St. Augustine
Aurelius Augustinus
(354-430)
Quick
Overview
Saint Augustine (in Latin, Augustinus), bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa
from 396 to 430, and the dominant personality of the Western Church of
his time, is generally recognized as having been the greatest thinker of
Christian antiquity. His mind was the crucible in which the religion of
the
New Testament was most completely fused with the Platonic tradition of
Greek philosophy; and it was also the means by which the product of this
fusion was transmitted to the Christendoms of medieval Roman
Catholicism and Renaissance Protestantism.
"Augustine" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5000/44.html>
[Accessed 17 April 1998].
His
Life
His
WorksLinks
Many of the following links go to the same site. A program has been set up so that one can read the entire Confessions in a series of weekly devotional readings.
Augustine
Biography of Augustine, with a collection of texts (in Latin and English),
scholarly notes and explanations, and suggested readings both online and
off.
Hippo Regius is the modern Annaba on the Algerian coast, in what was
then the Roman province of Numidia. Augustine, named Aurelius
Augustinus, was born on November 13, 354, of middle-class parents at
Tagaste (modern Souk-Ahras), a small town about 45 miles (72
kilometres) to the south. His father, Patricius, was and remained until
late
in life a pagan; his mother, Monica, was a Christian of intense but simple
piety, from whose early teaching Augustine retained a reverence for the
"name of Christ" that never left him. But he was not baptized in infancy.
He went through primary and secondary schooling and soon displayed
such intellectual promise that the modest family funds were banked upon
securing him an academic career that would qualify him for government
service. As a 19-year-old student at Carthage he was stirred by the
reading of a treatise of Cicero--the now lost Hortensius--and was filled
with an enthusiasm for "philosophy," which meant not only a devotion to
the pursuit of truth but a conviction of the superiority of a life devoted
to
that pursuit (the vita contemplative) over any aims of secular ambition.
The faith of the Catholic Church seemed to him too hopelessly
unphilosophical for any man of culture to entertain; and he was easily
carried away by the discovery in Manichaeism of a religion that
professed to appeal to reason rather than authority.
The Manichaean system as propagated in the Western Roman Empire
was a materialistic dualism that accounted for the creation of the world
as
the product of a conflict between light and dark substances and for the
soul of man as an element of the light entangled in the dark. Manichaeism
claimed to be the true Christianity, preaching Christ as the Redeemer
who enables the imprisoned particles of light to escape and return to their
own region. In the Manichaean Church the higher order of "elect"
adhered to a strict regimen of asceticism and celibacy, all physical
generation being held to serve the realm of darkness. After an
adolescence that probably was no more licentious than was common in
his time and country, Augustine had formed a liaison with a woman of
low birth by whom he had a son and to whom he remained loyally
attached throughout the nine years of his association with the
Manichaeans, and he was therefore allowed to join that sect's lower
order as one of the "hearers," to whom marriage was permitted as a
concession to human weakness.
His first zeal for this "religion of enlightenment" did not last long,
however,
for the Manichaean experts were intellectually second rate and proved
incapable of dealing with the questions he put to them. He became
increasingly disillusioned and was already falling into a general
agnosticism when, at the age of about 28, he left Carthage, where he had
worked as a free-lance teacher of rhetoric, and went to Rome in search
of more satisfactory pupils. There he made connections that led to an
official professorship at Milan, where the Western emperor then
resided.The bishop of Milan was Ambrose, the most eminent Christian
churchman of the day. Augustine was introduced to Ambrose but never
came to know him well. He went to hear him preach, however, and this,
his first contact with the mind of a Christian intellectual, was enough
to
shake Augustine's prejudice against Catholic teaching. Although he had
abandoned the doctrines of Manichaeism, he retained its materialistic
presuppositions, which left him still a skeptic with no satisfying alternative
to Manichaean notions of ultimate reality. The being of God and the
nature and origin of evil remained for him problems as insoluble as they
had ever been. (see also Index: good and evil)
The solution of both problems was given to him by a chance introduction
to Neoplatonic writings, for which he may well have been prepared by
Ambrose's use of them in some of his sermons. Neoplatonism, in the
work of the 3rd-century philosopher and mystic Plotinus, its greatest
exponent, is a spiritual monism--a philosophical doctrine holding that
there is only one reality--according to which the universe exists as a
series of emanations or degenerations from absolute unity. From the
transcendent One arises self-conscious mind or spirit; from mind comes
soul or life; and soul is the intermediary between the spheres of spirit
and
of sense. Matter is the lowest and last product of the supreme unity; and
since the One is also the real and the good, the potentiality of evil is
identified with unformed matter as the point of maximum departure from
the One. Evil itself is thus the least real of all things, being simply
the
privation or absence of good. Neoplatonic mysticism relies on the
principle that the inward is superior to the outward: to reach the good,
which is the real, one must "return into" oneself; for it is the spirit
at the
heart of man's inmost self that links him to the ultimate unity. (see also
Index: Christianity)
In the seventh book of the Confessions, Augustine tells how in such an
act of introspection he found God--the "changeless light," at once
immanent and transcendent, which is the source of every intuitive
recognition of truth and goodness. This discovery of God was more than
the conclusion of a process of reasoning: it was a mystical experience,
a
vision or touch that came and went. But it left behind it the answer to
Augustine's unsatisfied questionings. God is light, and evil is darkness,
as
the Manichaeans said. But neither is a material substance: the changeless
light of God is pure spiritual being, and the evil is nonentity, as darkness
is
but the absence of light.
Augustine's mystical experience, his awareness of God, had been
momentary and fleeting. He believed that this could be only because he
had not made for himself the necessary total identification of supreme
value with spirit; he was still himself entangled with the flesh. In fact,
Neoplatonism had reinforced the Manichaean principle that the way of
return to God must be through escape from the body; and for Augustine
this meant primarily and immediately escape from the ties of sexuality.
The immortal story of his conversion in the eighth book of the
Confessions tells of his coming to learn of the heroic achievements of
Christian asceticism in East and West, of the self-contempt induced in
him by the contrast of his own weakness, and of the final breakdown of
resistance in a Milan garden, when, at the sound of a child's voice calling
"tolle, lege: tolle, lege" ("take up and read"), he opened the New
Testament Letters and read in Letter of Paul to the Romans the words, ".
. . put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh,
to
gratify its desires" (Rom. 13:14).
This was in the late summer of the year 386. Vacation was near, and
Augustine resigned his teaching chair and went with some young pupils,
his son Adeodatus, and his mother Monica to a reading party at a
country house lent by a friend. Out of their literary study and
philosophical discussions there came the earliest of Augustine's surviving
works--the dialogues, which display so little of the storm and stress of
a
religious conversion and so little concern with specifically Christian
themes that critics have been led to question the accuracy of the
Confessions story written many years later. It is true that Augustine's
struggle against the domination of his sexual nature can be regarded as
the final phase in that fluctuating pursuit of the "philosophic life" first
presented to him by Cicero's Hortensius. But there is no sufficient
reason for doubting that he was a Catholic Christian in intention when
he
received Baptism at the hands of Ambrose in the spring of 387. It is
certain that three or four years later, when he wrote his treatise De vera
religione ( Of True Religion), he was still thinking of Christianity in
Neoplatonic terms. In this treatise, the divine Word ( Logos) in Christ
is
the mind or spirit of Plotinus, illuminating the reason, through whom the
human soul has access to the transcendent Godhead. Christ's human life
is man's example of the ascetic victory over the pains and pleasures of
the flesh; Christian morals serve only to purify the soul for the life
of
contemplation; and Christian faith is the necessary acceptance of the
church's authority in this preliminary stage of training.
Bishop
and Christian Philosopher.
Shortly after his Baptism, Augustine left Milan, with his mother and a
small party of friends, to return to Africa. At Rome's port city of Ostia,
his mother died; and Augustine recorded his last talk with her, in which
son led mother, through a discourse formed on the pattern of the
Neoplatonic "ascent" from this world to the other, to share with him a
momentary experience of the life eternal. Home again at Tagaste, the
friends formed a little community devoted to the religious life of
contemplation and study. But its peace was soon broken when, on a visit
to Hippo in 391, Augustine was forced to accept ordination as assistant
priest to its old bishop, Valerius. Five years later Valerius died, and
Augustine entered the episcopate in which he was to labour until his
death. The bishop in Roman Africa was not only the pastor of a parish,
the busy teacher and preacher, but the presiding judge in a
much-frequented court of summary jurisdiction in civil cases. Augustine
never enjoyed robust health, and the vast extent of his literary output
was
made possible only by the constant services of stenographers and by an
extraordinary capacity for the extempore formulation of ordered thought,
of which at least 400 sermons remain as proof. He was not a systematic
theologian. Much of his writing was in response to the appeals that his
growing reputation in the Christian world brought to him for the solution
of the most diverse problems. Over 200 of his letters have been
preserved, many of them having the scale of minor treatises. He was
tireless in controversy with heretics--Manichaeans, Donatists, and
Pelagians. But his deepest thought, the real Augustinianism, is to be found
in his scripture commentaries and homilies, especially his expositions
of
the Psalms and his writings on the Gospel and First Letter of John. The
characteristic pattern he imposed upon Christian theology was not the
outcome of controversy.
The decisive turn was given to his thinking by his ordination to the
priesthood, which dragged him against his will from the vita
contemplative into the world and at the same time diverted his studies
from philosophy to Scripture. The realities of pastoral experience among
the very imperfectly Christianized people of an African seaport, together
with the rapid impregnation of his mind with the categories of biblical
religion, made it impossible for him to overlook the differences between
Neoplatonism and Pauline Christianity. The knowledge of God and of the
soul always remained from the time of his Baptism the one and only
knowledge that he desired; and Plotinus had not been mistaken in bidding
him look within himself if he would find God, for the Bible also tells
of a
likeness to God imprinted on the soul. But although for the Neoplatonist
the soul's likeness to God is that of a, so to speak, reduced divinity,
for
the Christian it is that of a temporal and mutable image of the "eternal
and
changeless." Augustine was assured that it is the task of a Christian
philosophy, guided by the scriptural revelation, to seek to know God
through his image in the soul; and this was the path he followed in his
great treatise De Trinitate ( On the Trinity). He insisted that a true
knowledge of the soul's nature can be based only on the immediate
awareness of self-consciousness; and the soul's awareness of itself is
of a
trinity in unity that reflects "as in a glass darkly" the being of its
Maker.
He claimed that knowledge of one's own being, of one's own thinking, of
one's own willing is not open to doubt; there is an ego that exists, knows,
and wills. But in none of these aspects is the ego self-sufficient or
independent: it cannot maintain its own being, produce its own
knowledge, or satisfy its own desires. Augustine believed that he had
learned from the Platonists to find in God "the author of all existences,
the
illuminator of all truth, the bestower of all beatitude" (De civitate Dei
viii,
4). But his theories of the universe, of knowledge, and of ethics were
his
own. The following three paragraphs summarize these theories.
Creation in Plotinus is motiveless and purposeless, the automatic
by-product of the divine self-contemplation; in Augustine its source is
"the will of a good God that good things should be" (De civitate Dei xi,
21). The outgoing energy of creative love forms the basic principle of
his
entire theology. Since nothing can come into being or continue in it but
by
this divine will to create, all that exists is good "in so far as it has
being";
and because there are evidently degrees of goodness, there must also be
degrees of being. But even the formless matter that is nearest to "not
being" is essentially good because God made it; the origin of evil is not
to
be sought in material existence. Augustine persistently refused to unload
upon the material conditions of human life the responsibility for human
wickedness. (see also Index: Christianity)
Following Plato, Augustine argued that the ability to make true judgments
never can be inserted into the mind from outside. The human teacher
never can do more than help his pupil to see for himself what he already
knew without being aware of it. Augustine's favourite examples of these
intuitive judgments are the propositions of mathematics and the
appreciation of moral values; they are not the construction of the
individual mind, because when properly formulated they are accepted by
all minds alike. The individual thinker does not make the truth, he finds
it;
and he is able to do so because Christ, the revealing Word of God, is the
magister interior, the "inward teacher," who enables him to see the truth
for himself when he listens to him.
Ethics.
Augustine accepts the basic assumption of ancient ethical theory that
conduct is properly directed to the achievement of eudaimonia--the
happiness or well-being that is taken to be the one universal desire of
humanity. Augustine's cosmos is an ordered structure in which the
degrees of being are at the same time degrees of value. This universal
order requires the subordination of what is lower in the scale of being
to
what is higher: body is to be subject to spirit, and spirit to God. Man
must know his place in the order of the universe and, knowing it, must
voluntarily accept it; that is, he must set upon himself and upon everything
else the relative value that is properly due. Augustine's word for the
ethical valuation that influences conduct is amor ("love"). Amor is the
moral dynamic that impels man to action. If it is rightly directed man
will
never set a higher value on what is lower in the scale. All lesser goods
are
to be "used" as means or aids toward the higher; only the highest is to
be
"enjoyed" as the ultimate end on which the heart is set. The supreme
good in whose fruition alone man reaches his perfection is for Augustine
the God whose nature is agape, love in the New Testament sense of the
word. If, then, man's love, his amor, can rise to the enjoyment of God,
it
will become a participation in the divine agape, love itself. God will
have
given himself to men, and by sharing in his love men will love one another
as he loves them, drawing from him the power to give themselves to
others.
Struggle with the Donatist schism.
The energies of Augustine, both pastoral and literary, were for the first
15
years of his episcopate distracted by the wearisome struggle to end the
schism in the African Church that had persisted for nearly a century. The
Donatists, a Christian sect (named after Donatus, one of its leaders) the
members of which outnumbered the Catholics in the country districts and
in many towns, claimed to be the only true church on the ground that their
ministry was the only one the succession of which had not been stained
by apostasy in the great persecution of the years 303-313, which had
begun under the emperor Diocletian. Imperial attempts to suppress the
schism had stimulated the martyr spirit that had always marked African
Christianity and gained Donatism the support of strong elements in the
native population whose grievances were social and economic rather than
ecclesiastical. The schism maintained itself by fanatical violence, and
Augustine's persevering attempts to settle the questions at issue by
peaceful discussion were fruitless. In the end, the imperial government
became convinced that the Donatists were a danger to the security of
Africa. The Donatist bishops were compelled to meet their Catholic rivals
at a formal conference held under an official arbitrator at Carthage in
411, the foregone conclusion of which was a Catholic victory.
Donatists and Catholics agreed that the power of the Holy Spirit is
conveyed to the believer through the sacraments, which are administered
by the church through the clergy. The Donatists alleged, however, that
the sacraments require for their validity a ministry undefiled by serious
sin;
for the Spirit departs from the sinner, who cannot therefore "confer what
he does not possess." Augustine replied that the sacraments convey the
Spirit in virtue of Christ's ordinance alone and that this validity is
unaffected by the worthiness or unworthiness of the human minister. The
church's unity depends on the Spirit's supreme gift of charity, of which
schism is the denial. Unfortunately, Augustine, who had for long opposed
the use of any means but persuasion to end the schism, eventually was
induced to approve the enforcement of legal penalties upon the
schismatics, in the interest, as he believed, of the many whose fear of
Donatist violence had kept them from returning to the church. His famous
saying, "Love, and do what thou wilt," was in fact a defense of
compulsion in the service of charity.
Struggle with the Pelagian heresy.
As the Donatist controversy was ending, the Pelagians were already
beginning to threaten the traditional doctrines of sin and redemption in
the
Western Church. Pelagius had set himself to resist the slackening of
Christian moral standards. Against those who pleaded human frailty in
excuse for their failings, he insisted that God has made every man alike
free to choose and to perform the good; that it is the essence of sin to
be
a voluntary act that God's law forbids and that the sinner was free to
avoid; and that, were not this freedom real, there could be no justice
in
God's punishments and rewards. This reduction of Christianity to a bleak
moralism could not avoid conflict with the plain implications of the
church's sacramental and liturgical practice. Baptism had always been
"for the remission of sins," and infants were held to need it because they
inherit the guilt of Adam's transgression, which, as St. Paul taught,
brought death upon the whole race of men. The doctrine of original sin
was firmly established in the Western Church before Augustine's time;
and when it was openly rejected by Pelagius' disciple Celestius, there
was no escape for Pelagianism from being branded as a heresy. The
prevarications of Pelagius were able to persuade Pope Zosimus
(417-418) to reverse the condemnation pronounced by his predecessor,
Innocent I. But in the spring of 418 the African bishops obtained from
the
emperor Honorius an edict banishing the heretics; and Zosimus was
obliged to come into line.
Augustine was the soul of the Church's resistance. He had seen
Pelagianism at once as not merely a denial of the virtue of Christian
Baptism but also as a fatal misconception of the relationship between
God and man. For to assert that man can achieve righteousness by his
own effort is to contradict the fundamental truth that God is the giver
of
all good.
Before the controversy began, Augustine had worked out his own
rationalizations of the doctrines of original sin and divine
grace--rationalizations that the church was to prove unwilling to accept
fully. He accepted the traditional belief in the fact and in the penal
consequences of Adam's transgression, defining the fact as man's refusal
to accept his place in the created order, and the consequences as a
dislocation of the order of man's own nature--the revolt of flesh against
spirit. He argued that not only are all men involved in Adam's guilt and
punishment but also that this involvement takes effect through the
dependence of human procreation on the sexual passion, in which the
spirit's inability to control flesh is evident. It was this linking of
original sin
with human sexuality that exposed Augustine in his old age to the most
damaging criticisms of the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum, who boldly
asserted the moral neutrality of the instincts that belong to man's created
nature and charged Augustine with relapsing into Manichaeism in his
argument that an impulse that a man is bound to fight and conquer must
therefore be evil.
For Augustine the fall of man means that in all men the true order of love
has been violated. Departing from the love of God above him, man has
followed the love of self and become subject to what is below him. Man
has fallen by the act of his own will. He cannot by a similar exercise
of
will reverse the consequences of that fall. The subjection of spirit to
flesh
is a slavery from which the perverted will has no power to deliver itself,
just because it cannot will the deliverance. What is needed is a kind of
reversal of gravity--the substitution of an uplifting for a down-dragging
love. And Augustine believed that this could happen only by that gracious
descent of the divine love to dwell within the sinner: the gospel of the
incarnation and of Pentecost.
Pelagius, on the other hand, argued that all men have been created free
to
do what is right when they see it, and that Christians have received the
needed moral enlightenment in Christ's teaching and example. Augustine
knew the unreality of the Pelagian conception of freedom as an innate
and absolute power of choice, unaffected by circumstances. He pointed
to the inescapable conditioning of all moral activity by the situation
of the
agent--outside whose control are in general not only the presentation of
an object but also the kind of feeling that the presentation excites.
Moreover, the act of will is dependent on feeling as well as on cognition.
In Augustine's words:
Men will not do what is right, either because the right is
hidden from them or because they find no delight in it. But
that what was hidden may become clear, what delighted not
may become sweet--this belongs to the grace of God" (De
peccatorum meritis et remissione).
Augustine insisted that without this delight in righteousness there can
be
no true freedom in well-doing, but only a servile obedience to law. The
love of God, which is the motive of the Christian life, must be free. Yet
love of God, as St. Paul said, enters man's heart by the gift of the Holy
Spirit; and Augustine found it increasingly difficult to leave room in
his
doctrine of grace for a genuinely free response on man's part to the
Spirit's gift. The unexamined assumption that everything in human life
must be ascribed either to God's or to man's working compelled him to
hold that God alone is the cause of every human movement toward good.
In the first year of his episcopate, the study of St. Paul's argument in
Rom. 9-11 had convinced him that no event in time can alter the eternal
setting of God's will toward any human soul: his elect are chosen before
the foundations of the world. God knows--not before, but apart from,
the time process--how each individual in the course of time will respond
to the particular form in which grace is offered to him; and the elect
alone
receive the grace that will win their acceptance.
The rigour of this doctrine did not soften in face of the Pelagian challenge.
In De civitate Dei (The City of God ), the masterpiece on which
Augustine was working throughout the Pelagian controversy, he drew a
picture, as majestic as it is appalling, of the "beginnings, course and
destined ends" of the two invisible societies of the elect and the damned.
The work seems to have been in his mind before the capture of Rome by
the Visigoths in 410 had shaken the empire; but it took the form of a
Christian apologetic against the pagan claim that the disaster was
consequence and punishment of Rome's apostasy from its ancestral
religion. Augustine's two cities are not to be identified with the Christian
Church and the pagan or secular state. They are symbolic embodiments
of the two spiritual powers that have contended for allegiance in God's
creation ever since the fall of the angels--faith and unbelief, "the love
of
self extending to contempt for God, and the love of God extending to
contempt of self." Neither power is embodied in its purity in any earthly
institution; in this world the heavenly and earthly cities are inextricably
intermingled. If there is a philosophy of history in the De civitate Dei,
it is
the religious philosophy of predestination.
Augustine found it difficult in his old age to reassure some of his own
disciples, to whom his doctrine seemed to make moral effort futile and
praise and blame alike groundless. But he would retract nothing. His last
completed treatises drew out the logic of predestination to its most
ruthless conclusions. Though his doctrine in its final form was never
accepted by the church, it reappeared virtually unmodified in the writings
of both St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, the most acute thinkers,
respectively, of Scholasticism and Reform. It may indeed be regarded as
product of the too audacious attempt of the time-bound human mind to
contemplate existence with the eye of the eternal God. (see also Index:
election)
The end of Roman civilization in Africa was near and the Vandal armies
were besieging Hippo when Augustine died there on August 28, 430.
Not many years later, Vincent of Lérins defined Catholic orthodoxy
in
the famous phrase, Quod ubique quod semper quod ab omnibus
creditum est ("What is everywhere, what is always, what is by all people
believed"). He dared not call Augustine a heretic in so many words, but
it
was against the extravagances that he rightly detected in Augustinian
doctrine that his definition was aimed. That these extravagances have
been a noxious legacy to theology because of their author's authority
cannot be denied. But that should not prevent the grateful
acknowledgment of the debt that Christian thinking has owed through the
centuries to Augustine's influence, which has spanned and may one day
reconcile the divisions of Western Christendom. The secret of that
influence is to be found not so much in the brilliance and profundity of
his
intellect, the magic of his style, or the validity of his constructions
as in the
unique power of his religious genius. St. Anselm of Canterbury, St.
Bernard of Clairvaux, the makers of The Book of Common Prayer, St.
Francis de Sales, Blaise Pascal, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Joseph
Butler, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich--all these
have in their different ways drawn inspiration from one in whom they
have been compelled to recognize "the heart of the matter." Verus
philosophus est amator Dei ("The true philosopher is the lover of
God"). In those words from the De civitate Dei, Augustine has left at
once the best portrait of himself and the fullest justification of his
life's
work.
St. Augustine has been revered as a doctor of the church since the early
Middle Ages. His feast is celebrated on August 28. (Jo.Bu.)