but the religion that first satisfied him was that of the manichaeans
and he remained attached to that body for about 10 years.
the religion of Manes the persian was one of the many oriental religions which
exercised their influence over the dying roman empire
and like the gnostic sects absorbed some of the christian teaching and imitated christian institutions,
especially the two great sacraments.
in place of good and evil the manichaeans imagined two great principles of light and darkness,
occupying separate territories,
the former was the territory of God, the latter of the daemon.
thus, and this is the only feature of much importance in their scheme, evil had a separate existence.
so we find again the old dualism, which appeared in all the gnostic sects
and against which christian philosophy was always at war.
...the Christ was in some mysterious way identified with the sun, the Spirit with the air,
and both were opposed by the daemons in the stars.
Christ Seemed to men (the old docetism again) to come in the body...
the manichaeanism of augustine reduced monica to despair,
and there is a touching story of her entreating a bishop to reason with him.
but this wise bishop declined the task as futile
and expressed a belief that A's own studies would in time bring him to the light.
'farewell, he said, and God be with thee.
it is impossible for the child of those tears to be lost.'.
...in the Confessions we can trace the whole education of augustine's mind
and consequently his philosophical standpoint.
when he first began to think at all, he was confronted with two great realities,
the existence of God and the existence of the human soul or mind.
'the human mind is a thing apart in the universe,
and the divine mind embraces the whole in an all seeing vision'.
but between God and the soul comes evil.
why does evil find a place in the scheme of an omnipotent and benevolent God?
it was this primary difficulty that brought him to the manichaeans,
who seemed to offer a rational solution of it
and at this period that passionate zeal for truth appears, which is the special characteristic of A.
'o Truth, Truth, how inwardly did even then the marrow of my soul pant after Thee,
when they often and diversely and in many huge books,
echoed of Thee to me, though it was but an echo!'
but this earnest quest for Truth was only a part of the general thoroughness of augustine's character.
at every stage of his life, he aimed at the complete fulfilment of his being,
'the unfolding and enjoyment of his own personality'.
in his youth he was enthusiastic for the mere joy of living.
when a manichaean, he was full of zeal to make proselytes,
most of whom he subsequently carried over to the church.
when he read plato, he was absorbed by plato.
when at last he finds 'the blessed life',religious longing is no longer meditative but active and full of vitality.
he combines both the ideal and the practical'.
not only does he deliver to the west the teaching of the east in a practical, concise and popular form,
but under western influence he becomes such a zealot for the institutions and laws of the catholic church,
that he is carried away into extreme views and intolerance,
while finally, when confronted with the heresy of pelagianism
which seemed to him to raise natural man too high in relation to God,
in his zeal for the majesty of God he evolves an extreme theory of election,
which the church was obliged to modify.
it is his passionate quest for truth and certainty and his happy way of expressing his inward thoughts
which make the fascination of the confessions and impress on us the individuality of the man.
the keynote of the book is,
'THOU HAST MADE US FOR THYSELF AND OUR HEART IS RESTLESS,
TILL IT FINDS ITS REST IN THEE'.
george herbert seems to have followed this thought in his little poem, 'the pulley',
in which God gives man everything but rest; 'that at least
if goodnesse leade him not,
yet weariness may tosse him to My breast'.
but it must be noted that in these early years, when augustine was repelled by formal christianity,
he was always, as has been said of anatole france,
'haunted by the prepossession of Christ'.
then the study of cicero 'altered his affections and turned his purposes',
and he says, 'how did i burn then my God,
how did i burn to remount from earthly things to Thee', ye
'this alone checked me thus enkindled,
that the name of Christ was not in it.
for this name according to Thy mercy, O Lord, the name of Thy saviour and son,
had my tender heart, even with my mother's milk, devoutly drunk in and deeply treasured
and whatsoever was without that name, though never so learned, polished and true,
took not entire hold on me.
i resolved then to bend my mind to the holy scriptures...
but they seemed to me unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of cicero'.
he never understood the spiritual intent of scripture till he listened to ambrose.
but the manichaean system attracted him quite as much by its use of the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost
as by its explanation of evil.
however, the futility of faustus, who frankly admitted he could not answer his questions,
made it impossible for him to go farther with that sect, as we find in the fifth book.
he leaves carthage and goes to rome and milan.
faustus 'could speak fluently and in beter terms than the rest, but still the self same things
and what availed the utmost neatness of the cup bearer to my thirst for a more precious draft?'
so at last we find him at milan, received by ambrose as a son.
'loving him, not at first as a teacher of the truth (which i utterly despaired of in Thy church),
but as a person kind towards myself.
and i listened diligently to him.
i hung on his words attentively,
but of the matter i was as a careless and scornful looker-on...
and yet was i drawing nearer by little and little unconsciously.
and while i opened my heart to hear how eloquently he spoke, there also entered how truly he sple'.
but still it was an open question.
ambrose was helping him by his spiritual interpretations of scripture
and he became again a catechumen as in his childhood,
but he failed to break down the manichaean stronghold,
because he could not yet conceive of God as a spiritual substance.
there could be no personality, he thought, which was not material.
then came the penultimate phase, the study of plato,
while 'monica believed in Christ that before she departed this life,
she should see me a catholic'.
...(in this phase) the process through which augustine's mind passed is thus described by eucken.
first there is the radical dissatisfaction with the condition of man and the natural world..
in fact with the existence of evil.
yet man, with all his ills, clings to existence.
is it not conclusive that man has something in his nature good and capable of happiness?
there must then be something beyond this world .
there must be somewhere Perfect Being..and that is God.
all genuine life springs from Him and returns to Him.
the soul of man is equally real.
even if we doubt, we must possess a mind to doubt with.
the existence even of a physical world is less obvious than the existence of mind.
all this is platonic,
but he brakes away later from platonism by gradually putting more and more
the will in the place of thought, volition in the place of knowledge.
bothe the trinity and the individual soul as well, which is a mirror of it,
consist of being (power), knowledge (wisdom) and will (love).
in God is true being and the highest good (perfect love.
man, therefore, only attains to salvation and happiness by clinging to God.
there are two ways of doing this:
1. intuition and love
2 the purification and moral training of the individual life by fellowship with God,
who has freely bridged over the abyss that lay between.
cunning ham says that A differs from plato by saying,
not that truth has its source in God, but that truth is God.
God is not above all being and reason, but is the highest being and the completest reason.
the last stage of his conversion is told in the end of the seventh and in the eighth book
and commences when he passes from plato to st. paul.
augustine became saturated with paul,
and the arguments in the Confessions continually fall into quotations of paul.
bishop wordsworth says that if transmigration of souls were a fact, paul's sould would be found again in A.
for a long time his head was convinced, but his heart refused the great renunciation.
'when Thou didst on all sides show me, that what Thou saidst was true,
I, convicted by the truth, had nothing at all to answer, but only those dull and drowsy words,
'anon, anon-presently, leave me for a little'.
but my little while went on for a long while'.
at last he hears of the conversion of some simple folk, and cries to his friend alypius, 'what ails us?
the unlearned start up and take heaven by force
and we with our learning and without heart, lo, where we wallow is flesh and blood!'
then comes the voice of the mysterious little child in the garden:
'take and read ('tolle, lege')
he opens paul at random and finds,
'not in chambering and wantonness..
but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ
and make no provision for the flesh'.
from that moment his mind is made up.
he carries away alypius and the illegitimate child of his extreme youth, adeodatus, into retirement
and after a few months of careful training by ambose, they are all baptized.
so came A out of much tribulation and washed his robes.
bishop christopher wordsworh wrote a short book on augustine's sermon on the sermon on the mount,
which gives a critique of his general relation to scripture.
he points out that, in A's view, spiritual things must be spiritually discerned.
yet external helps are valuable, such as natural science, history, logic, music, philosophy.
but after all the heart makes the theologian
and the right relation of reason to faith is not
'know that you may believe', but 'believe that you may understnd'.
he anticipated a principle of modern interpretation,
that a reading involving difficulty was more likely to be correct,
than one which made the thought easy.
yet obscurer passages must be interpreted by the clearer.
the analogy of faith must be followed
and an isolated text must not be taken to counteract the general drift.
thus metaphors and symbols are used at different times in contradictory meanings.
for instance, Christ is a lion in revelation, satan is a lion in I perter.
truth is leaven in matthew, malice and hypocrisy in I corinthians.
the first foundations of doctrine must rest on plain and literal passages.
one half of truth must not be exaggerated, while the other half is obscured...
..after his baptism he spent about 18 months in rome, confuting the manichaeans,
and then retired to africa, where he lived quietly for some years in a confraternity of which he was the head,
giving his possessions to the poor.
on a visit to hippo, he was induced to take orders, built a hospital..
in 395 he became assistant bishop of hippo and shortly afterwards bishop.
in that capacity he spent two hours every day
in adjusting differences between members of his flock as an arbitrator
and this is supposed to have been the origin of ecclesiastical courts.
the self respect of A required great cleanliness and neatness of person and dress.
although his diet was of the simplest, he did not abstain altogether from wine
and his spoons were of silver.
on his table was fixed a little notice that at that board noone uct speak ill of his neighbour.
it is hardly correct to say that he was a monk,
but he lived according to a monkish rule in a community consisting of his clergy,
all of whom head to put their property into the common fund.
community of goods, chastity, labour;
these were the three fundamental points of the augusinian rule.
not that he ever consciously founded an order...
the first act of constantine, after his conversion was to summon the council of arles,
which condemned the (donatist) schism
but nevertheless it grew and by this time possibly a majority of the african christians were donatists.
although there were good men among them,
they were on the whole a bad and mischievous sect.
their origin was bad and their subsequent story one of hatred, intolerance and violence.
since the catholic succession of carthage came, they said, through a tradator
-an early christian who betrayed other christians during the early roman persecutions-
(though it actually did not),
they repudiated catholic orders and sacraments, even baptism.
when they sized a catholic church,
they scraped the walls, burnt the altar and threw the eucharist to the dogs
and further, they maintained a sort of militia of ruffians, known as the circumcellions,
who with a battle cry of 'praise the Lord', fell upon catholics and murdered and mutilated them.
if augustine became their persecutor, he was sorely tried,
and it was not till after holding councils and many attempts at friendly discussion,
that he agreed to call in the aid of honorius to suppress them.
even then for a time he deprecated extreme punishment,
but we can only regret that such a man..should be found using such expressions as
'the worst death of the soul is freedom to err'
and 'better that a man's body should be destroyed (ie. by his fellow men) than his soul'.
(note: haven't we all said AND THOUGHT worse things under lesser provocation...?)
..donatism was stamped out.
...it was the struggle with the donatists which brought out A's dogmatic statements about the church
'whoever is separated from the catholic church, however laudably he thinks he is living,
yet for that crime alone, that he is severed from Christ's unity, he shall not have life,
but the wrath of God abideth in him'.
...however harsh and intolerant A seems in dealing with the donatists,
we have always to thank him for the saying which is attributed to him:
'in essentials unity, in non essentials liberty, in all things charity'.
..the feeling of the african church at this time was strong against roman interference.
..about 405 a briton or breton (a native or inhabitant of brittany..(france)) ..probably the latter,
who was know as morgan or pelagius,
began teaching a series of propositions (contrary to augustine)
there was, he said, no such thing as original sin.
sin did not create death.
adam would have died just as much, whether he sinned or not.
God made us men, but it rests entirely with ourselves whether we are good or not,
for man's will is absolutely free and self sufficient.
there were three ways of salvation:
the law of nature, the law of moses, the law of Christ.
the works of heathens were acceptable independently of the grace of God.
perfection was attainable here by man unaided;
either actual, so that believers do not sin or at any rate possible, that they might live without sin.
teaching such as this struck at the root of christianity,
for it denied the necessity of the atonement
and augustine's whole soul was on fire.
in 412 he entered the lists.
the augustinian reply, stated simply is this:
man, owing to the fall, has lost sanctifying grace,
is subject to death and suffering
and feels an impelling inclination to evil.
hence his free will is changed in nature, it is now corrupt, and
can do no good thing without grace.
and this grace is an entirely free gift of God,
which we have not merited, could never merit and without which merit is impossible.
augustinianism then, to start with,
is simply an expression of the thought that nothing good can be done without grace,
and that grace is freely offered.
original sin is universal , yet man is not, as calvin taught, utterly rotten and defiled.
man's nature is a good thing corrupted.
'sin is the defect of a good nature,
which contains elements of good even in its most diseased and corrupted state'.
how did sin come?
all things are good, because God created them, who is good.
but they are chageable (God only is without change)
and every falling away or privation of good is evil.
following the first change evil crept in, even against man's will, with ignorance and concupiscence
(sexual desire, lust)
which brought in their train error and suffering.
but in the course of the controversy, augustine was carried on to further positions.
God, being omniscient, must have known that man's free will would err.
He foresaw those who would believe, and gave them the grace of well doing,
withholding it from those who would not.
yet in a later stage, instead of merely saying with paul,
'those whom He foreknew, them did He also predestinate',
he develops predestination into election,
so that grace is now a free gift offered to some and not to others, according to an arbitrary choice.
hooker tells us that his view developed in this way in the pelagian controversy,
though A in his 'Retractations (a work written towards the close of his life,
and the title meaning rather revising or re editing that retracting his earlier opinions)
denies that his views changed.
it would seem that in the earlier treatise on free will he distinctly states that the will is free.
this is explained, however, by saying that he was then speaking of the human will before the Fall;
since then it had been crippled.
the ultimate position then is,
'since the fall human nature is a corrupt mass liable to God's wrath and punishment,
and while in His mercy He chooses some by an eternal decree of predestination to eternal life,
He leaves others to eternal damnation'.
to those who are predestined the gift of perseverance follows.
how all this can be consistent with divine love and justice,
A would say, is a mystery into which we cannot look:
we can only wait for the beyond, where all enigmas will be solved.
all this is what is known as the gloomy side of augustine's theology
and it certainly led to extreme calvinism,
although he never explicitly said that God predestined any to damnation.
still that A should in the heat of his controversy with pelagius,
have made the statements that he did, is strange when the doctrine of love
runs so clearly through all his work.
..it is not well to dwell too much on the gloomy theology into which A was led
through being 'very jealous for the Lord God of hosts'
nor on his tendency to persecution, which came only when he was sorely tried.
like many others who have taught a grim theology,
he belied it by the sweetness and grace of his character.
let us think rather of his untiring devotion to duty,
his absorption in the quest for the divine
and in the revelation of It to others.
and his brave death at his post, when all the work of his life seemed falling to pieces
and listen to his tender words of consolation,
'pray that you may be drawn'.
'lift up your hearts and your tears shall be dried'.
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