Saint Augustine of Hippo
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
Saint Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo is one of the few figures from antiquity who is still widely quoted today, along with Plato and Aristotle. The references are not just in theology, but in physics – Stephen Hawking, a leading quantum physicist, mentions Augustine’s theory of time in his “The Universe in a Nutshell”, and in politics – the argument justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq was largely conducted within Augustine’s framework for analyzing a “just war”.
Augustine has probably had more impact on the development of the Western Church as an institution than any other single figure. He has been hugely influential not only for Catholics, but with Protestant reformers also. Benjamin Warfield, a protestant scholar in the Reformed tradition, stated: “The reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church”[1].
Augustine and his world
The usual starting point for a discussion about an historical figure is when and where he or she was born. So we could say that Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, about 60 miles from the Mediterranean coast. But how much does that tell us?
I could introduce myself as born in South Wales in 1953.
But if I said that I was born in the UK after the Second World War, in the generation that benefited from the economic growth of that period, to parents who were first generation professionals, and developed the internationalist perspective common in that time and background, that probably wouldn’t go down well at cocktail parties, but it would be more informative – particularly if you didn’t know much about Wales in the 1950’s.
Since 354 is much further in the past, we don’t have any instinctive sense of what that means. Also North Africa was a very different place from any image we may have of it now. We need to clothe Augustine with more than a few facts and figures if we are to appreciate his significance and how it is possible that he could have such enduring influence. One thing that helps is the enormous amount of material that we have from Augustine himself, more than any other figure from that period – which also speaks to his recognized importance, both for his contemporaries and subsequently. We have 93 books, 400 sermons (of about 8000 it is thought he produced), and 300 surviving letters. There was a whole industry of stenographers around Augustine.
If asked to describe yourself, you might answer ‘American’, or ‘Californian’, or some equivalent. Would Augustine say ‘African’? I doubt it. Much more likely he’d say ‘Roman’. We should start by placing Augustine in the Roman world. The story of that world is an amazing and ultimately a tragic one.
Rome was founded about 750BC. The first Roman constitution dated from 450BC, so by the time of Augustine, Rome had been a constitutional state for 800 years, about 4 times longer than the USA and roughly the length of time since the Magna Carta was created in Britain. North Africa was not the edge of a distinct and largely impoverished continent, but the bread-basket of Rome – perhaps equivalent to the US Mid-West.
Augustine was born into this Roman world, not just in a geographical sense, but in a cultural sense. His father was a minor local official, not wealthy but with some status – perhaps equivalent to a small town mayor. He was clever, and fortunate to attract a rich patron who provided for his education, and was groomed for public life. That meant studying rhetoric and becoming an orator. So he was on a promising trajectory, a smart young man escaping from provincial life to the big time.
This was the zenith of Roman life and culture. Rome was considered a fixed background, a given, almost God-given – even by Christians (who had lived with Rome longer than we have lived with the United States). But in fact Rome was at the end of its life. Its collapse as a society was beginning. The city of Rome was sacked in 410, an event more traumatic in Augustine’s life than our nearest equivalent, the destruction in New York on September 11, 2001. By the end of Augustine’s life in 430, when he was 76, North Africa was overrun, Roman society was destroyed, and the Vandals were besieging Hippo Regis, the 1000 year-old city were he was bishop.
Rome and the Church
Rome is important not just as the backdrop to Augustine’s life but for a much deeper reason. Christians often struggle with the issue of how they relate to the society in which they live. What is the relationship of “the church” and the society as a whole? We might argue this question remains unresolved today. It has certainly been answered in many different ways through history. For Christians in the fourth Century it was particularly challenging. For the Jews in pre-Christian times, the answer was clear – the professing community the followers of Yahweh, and the society were one and the same (in principle, if not always in practice). For early Christians that was not the case. Soon after Christianity started, it was outlawed and Christians were persecuted[2]. So their answer was clear – the church and society were in opposition, and the question did not require deep consideration.
In 313 the world changed. Emperor Constantine issued the Edit of Toleration. Within 70 years Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. So Christians of that generation had to come to terms with a transition from being a misunderstood, persecuted, despised minority to holding the levers of power in the greatest Empire the world had ever seen and would see for the next 1500 years.
Of course, at the beginning of this period, many people were not Christians, although pretty quickly it became apparent that you should be, if you wanted to get on in life. There was also a great deal of confusion about what exactly was a Christian – there were many movements and branches within Christianity, and sects more or less closely related to it. Two of these were of particular significance in Augustine’s life: Manichaeism and Donatism. In some sense they were at the opposite ends of spectrum of beliefs in Augustine’s time. Manichaeism was loosely related to Christianity and had similarities with gnostic beliefs[3]. Donatism was an extreme purist movement within Christianity.
In thinking about the church and the wider society, Augustine developed the radical view that the church was “catholic”, that is, intended to include everyone. This would have seemed absurd to the Christians of the previous generation. Neither was it an inevitable consequence of Roman thought, which was very used to accommodating a huge range of philosophies, theologies and lifestyles. Each obviously considered itself superior, but typically sought to buttress its superiority by exclusion rather than inclusiveness. Augustine’s view of the church went far beyond a pragmatic declaration, or even a simple reference to the inclusiveness of the Gospel, to a deep theology which saw the church by its very nature as catholic. If it were not catholic (all-inclusive) it was not faithful to itself. This led Augustine to an acceptance that coercion could be used to maintain the unity of the church. If the church was supposed to include everyone then forcing people to accept church teaching was an option. Augustine was very careful to limit the type and degree of force that should be considered acceptable for this purpose, and doubtless would have been appalled by the later extremes of the Inquisition and numerous religious wars. However it is clear that this line of thought later led to devastating consequences[4].
In essence Augustine returned theological thinking to the position of the pre-Christian Israelites, where society and the church were coincident, except it was now Roman society rather than the people or kingdom of Israel. His book “The City of God” lays out this complex undertaking, linking the mythology of Rome (Aeneas, Romulus and Remus) with the historical progression including Caesar, Constantine, Jerusalem, Babylon, David and Isaiah. The details of this scheme became immediately irrelevant with the collapse of Roman society, but the concept of one church, catholic and universal, became the fundamental principle on which the Western church evolved over the next 1000 years. Even Calvin was still arguing for the maintenance of the catholic church – he just didn’t accept that the structure headed by medieval Popes was that church. Calvin also quoted extensively and generally favorably on Augustine’s view of grace, particularly that it was God’s gift to some and not to others[5]. Ultimately the view of grace as exclusive trumped the catholicity of the church – as summarized in the quotation from Benjamin Warfield at the beginning of this chapter.
Augustine the philosopher
Augustine was set to become an orator, a public role. In fact he became a philosopher, at this time typically involving withdrawal from society, celibacy, what we might consider a monastic lifestyle. The initial training was similar. He studied the Latin classical texts, for style, and then Cicero, where he first experienced philosophical thinking. This led him to paganism, which we associate with primitive societies and thinking. For Romans this was the most sophisticated of a wide range of worldviews, drawn from ancient Greek ideals. It was the common view of the Roman elite.
But with study Augustine found pagan philosophy sterile and unsatisfying. He turned to the headier brew of Manichaeism.
Manichaeism
Mani lived c. 210–276 AD in Babylon, at that time part of the Persian Empire. He produced seven writings, the final one dedicated to the King of Persia, Shapur I, who was a strong supporter of Manichaeism and encouraged its spread throughout his empire.
Manichaeism claimed that it provided the complete version of teachings which had been only partially revealed by teachers such as Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus. It easily absorbed new religious deities from the surrounding religions into the Manichaean scriptures.
Manichaean theology explained good and evil as the result of two distinct natures that existed from the beginning: light and darkness. In our terms, two Gods. The realm of light lived in peace, while the realm of darkness was in constant conflict with itself. The universe is the temporary result of an attack from the realm of darkness on the realm of light, and was created by the Living Spirit, an emanation of the light realm, out of the mixture of light and darkness.
A key belief in Manichaeism is that there is no omnipotent good power. This claim addresses part of the problem of evil by denying the infinite perfection of God and postulating the two equal and opposite powers (light and dark). The human person is seen as a battleground for these powers: the good part is the soul (which is composed of light) and the bad part is the body (composed of dark earth). The soul defines the person and is incorruptible, but it is under the domination of a “foreign power”, which addressed the practical part of the problem of evil. Humans are said to be able to be saved from this power (matter) if they come to know who they are and identify themselves with their soul.
The myth of eternal conflict between good and evil long predated Mani and has found echoes throughout the history of Christianity, particularly in medieval times in alchemy and astrology, and most recently in utopian social philosophy, even Marxism. It remains a powerful framework reflected in a vast range of popular TV and movie drama.
The transition to Christianity
Having engaged in debate with several of the leading Manicheans of the time, Augustine became disillusioned with this system as inadequate to reflect the active character of human nature, and in particular choosing between good and evil acts (which remained a central preoccupation for him). He turned next to Judaic and Christian writings, notably the Book of Isaiah. This he found barbaric, and he then made the jump to the philosophy of Plato which was enjoying a resurgence at that time (so called “neo-Platonism”) and was also influential in Christian circles. Eventually he arrived at the writings of Saint Paul and experienced a mystical conversion. However, despite the intensely personal and spiritual nature of this conversion, Augustine remained a philosopher – indeed he has been termed the greatest, maybe the only, Roman philosopher.[6]
The question of the role of philosophy in Christian thinking was similar to that of the relationship of the church to society – it went through massive transition, and Augustine was the pivotal figure. Christ was clearly not a philosopher. He showed absolutely no interest in the great philosophical questions: the role of spirit versus matter, the origin of evil, the nature of the elements, music, mathematics. In the third century, the Christian Tertullian summarized the relationship in his question: “Quid Athenae Hierosolymis?” (What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?) – his answer was an emphatic “Nothing!”
Augustine certainly thought otherwise and his greater influence can be seen throughout later church history. It remains apparent today in the requirement that Roman Catholic priests study philosophy as part of their training (a legacy of Augustine that is perhaps not widely appreciated, especially by seminarians).
So was Augustine one of those major philosophical types – with hugely important ideas that most people don’t understand or care about (like Descartes, Kant, or Hegel)? No. He ended up a bishop, which in those days was a pastoral role, perhaps closer to today’s parish priest. It also carried a lot of responsibility for civil matters, particularly personal and property disputes, since in many places there was no other recognized source of authority in the community. Augustine hated the administrative burden but he had an intimate understanding of human nature, and a deep sympathy for human weakness. To understand how this bright, social climber got there we need to follow his personal development in a bit more detail.
The life of St Augustine
We are fortunate that Augustine left us his “Confessiones” – typically translated as Confessions, but more accurately as his “Testament”. This document is his explanation of Christian faith, illustrated through his own life story.
He had a Christian mother, Monica, and a father who was not a Christian. He enjoyed the normal hedonism of Roman life, including circuses[7] (for which he criticized himself later). At the age of about 18 he took a concubine, a normal and recognized custom in those days, and had a son, Adeodatus. He moved around North Africa for his early training, as he gained experience and some small reputation as a public speaker. His big move came with his journey to Rome where he hoped to make a major impact, but Rome itself was in a poor state at that time and the Imperial capital had moved to Milan. Despite finding himself in the wrong place to really make an impact, he did manage to get the recommendation for the post of Imperial Orator. At this point he sent his concubine away and agreed with his mother to take a wife of more suitable social standing. His son remained with him, by this time a teenager and very much the love of Augustine’s life. At age 30 he was a sophisticated, worldly, albeit thoughtful, man, on the verge of a major political career.
In Milan he met Saint Ambrose, who had considerable status, sufficient to criticize the emperor. Ambrose had the intellect to convince Augustine that Christianity was the answer to his philosophical questioning. He baptized Augustine, along with his son, at Easter in 387 in Milan. This was really the start of Augustine’s conversion, at first a largely intellectual exercise which deepened into a spiritual experience. After a period withdrawn from public life in Italy, and having given up plans of marriage, he returned to his birthplace Thagaste. On his way back his mother died, and his son soon after.
Upon his return to north Africa he sold the wealth inherited from his father, and gave the money to the poor. He kept the family house, which he converted into a monastic foundation for himself and a group of friends. The Augustinian Rule[8] as it later evolved was unlikely to have been based directly on Augustine’s practice, but Religious Orders claiming linkage to Augustine remain important (the Canons Regular being one example). Luther was an Augustinian monk.
Augustine himself did not want to take on the duties of a cleric, which would for a person of his education and standing mean becoming a bishop with substantial civil and ecclesiastical responsibilities. However he was persuaded and in 391 he was ordained in Hippo Regius (now Annaba, in Algeria). Four years later, he became bishop of Hippo and remained in this position until his death in 430.
As a bishop, and one with standing beyond his local area, Augustine was inevitably drawn into many disputes within the church, of which the long-standing division with the Donatists was a major formative experience. As we noted earlier, the dispute with the Donatists was the other major spur to Augustine’s theology, along with his early interest in Manichaeism.
Donatism was more a matter of Church discipline than doctrine, although it did effect views of the sacraments. The primary disagreement between Donatists and the rest of the early Christian church was over the treatment of those who had renounced their faith during the persecution of Roman emperor Diocletian (303–305), which was particularly severe in North Africa. Donatists took a very rigorous attitude towards those who had failed to hold and give public expression to their faith at this time, which would very likely have led to martyrdom. In particular they refused to accept the authority of bishops who had gone into hiding or collaborated with the Roman authorities.
Donatists held that apostates could not be reconciled with the Church – the sacrament of Penance was not effective in such cases. They also argued that priests and bishops who had renounced their faith during the persecution could no longer validly celebrate the sacraments, which is inconsistent with the Catholic position that the validity of a sacrament depends on the grace of God not the character of the minister (even in a state of mortal sin).
Many towns were divided between Donatist and non-Donatist congregations. As Christianity became accepted by the Roman state, this dispute took on a political character. A notable example is when Constantine, in 317, had sent troops, unsuccessfully, to subdue the Donatists in Carthage (not far from Hippo).
Augustine campaigned against Donatism throughout his time in Hippo, and gained the upper hand, in part a theological victory and in part political. The argument was couched partly in terms of sacraments but, more importantly for Augustine, contributed to his views on the catholicity of the church. He could not accept that the church could be defined by an exclusionary, minority status, as the Donatists wished.
The other major controversy which engaged much of Augustine’s energy as bishop was with a British monk, Pelagius. This involved the nature of grace and led to Augustine’s development of the doctrine of original sin. The concept was developed by Augustine to address the challenge of human weakness – otherwise how could our failure be excusable in the light of God’s goodness. It was not initially seen as a transference of guilt. Despite the focus on sex as a human weakness, the central idea is more in line with modern thinking that recognizes the essential imperfection of humankind and the inherent alienation from our world and our creator[9].
It is often thought that Augustine lived out a conflict between his optimistic nature, based on a belief in the goodness of God and His gift to all people, and his pessimistic nature, very aware of human weakness and failure. The pessimistic side seems to gain strength towards the end of his life, perhaps mirroring the collapse of the Roman society around him. At his end he was very conscious of his own sinfulness and his failures in achieving reconciliation in his role as a bishop. Some of his last letters are very pessimistic.
Augustine struggled throughout his life to reconcile the conflicts he saw in human nature, from the individual’s battle of will between good and evil intentions, to the structure of the church and society. He remained a philosopher, but a very practical one who understood what made people tick, and wanted them to understand that God was the center of everything.
Some of Augustine’s key ideas:
The nature of the Church
The community of the followers of Christ was part of society (universal) and “catholic” (all inclusive); also “apostolic” (authority arose from the Apostles by direct transmission via subsequent bishops), following Irenaeus of Lyons and Cyril of Carthage. This idea was subsequently formalized in the words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one church, catholic and apostolic” (note that catholic is not capitalized!). Forced conversion was acceptable, but with strictly limited means of compulsion, which excluded violence.
The basis for Salvation
Humans are sinful and cannot merit salvation, that is an gratuitous gift from God. Those intended to be saved vs damned is fixed for all time (predestination) – however this is held to be consistent with free will. This is a complex issue which is tied up with Augustine’s sophisticated philosophy of time. It is difficult to decide the extent to which he would have agreed with the way later Protestant reformers developed the concept of predestination, but we should note that a number of significant churchmen in his own time strongly disagreed with his “soteriology” (theology of salvation).
Sin and Original Sin
Sin is a defect of will, not of understanding – choosing to do wrong, rather than being mistaken. The imperfection of human will and the consequent misuse of human freedom is intrinsic to human nature. So sin is a primal part of the human condition (inherited from Adam and Eve). This also provides strong argument for infant baptism. Augustine held that an unbaptized infant would go to hell. Because this idea seems repugnant to Christian sensibility, the medieval Church from about 1300 developed the idea of “Limbo” as an intermediate state – not paradise but not involving the suffering of hell.[10]
The Second Vatican Council repudiated the idea that only the baptized could be saved – relying on the mystery of God’s love:
Just war
This theory was contrary to the Christian pacifism traditional up to this time. This could not be reconciled with the actions of ‘christian’ state that frequently found itself at war. Augustine argued that war is acceptable under certain conditions. Firstly, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain or as an exercise of power. Secondly, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state. Thirdly, love must be a central motive even in the midst of violence.
Augustine accepted the inevitability of war (as part of the fallen human condition), and wanted to provide guidance for how ‘just men’ should behave given this unavoidable fact. It is highly debatable how many wars, ancient or modern, would meet Augustine’s criteria of justness.
The position of the Jews
Their dispersal was a punishment, but they were a special people and should not be excluded from Christian lands. This was an untypical attitude even in Augustine’s time, and was certainly not a part of his teaching which was accepted in later times.
Against biblical literalism
Augustine wrote extensively about the Book of Genesis and the creation stories. Many Church Fathers interpreted the Scriptures in highly symbolic and allegorical ways. Augustine did not go as far as some but was very cautious of overly literal readings. He noted specifically that the story of the seven days of creation made no sense if one attempted to read it literally.
One might regard the following remark as as a useful antidote to some fundamentalist thinking:
Questions for Consideration
Footnotes (Click footnote number to return to text.)
[1] Warfield: Calvin and Augustine (1956)
[2] See Church History: The Patristic Period
[3] See Church History: The Patristic Period on Gnosticism
[4] The retrieval of catholicity as an embracing spirit of service and brotherhood rather than a justification for coercion or exclusion was one of the achievements of the Second Vatican Council.
[5] This is the basis for huge debate around “predestination” – the view that some are saved and others are not – with a range of views as to what influence, if any, the individual has on this outcome. It therefore links also to the issue of Free Will. These questions remain as contentious now as they were for Augustine.
[6] Roman culture, unlike Greece, did not create much unique philosophy.
[7] Roman circuses have little in common with the modern version. They had animals, but for the purpose of killing them. The killing sport also extended to humans, sometimes Christians, but generally any captured adversaries or slaves were considered appropriate targets.
[8] The directions for the Religious Order of that name – see Church Life and Traditions: Monasticism and Religious Orders
[9] The concept of alienation is important in many modern thinkers, ranging from religious, through Jungian psychology, to the radical atheism of the Existentialists of the post Second World War period.
[10] Limbo has never been an official Roman Catholic doctrine.
The Catechism says specifically in respect of children who have died without Baptism: “the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,’ allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism.” (1261)