Augustine on the Christian Life E-Book

Gerald Bray

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Theologians on the Christian Life
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 463

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Augustine is widely considered to be one of the most influential theologians of all time and stands as a giant among giants in the history of the Christian faith. However, while many Christians are familiar with the broad strokes of his theology, few readers today have explored the riches of his spiritual life. In this addition to Crossway's growing Theologians on the Christian Life series, renowned scholar Gerald Bray seeks to show us that Augustine is just as relevant today as it was in AD 430. Focusing on the North African pastor's personal transformation and dependence on the the Word of God, Bray gives us a picture of this ancient hero of the faith that can sharpen and encourage modern believers.  Part of the Theologians on the Christian Life series.

Leseprobe

AUGUSTINE

on the Christian Life

TRANSFORMED BY THE POWER OF GOD

GERALD BRAY

Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God

Copyright © 2015 by Gerald Bray

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh DennisCover image: Richard Solomon Artists, Mark Summers

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4494-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4497-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4495-8 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4496-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bray, Gerald Lewis.

Augustine on the Christian life: transformed by the power of God / Gerald Bray.

    1 online resource.—(Theologians on the Christian life)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4495-8 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4496-5 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4497-2 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4494-1 (tp)

1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. 2. Theology—Early works to 1800. 3. Christian life. I. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Works. Selections. English. II. Title.

BR1720.A9     

248.092—dc23                                                  2015013990

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

For M. R. W.

CONTENTS

Cover PageTitle PageCopyrightDedicationSeries PrefacePrefaceAugustine’s Latin Titles and Their English Translations1The Life and Times of Augustine2Augustine the Believer3Augustine the Teacher4Augustine the Pastor5Augustine TodayFor Further ReadingA Note on the Numbering of the PsalmsGeneral IndexScripture Index

SERIES PREFACE

Some might call us spoiled. We live in an era of significant and substantial resources for Christians on living the Christian life. We have ready access to books, DVD series, online material, seminars—all in the interest of encouraging us in our daily walk with Christ. The laity, the people in the pew, have access to more information than scholars dreamed of having in previous centuries.

Yet for all our abundance of resources, we also lack something. We tend to lack the perspectives from the past, perspectives from a different time and place than our own. To put the matter differently, we have so many riches in our current horizon that we tend not to look to the horizons of the past.

That is unfortunate, especially when it comes to learning about and practicing discipleship. It’s like owning a mansion and choosing to live in only one room. This series invites you to explore the other rooms.

As we go exploring, we will visit places and times different from our own. We will see different models, approaches, and emphases. This series does not intend for these models to be copied uncritically, and it certainly does not intend to put these figures from the past high upon a pedestal like some race of super-Christians. This series intends, however, to help us in the present listen to the past. We believe there is wisdom in the past twenty centuries of the church, wisdom for living the Christian life.

Stephen J. Nichols and Justin Taylor

PREFACE

Augustine is, by any standard, one of the giants of world civilization. His writings continue to be read and studied from every conceivable angle. New editions and translations of his Latin works appear with great regularity, and the amount of secondary literature about him is more than any one person can hope to master.

This book is part of a series that focuses on the Christian life, a subject that was dear to Augustine’s heart and motivated his preaching and teaching ministry but has been curiously neglected in recent years. For whatever reason, scholars have concentrated on his philosophy, his theology, and increasingly his biblical interpretation, but have had relatively little to say about his spiritual development and devotional teaching.

It is impossible to write about him without touching on the different aspects of his life and work, including the controversies in which he was engaged and that did so much to draw out the depths of his thinking. But as far as possible, these things are kept in the background here so that the man and his all-important relationship with God can occupy the center stage that he himself wanted it to have. In this book, every effort is made to let Augustine speak for himself and to understand him on his own terms, however uncongenial they may seem to many people today. Sympathy for him grows out of understanding, and that understanding can only come with listening to his voice and putting ourselves, as much as we can, in his shoes.

The selections from his writings that are quoted here have been freshly translated into contemporary (and as much as possible, colloquial) English. Augustine himself used the spoken word to teach his congregation at Hippo and put effective communication with them ahead of any literary pretensions. I hope that readers who are approaching him for the first time will be encouraged to go further and learn more about this fascinating man, while those who are already familiar with him may be challenged to see him in a new light. Above all, I devoutly desire that all who come to Augustine may be led through him to a deeper understanding and closer relationship with the God of Jesus Christ, to whom he was drawn and in whose service he spent the greater part of his life. It is for that, above all, that we remember him today, and it is only in the light of Christ that his career and his writings can be understood as he meant them to be.

The details of Augustine’s life are known mainly from what he tells us himself, or from what his disciple and biographer Possidius has told us. Modern scholars generally accept this information as factual, and it is seldom if ever questioned. For more precise details, see Allan Fitzgerald, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerd­mans, 1999), and Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A New Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

AUGUSTINE’S LATIN TITLES AND THEIR ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

It is customary to refer to Augustine’s works by their Latin titles, a practice followed in the notes to this book. One reason for this is that a number of his works do not have English titles, and some have more than one, which can cause confusion. On the other hand, the Latin titles are standard and universally recognized. Many of them are similar to their English equivalents, as can be seen from the following list of works referred to in this volume. Note that the Latin de (on) is often omitted in English translation, as is the word liber/libri (book/books), which is usually found in the full Latin titles, as for example, De Trinitate libri XV (Fifteen Books on the Trinity).

LatinEnglishAdnotationes in IobNotes on JobAd SimplicianumTo SimplicianBibliotheca CasinensisLibrary of CasiciacumConfessionesConfessionsContra academicosAgainst the AcademicsContra AdimantumAgainst AdimantiusContra epistulam Parmeniani DonatistaeAgainst the Letters of Parmenian the DonatistContra epistulam Manichaei fundamentalemNo English equivalent(Against the Teaching of the Manichees)Contra FaustumAgainst FaustusContra IulianumAgainst Julian (of Eclanum)Contra litteras Petiliani DonatistaeAgainst the Letters of Petilian, the DonatistContra Maximinum ArianumAgainst Maximinus the ArianDe anima et eius origineOn the Origin of the SoulDe baptismoOn BaptismDe beata vitaOn the Blessed LifeDe bono coniugaliOn the Good of MarriageDe catechizandis rudibusOn the Elements of Christian InstructionDe civitate DeiOn the City of GodDe correptione DonatistarumOn the Punishment of the DonatistsDe correptione et gratiaOn Punishment and GraceDe doctrina ChristianaOn Christian Doctrine (Teaching)De dono perseverantiaeOn the Gift of PerseveranceDe fide et symboloOn Faith and the CreedDe Genesi ad litteramA Literal Commentary on GenesisDe Genesi adversus ManichaeosOn Genesis against the ManicheesDe Genesi liber imperfectusIncomplete Commentary on GenesisDe gratiaOn GraceDe gratia Christi et de peccato originaliOn the Grace of Christ and Original SinDe gratia et libero arbitrioOn Grace and Free WillDe libero arbitrioOn Free WillDe mendacioOn LyingDe moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus ManichaeorumOn the Customs of the Catholic Church and Those of the ManicheesDe natura boni contra ManichaeosOn the Nature of Good, against the ManicheesDe natura et gratiaOn Nature and GraceDe ordineOn Providence (Order)De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorumOn the Merits of Sinners and Forgiveness and on the Baptism of InfantsDe praedestinatione sanctorumOn the Predestination of the SaintsDe sancta virginitateOn Holy VirginityDe spiritu et litteraOn the Spirit and the LetterDe symbolo ad catechumenosOn the Creed, for Those Preparing for BaptismDe TrinitateOn the TrinityDe unitate ecclesiaeOn the Unity of the ChurchDe urbis excidioOn the Fall of the City (of Rome)De utilitate credendiOn the Benefits of BelievingDe utilitate ieiuniiOn the Benefits of FastingDe vera religioneOn True ReligionEnarrationes in PsalmosExpositions of the PsalmsEnchiridionNo English equivalent (Handbook)EpistulaeLettersEpistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositioUnfinished Commentary on RomansExpositio epistulae ad GalatasCommentary on GalatiansExpositio quarundam propositionum ex epistula ad RomanosExposition of Some Statements from the Epistle to the RomansHomiliae decem in Iohannis EvangeliumTen Sermons on the Gospel of JohnLocutiones in HeptateuchumExpressions in the HeptateuchPost collationem contra DonatistasAgainst the Donatists after the CouncilQuaestiones EvangeliorumQuestions about the GospelsQuaestiones in HeptateuchumQuestions about the HeptateuchRetractationesRetractionsSermo ad Caesareae ecclesiae plebemSermon to the People of the Church of CaesareaSermonesSermonsSermones WilmartianiWilmart SermonsTractatus in Evangelium IoannisTreatises (Sermons) on John’s GospelTractatus in epistulam Ioannis ad ParthosTreatises (Sermons) on 1 John

CHAPTER 1

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AUGUSTINE

Augustine’s Life

Aurelius Augustinus, the man we call Augustine, was born on November 13, 354, in the small North African town of Thagaste, known today as Souk Ahras (Algeria). Then, as now, it was inhabited by Berbers, tribesmen who were the original inhabitants of North Africa and who have blended in with their various conquerors over the centuries without being totally assimilated by any of them. In the Roman Empire, the Berbers of Thagaste spoke Latin and lived like Romans, but they remained attached to their native soil and to customs that would survive after the empire disappeared. Augustine himself was brought up as a Roman—Latin-speaking and imbued with the culture and values of the imperial city. But he was detached enough from Rome that when it fell to the barbarians in AD 410, he was able to see it for what it was—a passing phase in human history that would vanish just as Nineveh and Babylon had disappeared centuries before.

Augustine was the son of a pagan father called Patricius and a Christian mother by the name of Monica. They were most likely of Berber origin, though there may have been an admixture of Italian stock in their background, and they were certainly Romanized. We do not know how they met and married, but most likely they were betrothed by their families at a young age. Whether Monica was a Christian when that happened we do not know, nor can we say what led her parents (if they were Christians) to give their daughter to a pagan husband. What seems almost certain is that it was not a love match but a social calculation. Patricius was a civil servant, a respectable and well-paid position that made him a man of some importance in a small agricultural village. Monica’s family no doubt thought it was a good idea for them to have connections to the government, and they knew that their daughter would be well provided for. They could also hope that in time Patricius would be converted to Christ.

Christianity had been legalized in the Roman Empire in AD 313, not long before Patricius was born, and its influence was steadily growing. There was as yet no requirement that government officials should be Christians, and many were not, but the church was no longer persecuted, and Monica was free to practice her faith. What she could not do was pass it on to her children (and especially not to her male children) because in the ancient world a boy followed the religion of his father. But as Augustine tells us himself, that did not prevent her from bringing him up in a way that made him familiar with Christianity. She took him to church with her and even enrolled him as a “catechumen” (apprentice) in what was the fourth-century equivalent of Sunday school. However, she could not have him baptized without his father’s permission, although she almost did when the young Augustine developed a fever and seemed to be close to death. At that point he himself cried out to be baptized.

You saw, my God, because you were already my guardian, with what fervor of mind and with what faith I begged for the baptism of your Christ, my God and Lord, urging it on the devotion of my mother and of the mother of us all, the church. My physical mother . . . hastily made arrangements for me to be initiated and washed in the sacraments of salvation. . . . But suddenly I recovered. My cleansing was deferred on the assumption that, if I lived, I would be sure to soil myself; and . . . my guilt would be greater and more dangerous.1

At home Augustine’s mother sang hymns to him and prayed over him, leaving an indelible impression on his mind. In later years he would recall his early upbringing and praise his mother for the teaching and example she gave him even when he was too young to appreciate what she was doing.

But strong though his attachment was to his mother, Augustine was a man who was expected to live in a man’s world. For the son of Patricius that meant getting a good education and rising in the imperial administration, which was the most secure and prestigious form of employment known to him. Augustine could not get what he needed in Thagaste, so when he was eleven years old he was sent to board in Madaura, a larger town about twenty miles to the south, which was known for its excellent schools. He stayed there for about four years, but had to return home when his father died. Patricius had accepted Christ as his Savior shortly before his death, but although in later years Augustine rejoiced at that, it made little impression on him at the time. There was nothing for him to do back home, and after a year he was sent to Carthage for further education, paid for by a certain Romanianus, who was a wealthy friend of the family.

Carthage (now a suburb of Tunis), was the capital of Roman Africa and the second city in the western half of the empire. It could not compete with Rome or with the great urban centers of the East, like Alexandria and Antioch, but it had a famous history and had long been an important center of Latin culture. The education Augustine got there was as good as any that could be had in the ancient world, and there was no need for him to go elsewhere. He was already well versed in the classics of Latin literature and had mastered the art of rhetoric (public speaking) that was essential for anyone who wanted to make a career in the ancient world. He had also studied Greek, but that language was not spoken in North Africa, and Augustine was not a gifted linguist. For him, Greek remained essentially a textbook language, which was a disadvantage to him as a Christian theologian. He had no trouble establishing himself as a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric at Carthage, but in later years his weakness in Greek would be held against him by men like Jerome (ca. 330–410), who was a brilliant linguist and translated the Bible into Latin, not only from Greek but from Hebrew as well. Augustine could not compete with that and remained dependent on translations of the Scriptures that were often of poor quality, which is surprising considering how central the Bible was to his preaching and teaching ministry.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. On arriving in Carthage, Augustine quickly settled into student life. He spent much of his time at the theater, where he reveled in the romantic lives of the stage characters. He had an exceptional love of music and drama, and his appetite for romance was whetted as well. Before long he acquired a mistress—her name is one of the few things about his life that we do not know—who bore him a son before he was eighteen years old. It is interesting to note that although he was not even formally a Christian at this stage, he called his son Adeodatus (“given by God”), the Latin equivalent of the Greek Theodoros (Theodore). Years later, after his conversion, he sent his mistress away but he kept his son, who was very precious to him.

Not long after this, as he was honing his rhetorical skills by reading Cicero’s Hortensius—a work now lost—Augustine was struck by the beauty not only of Cicero’s language but also of his ideas, and he fell in love with philosophy. Among the many religious and philosophical groups that competed for attention in Carthage was the sect of the Manichees, named for a Persian prophet called Mani who had lived in the borderlands between the Roman Empire and Persia about 150 years before Augustine’s time. Mani was eclectic in his tastes, borrowing a lot from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, various strands of Greek philosophy, and even Christianity. He was the “New Age” guru of his time, and his ideas suited the young Augustine perfectly. They were black-and-white in a way that the more sophisticated philosophies of the Greeks were not. Like Zoroaster, Mani believed that the world was divided into absolute good and absolute evil—two equal powers that did battle for the soul of man. He claimed to be rational, offering an explanation for every problem, but he skated over contradictions and untidy facts that did not fit his scheme of things. For someone who wanted intellectual assurance without taking the trouble to become truly educated, Mani offered the perfect belief system, and there were many who joined the Manichees for that reason.

The Manichees prided themselves on their knowledge of natural science and thought that they could use it to fight the power of evil. Regarding spirit as good and matter as evil, they claimed to have a higher form of knowledge, but at the same time they indulged their fleshly appetites in what Augustine later came to see was hypocritical debauchery. Far from achieving a balanced approach to life, they swung from one extreme to another because they were unable to judge good and evil for what they really were or cling to the former in order to subdue the latter.2

Augustine spent nine years in the company of the Manichees but became increasingly disenchanted with them when he realized that their great teacher, a man called Faustus, was unable to answer his most pressing questions.3 He grew restless in Carthage, having reached the summit of what it had to offer, and began to feel the pull of Rome. Eventually he left for the imperial capital, much against his mother’s wishes, and tried to set himself up as a teacher there. Unfortunately for him, nothing seemed to work out as he intended. No sooner had he arrived in Rome than he fell seriously ill, and it was some time before he could establish himself as a teacher. He was mocked for his provincial accent, and although the students he attracted were better than those in Carthage, they suffered from a fatal defect—they were reluctant to pay their fees. Intellectually, Augustine was still moving in Manichaean circles, but he was attracted to the so-called New Academy, a group of skeptical thinkers who questioned everything and claimed that the search for truth was a waste of time because absolute truth did not exist. This appealed to Augustine’s disillusionment with the Manichees and helped him to escape from their clutches, but it did not provide much of a substitute. Like skeptics in every age, the New Academics knew what they were against but not what they were for, so they could never provide an honest seeker after truth like Augustine with the peace of mind that he craved.

Before long, Augustine left Rome for Milan, which was then the seat of the Roman emperor in the West and a city of great importance. Augustine arrived there in 384 and soon came across the local bishop. This was Ambrose (ca. 339–397), a former prefect (mayor) of the city who had been chosen by popular acclaim to be its bishop ten years earlier, even though he was still a layman at the time. Ordained deacon, presbyter, and bishop overnight, Ambrose had quickly established himself as the leading moral and spiritual authority in the Latin world. He did not flatter those in power but castigated them—something that nobody had previously had the courage to do. Even the emperors were shamed into doing his bidding, so strong was his personality and sense of mission. Moreover, Ambrose was a master of rhetoric whose command of logic impressed even Augustine. Before long, Augustine found himself going to hear Ambrose preach. For the first time, Augustine came to see that Christianity made sense and had answers to the questions he had put to the Manichees in vain. He was gradually coming round to Christianity, but two things stood in his way: his inability to think of God as a spiritual being who had created a world that was fundamentally good, and his unwillingness to adopt a moral lifestyle.

The first of these problems was largely resolved by Platonism, which Augustine now encountered for the first time though the translations made by Marius Victorinus, a Platonic philosopher who had become a Christian. Platonism went back to Plato, who had lived at Athens in the fourth century BC,4 but it had been revived in a modified form about a century before Augustine was born by an Alexandrian called Plotinus (ca. 204–270) and his disciple Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305). Plotinus is credited with having turned what was essentially an academic philosophy into a kind of religion that would enable those who pursued it not only to understand but also to experience the supreme being. Whether Plotinus was influenced by Christianity has been debated, but in the marketplace of ideas there is no doubt that his Neoplatonism (as we now call it) competed with the gospel for the hearts and minds of men. This is especially clear from the writings of Porphyry, many of which were direct attacks on Christianity. For that reason, they are now almost entirely lost because Christian scribes of later times saw no reason to copy them (and every reason to destroy them); but they circulated freely in Augustine’s day and made it easy for intellectuals to look down on the faith taught by Jesus. Augustine was in no mood for that, though, and it seems that what he took from the Neoplatonists was the positive teaching of Plotinus rather than the critical views of Porphyry.

Plotinus solved the problem of evil for Augustine by persuading him that it had no real existence of its own.5 According to him, every created thing is good in itself because it has been made by the supreme being, which cannot make or do anything that is foreign to its nature. Evil is therefore a defect—the absence or perversion of what is good—not a power or substance in its own right. While absorbing this doctrine, Augustine was also reading John’s Gospel, which to Augustine’s mind sounded very much like the teaching of Plotinus. The big difference was that John spoke of the nonmaterial Word of God becoming flesh, something that a Platonist could not contemplate.6 Plotinus also taught Augustine the value of self-examination. Rather than look for answers in the stars or in nature, a man should look into his own soul and test the witness of his conscience. This was to become one of the most significant ways in which Augustine would discover truth as a Christian, and so it is important to understand how it first came into his life.

Augustine was now well on the way to joining the church, but there were still hurdles that he had to surmount. His mother persuaded him to abandon his mistress, but she wanted to find him a suitable wife instead. She managed to identify a ten-year-old, underage girl who was more than twenty years Augustine’s junior, and he was understandably unenthusiastic about her. Instead of that, Augustine tried to persuade some of his friends to set up a kind of commune where they could study philosophy in peace, but his mother objected to the idea, and it foundered when the others pulled out because they did not want to abandon their wives or potential wives. Augustine was torn between what he saw as incompatible alternatives: either he could marry and settle down like everyone else, or he could live a solitary life, which he did not want to do. He even took another concubine, impatient with his mother’s drawn-out plans for his future marriage, but that was no solution and the arrangement did not last long.

At this point in his life Augustine needed someone to talk to, and he found help from one of Ambrose’s assistants, an old man called Simplicianus. Simplicianus listened as Augustine recounted his doubts and fears, and was able to share experiences of his own, including the remarkable conversion of Marius Victorinus, which he had witnessed some years before in Rome. Another powerful influence on him at this time was that of Ponticianus, who was also from North Africa. Ponticianus introduced Augustine to monasticism, which was only then making its appearance in Italy, although it had been flourishing in Egypt for more than a century. Thanks to him, Augustine met people who had given up great careers and positions in the world and sought peace of mind in the simplicity and renunciation associated with the solitary life. What others saw as madness, they thought of as heroic self-sacrifice, and Augustine felt ashamed that he was unwilling to follow them in this.

Filled with a growing sense of his personal inadequacy and realizing how empty his life had so far been, Augustine fell into a state of despair. He was torn between the monastic ideal, on the one hand, and the pleasures of this world, on the other—wanting to embrace the former but finding it too hard to abandon the latter. It was when he was in this condition that he heard a child’s voice say: Tolle, lege (Take up and read). Somewhat confused, he reached for a portion of the Scriptures that he had to hand and read: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:13–14).7

The dam of his pent-up emotions broke and he surrendered his life to Christ. The change was immediate and long-lasting, but the implications took time to sink in. He enrolled in baptismal preparation classes, intending to be baptized at the next Easter baptismal ceremony (in 387). He still had several months to prepare for that, and during that time Augustine went into retreat at a place called Cassiciacum, where he began to write a series of treatises that would help to define his later life. One of the most interesting of these is the first account of his conversion, written while it was fresh in his memory and reflecting the simplicity of a man who was still absorbing the implications of the experience.8

After being baptized, Augustine decided to return to Africa with his mother, who had come to Italy sometime before in search of her son. As they were waiting for the boat, Monica caught a fever and died, content that she had been privileged to see Augustine finally won for Christ. Augustine postponed his departure for a year and used the time to write against the Manichees, to whom he had previously been so close.9 Then in 388 he went back to Thagaste with a few friends, determined to make amends to those whom he had previously misled with his Manichaeism and to establish a monastic community in his birthplace. It was shortly after he got home that Adeodatus died, at which point Augustine’s life changed again. In 391 he went on a short visit to Hippo Regius, a coastal city now known as Annaba (Algeria). He went to church, where the bishop, an old man called Valerius, spotted him and began to tell people that he, Valerius, needed an assistant. The congregation knew that Augustine was the right choice, and they thrust him forward for ordination, something that he had never sought. Augustine gave in to their wishes and was soon ordained. Valerius was a Greek who spoke poor Latin, so he asked Augustine to preach in his stead, while at the same time permitting him to establish a small monastery next to the cathedral.10

Augustine soon established a clergy training school and created an office for himself, where he quickly turned out a whole series of tracts defending mainline Christianity against the Manichees and the Donatists, a schismatic sect that had broken away from the church two generations before because of its stricter views on church discipline. The Manichees were relatively easy to refute, and they had no real following outside intellectual circles in the big cities, but the Donatists were another matter. They had penetrated very deeply into the countryside, where they had split the church, even in small towns like Thagaste. In order to combat them effectively, Augustine had to develop a doctrine of the church that accounted for imperfection within it without giving the impression that sinfulness should be tolerated. Like the Manichees, the Donatists were black-and-white people who found any kind of subtlety difficult, and their appeal to rid the church of its corrupt members was often welcome to those who felt they were being forced to tolerate low standards of spiritual life. Augustine did not condemn Donatist beliefs (which were theologically orthodox), but concentrated on the negative impact their separatism was having on the wider church. He wanted them to come back into fellowship with the main body of believers, though his success in this endeavor was somewhat limited. In 411 he attended a council held at Carthage whose main purpose was to reconcile the Donatists to the mainline church. In theory it was successful and many Donatists returned to the fold, but by then antagonisms had gone too deep to be eradicated overnight. Donatism limped on in a weakened state, but it did not finally disappear until the entire North African church was engulfed by the tide of Islam in the late seventh century.11

In 395 Valerius, fearing that some other city would get Augustine as its bishop, persuaded the church at Hippo to consecrate Augustine to that office, even though Valerius was still alive. Augustine hesitated but finally gave in to the pleas of the people, who did not want to lose him. When Valerius died the following year, Augustine was already in post, and he remained there until his death on August 28, 430. He is called Augustine of Hippo (not Thagaste) because that is where he was bishop, a practice that is almost universal when speaking of the fathers of the early church who held episcopal office. His first few years as a bishop were fairly uneventful (apart from the ongoing controversy with the Donatists), but in 410 Rome was sacked by the Goths, and once again Augustine’s life changed forever.

As refugees poured into Africa from Italy, bringing lurid stories of the destruction they had witnessed, Augustine became alarmed by the readiness of some to blame the disaster on Christianity. Had the old gods been kept, these people argued, they would have protected Rome, which was now suffering the consequences of having abandoned them. Augustine could hardly sit back and let such a challenge go unanswered, and so he began writing the greatest book of his career—TheCity of God, a massive work in which he reconstructed the history of the world. In it, Augustine tried to show that current events are the outworking of God’s eternal plan. In the end all earthly powers will collapse and fall, but the city of God, the kingdom of heaven, will go on forever. The fight between good and evil takes different forms, said Augustine, but Christians know what side they are on. They are neither Romans nor barbarians, but citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem that will descend on the last day when Christ returns to establish his everlasting rule.

Among the refugees in Carthage were some who had imbibed the teaching of Pelagius (ca. 354–ca. 418), a British monk who had gone to Rome, where he had been preaching that the human race was not entirely sinful. According to Pelagius, there was a residue of uncorrupted goodness in every man that, if it were properly nurtured, could win a soul back to God. In response to this, Augustine developed his ideas about grace and predestination, which have remained fundamental for Western theology ever since. Augustine spent many years warning the world of the dangers of Pelagianism, which soon attracted widespread condemnation, but Pelagius also had his defenders, the most articulate of whom was Julian of Eclanum, who had been banished from Italy because of it. Julian attacked Augustine quite openly and viciously, and Augustine replied by refuting his treatises one at a time, leaving only two of them still unanswered at his death.

In 426, sensing that his days were numbered, Augustine chose a certain Heraclius as his successor, and the two men governed the church together for the next few years. During that time, Augustine went over his earlier writings, correcting them and noting where he had changed his mind since first writing them. It was a remarkable performance, and like so many things in his life, it was an exercise that was without precedent in the ancient world.

Augustine died when Hippo was under siege by the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that had crossed through Spain into North Africa. A few days after he passed away, the city surrendered, and by the end of the year the Vandals had set up a kingdom of their own in Carthage. It survived for just over a century, until the Roman general Belisarius, acting on orders from Constantinople, retook the city and the province. The empire came back for a further 150 years, but in 698 Carthage fell to the Muslim Arabs who have ruled it almost uninterruptedly ever since. But long before that happened, the Africa that Augustine knew had disappeared. His colleague Heraclius seems to have been the last bishop of Hippo, and after his time the whole area went into decline. Fortunately for us, there was a brief respite in the decade following Augustine’s death, when one of his associates, a man called Possidius, was able to write a biography of him, using materials that were still extant in the library there. By then, Augustine’s writings were being copied and circulated all over the Latin world, so the eclipse of Roman culture in North Africa was not the end of his influence. But the world he knew had changed forever, and it is no exaggeration to say that with his death, the great days of the North African church came to a close. Augustine would become the teacher of western Europe, not of Africa, and it is in that role that his historical importance was to lie.

Augustine’s Writings

No ancient Christian writer has left us a larger corpus of writings than Augustine. His only rival in this respect is Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254), who may have written more than he did, though on a narrower range of subjects. But Origen was condemned as a heretic three hundred years after his death, and his books were either destroyed or no longer copied; so what we now have is only a small portion of what he actually wrote. That fate never befell Augustine. Some of Augustine’s works have been lost, and there is a small amount of material that circulates under his name but is probably (or certainly) not his. But that still leaves over a hundred books that have survived and are undoubtedly his, plus 307 known letters and 583 sermons, which were transcribed for publication by those who heard them. An average of three books a year is a remarkable output for anyone to have achieved over a lifetime, and quite outstanding when we realize that they had to be written and copied out by hand and that Augustine had none of the modern scholar’s resources at his disposal. That he should have made occasional mistakes or written something rather unmemorable is hardly surprising. The truly astonishing thing is how much he got right and how much of his work is still influential today. Whether you like him or loathe him—and Augustine has had his detractors as well as his admirers—there can be no doubt of his greatness or of the very long shadow he has cast over European culture down through the ages.

In cataloging his many writings, it is best to subdivide them according to the type of literature they are, as follows.

Autobiographical

Augustine was one of the few people in antiquity who wrote at great length about himself. In the Christian world, only the apostle Paul revealed as much of his own spiritual journey as Augustine did, and Paul only did so in passing as the subject came up in his epistles. Augustine, by contrast, sat down deliberately to write his autobiography, which no Christian and relatively few pagans had ever done before him.

His first foray into this field came immediately after his conversion, in the Dialogues, which he wrote between his conversion and his ordination in 391.12 Intended as philosophical works, the Dialogues nevertheless contain much introductory autobiographical material that helps us to understand his mental and spiritual state when he was processing his conversion and preparing himself for baptism.

His most important autobiographical work was his Confessions, which he started writing soon after becoming a bishop and finished around 400. The Confessions are the most popular of his writings and are still widely read today because of the deep insight they give us not only into his character, but into the process of religious conversion in general. They are structured as a meditation offered to God, a kind of extended prayer in which Augustine confesses his many sins and failures. In that sense they are a searing self-examination in which outwardly trivial events (like stealing pears from a tree when he was young) become important episodes in his spiritual journey, revealing to him the depth of his sinfulness and the overwhelming need he felt for the grace of God to forgive and restore him.

The Confessions cover his life from birth to the death of his mother, shortly after his baptism, and they are a major source for our knowledge of his spiritual development. To them must be added his Retractions, written late in life (426–427) and reexamining his work in the light of his growth as a Christian. They are as close as we can come to an understanding of his motives in writing and of the influences that shaped his thinking over time.13

In addition to these important works, there are two letters (nos. 355–356) that give us some details of his life in Africa after his return in 388 until he became a bishop eight years later. As I have already mentioned, there is also the Life of Saint Augustine, written by his disciple Possidius between 431 and 439, which draws on personal reminiscences and archival materials in order to provide a clear picture of Augustine’s activity as bishop of Hippo.

Philosophical

Augustine was a professional philosopher before his conversion, and the effects of that can be seen in his earliest works. The Dialogues he composed at Cassiciacum addressed philosophical themes of different kinds. He wrote a long work against the skeptics of the New Academy, from which his conversion had rescued him.14 He was also preoccupied with the immortality of the soul, on which he wrote a good deal. He was especially concerned to reaffirm its spiritual nature and examine how it could rise to the contemplation of God, something that he regarded as foundational for living the Christian life.

Other treatises of a philosophical nature included two books in which he sought to classify reality according to hierarchical principles that he believed were inherent in things.15 He also wrote several more that ranged across all the arts known to man and tried to show how each of them could become a pathway into the knowledge of God. In addition to these he composed lengthy treatises on the question of free will, trying to explain the origin of evil, the nature of human freedom, and divine foreknowledge.16 The three books dedicated to these and similar subjects are of particular importance for the light they shed on Augustine’s beliefs about predestination before the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy, when his position on the subject hardened and its finer points were clarified.17

Also to this category belongs a charming treatise on music, which was something dear to Augustine’s heart. He was deeply touched by Christian singing even before his conversion and believed that music could lead people to God if it were understood and used in the right way. Finally, there is a treatise couched in the form of a dialogue with his son, Adeodatus, which is an interesting study in the educational methods he thought ought to be used with children.

Exegetical

Considering the volume of his works, Augustine was not a great commentator on Scripture, but given the centrality of the Bible for the life of the church, it would have been hard for him not to have written at least some exegetical treatises, and on certain matters he could wax very eloquent. He was especially interested in hermeneutics, and one of the most important books ever written on the subject belongs to him. It is called On Christian Doctrine, because as far as Augustine was concerned, the Bible was the only real source of Christian teaching. It had to be read in the right way of course, and in this short but important treatise he outlined what that was. Augustine made a fundamental distinction between things meant to be used (uti) and things meant to be enjoyed (frui), and he tried to demonstrate how the Bible leads us from the former to the latter because it is a means to an end, which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The book is also important for the way in which it develops the idea that words are signs for things and can therefore be used in different senses, both physical and metaphorical. If it were not so, finite words could not help us know the infinite God, but of course they do, and nowhere more so than in the Bible.18

In dealing with the Old Testament, Augustine concentrated to an unusual degree on the creation story in Genesis 1–3. He commented on it no fewer than four times—twice allegorically and twice literally. His allegorical commentaries were directed chiefly against the Manichees, whom he accused of having too narrowly literalistic an interpretation of the text, and they were written first, shortly after his conversion. He later interpreted the creation account literally, but his first attempt at this, which went back to about 393, was a failure and he abandoned it. Later on, he took it up again and over a period of about fifteen years (401–415) he composed a major exposition of the deep themes of the creation that still ranks among the more important of his works.19

Beyond his many interpretations of Genesis 1–3, Augustine also wrote on the so-called Heptateuch (the seven books from Genesis to Judges), though his two works on the subject were not so much commentaries as a series of answers to difficult exegetical questions raised by the text.20 He did something similar with the book of Job.21 But by far the most impressive of his works on the Old Testament was his enormous Expositions of the Psalms, the only complete commentary on them that we possess from ancient times, which occupied him for almost a quarter of a century (392–416). The Expositions are not a unified whole but a mixture of exegetical notes, some longer expositions, and a huge number of sermons, including thirty-two on Psalm 119. It should be pointed out that Augustine used Latin versions of the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of the original Hebrew, which in the Psalms (in particular) is often quite different from the Greek. That unfortunately reduces the value of the Expositions as pure exegesis, but as a source of spiritual nourishment it is unparalleled in his writings. Even if what he says is not always securely grounded in the biblical text he is commenting on, the points he is making can usually be substantiated from other parts of Scripture and therefore have a genuine spiritual value in spite of the defects of the translation he was using.

In writing on the New Testament, Augustine more or less confined himself to the Gospels, Romans, James, and 1 John. He devised a harmonization of the four Gospels in order to show that they did not contradict one another, and also wrote two books on the Sermon on the Mount. His two attempts to write a commentary on Romans both failed, though fragments survive and we have a good idea of how he interpreted the epistle. His exposition of James is unfortunately lost, but his ten sermons on love, based on 1 John, are among his most appealing works.22 He also preached (or at least composed) 124 sermons on the Fourth Gospel, which, taken together, form a remarkable commentary on it that is full of rich spiritual meditation and counsel.23

Doctrinal

Much of what Augustine wrote concerned questions that arose from his study of Christian doctrine. Apart from the treatises dealing with particular controversies, which we shall look at a bit further on, he wrote a short exposition of the baptismal creed that was eventually standardized as the Apostles’ Creed that is still in use today, along with several occasional pieces dealing with specific questions that had been put to him. One of the more important works of this kind is his Handbook or Enchiridion, which is an exposition of faith (the creed), hope (the Lord’s Prayer), and love (the Ten Commandments). It was to become the basis for the education of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and in that capacity it played a major role in shaping the spiritual outlook of the Western church for over a thousand years.

The most important of his purely doctrinal writings however is his fifteen-volume work On the Trinity, which became the starting point of all future reflection on the subject in the Latin-speaking world. The first four books deal with the biblical evidence for the Trinity, followed by a theological construction and defense of the doctrine (bks. 5–7), an introduction to the mystical experience of God (bk. 8), a search for the image of the Trinity in human psychology (bks. 9–14), and a concluding summary of the whole treatise (bk. 15). Augustine was the first to develop the idea that the image of God in which we are created is an image of the Trinity, which he compared to the memory, intellect, and will inherent in the human brain. Because of this, Augustine is often regarded as the founder of modern psychology, as well as a theologian of the first rank, and his ideas on the subject are widely studied even by people who have no particular interest in Christianity.24

It should be pointed out before we move on that Augustine never wrote a systematic theology in the way we understand that now. This was not because he never got round to it, but because systematic theologies were unknown in his time. The first person to write anything resembling one was John of Damascus (d. 749), who wrote in Greek. No Latin writer attempted anything similar until Peter Lombard (ca. 1090–1160) composed his famous Sentences, which became the textbook of the medieval schools and did much to popularize Augustine’s teaching, from which Peter made copious extracts. From then until the widespread dissemination of printed editions of Augustine’s writings in the sixteenth century, Peter Lombard was the gateway through which most students learned about him, and so Augustine acquired a reputation as a systematic theologian without having been one!

Apologetical

Augustine was always concerned to win the pagan world for Christ, and in pursuit of that aim he wrote a number of evangelistic treatises designed to expound Christianity to unbelievers and to overcome their opposition to its teachings. By far the most important composition in this category is his massive twenty-two volume work The City of God, which is one of the most important books in world literature. It is a well-constructed defense of Christianity against its pagan detractors based on the theme that there are two “cities,” the city of God and the city of the world, which are in conflict with one another. Its length and encyclopedic comprehensiveness are such that it is useful to have a breakdown of its contents as follows:

First part (books 1–10): A refutation of paganism

Books 1–5: Paganism, useless for human society

Books 6–10: Paganism, useless for knowing God

Second part (books 11–22): A defense of Christianity

Books 11–14: How the city of God and the city of the world came into being

Books 15–18: How the two cities have developed over time

Books 19–22: What the final destiny of each of the cities will be

In the course of expounding his theme, Augustine ranged over just about every subject imaginable, and there are frequent digressions dealing with subjects that occurred to him in the course of writing and that he thought were of sufficient interest to warrant special comment. Perhaps most important for the long-term future was his rejection of millenarian prophecy, especially as an interpretation of the book of Revelation. Augustine was what would now be called “amillenarian” because he rejected the literal interpretation of the thousand-year reign of Christ that was common in his day. Instead, he believed that Revelation was an allegory of the conflict between good and evil and not a prophecy that would be worked out in human history more or less as recorded in the biblical text. Many movements have tried to revive a purely historical reading of Revelation, but many churches have adopted the Augustinian position on the matter, and it is now the one which, broadly speaking, commands the assent of most academic theologians.

Pastoral and Monastic

As the head of a local church and leader of a monastic community within it, Augustine had to deal with a number of pastoral matters, many of which are to be found in his letters and sermons, or scattered through other writings. However, he also found time to write about specific subjects affecting the Christian life, the most important of which were connected with sexual questions. He wrote on matrimony, widowhood, and singleness, the last of these being especially relevant for monks. In addition he composed a rule for life in the monastery, which was revived in the late Middle Ages and is still in use today. Both Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther were monks in the Augustinian tradition, giving his writings on the subject a considerable impact on the Renaissance and Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Polemical

Some of Augustine’s most important works were those written against heresies of different kinds. Like all Christians of his time, he regarded heresy as a spiritual disease to be fought in order to safeguard the health of both the individual soul and the body of Christ. As many others had done before him, he wrote a treatise against heresies in general, as well as one against the Jews. He also wrote against Arianism, which was creeping into North Africa toward the end of his life and would become the state religion under the Vandals, although it had been condemned many times in the East and was rapidly dying out in its Egyptian homeland. He also wrote against the followers of Marcion, a second-century heretic who had rejected the Old Testament; against Origen, who was accused of denying eternal punishment and believing in a form of reincarnation; and against Priscillian of Avila, who taught a form of Manichaeism. But by far the most important of his antiheretical writings were directed against three groups in particular.

The first of these was the Manichees, with whom he had associated before his conversion. In fact, a blistering treatise against Manichaeism may well have been the first thing he wrote.25 In the years before 400 he returned to the same theme on several occasions, even engaging in public debate with Fortunatus, a Manichee who visited Hippo in 392. The main themes of all these works were the same: good and evil are not competing powers; the Creator God of the Old Testament is good, one, and sovereign over all things; and evil is an absence of good and not a power in its own right. Several of the tracts were directed against particular individuals: in addition to Fortunatus, there was Faustus, who was widely regarded as the sect’s chief theologian; Secundinus, who tried to persuade Augustine to return to the Manichaean fold; and Felix, who turned up in Hippo at the end of 404 and engaged in debate with the bishop. As far as Augustine was concerned, the battle lines against the Manichees were clearly drawn, and he had little difficulty in defending his position. Dualism was inherently unstable and implausible. It made much more sense to see the world as a single coherent universe under the control of one sovereign God, even if that made it difficult to explain what evil was and why it was tolerated.