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Augustine of Hippo
Aurelius Augustinus, known to the modern world as Saint Augustine, was in his fifties and the bishop of Hippo, in Numidia, when the Visigoths overran Italy and sacked Rome -- the news of which exaggerated the extent of Visigoth violence. Augustine saw the refugees pouring into North Africa, including noble families from Rome, and he heard accusations that Rome's destruction was the result of neglect to worship the city's traditional gods.
Christians were responding with uncertainty to these allegations. They believed that their god protected people, and obviously Rome had not been protected. They believed, as had Eusebius, that God had linked Rome and Christianity. And, with disaster befalling Rome, they needed a new view on God's ties with Rome and with Christians. Augustine supplied it, drawing from the old association of evil with the present world and on the habit to put things into the form of allegory.
In a series of sermons, Augustine told his demoralized flock not to worry, that they were not citizens of Rome or denizens of earth but that they were citizens of the heavenly city of Jerusalem. Since the fall of Adam, said Augustine, the loyalties of the human race had been divided between two great symbolic cities. One city, the heavenly city of Jerusalem, served God along with his loyal angels. The other city, Babylon, represented by Rome, served the rebel angels: the devil and his demons. He said that although Jerusalem and Babylon appeared mixed they would be separated at the Last Judgment. The righteous, he said, would return to the heavenly city of Jerusalem just as the prophets had foretold of the return of Jews to their homeland.
Augustine's response in writing to the charge that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome appeared in 413 in a work entitled The City of God. In this work he argued that although Rome had suffered a great demise, God was actively at work in human history, that Rome was not eternal as some people had thought, that rather than Rome being the great peace-maker (as claimed by Bishop Eusebius) it had been destined to decay. Augustine claimed that Rome had been influenced both by God and by demons, that worldliness, a lust for material goods and violence were rooted in impulse and had made Rome wicked. Rome, he wrote, was based on self-love, robbery, violence and fraud. The Romans, he claimed, were the most successful brigands in history. Viewing Roman culture, Augustine described slavery and private property not as the creations of God but of sin. Christianity could not save Rome, he wrote, because those with power, including Christian emperors, could not erase the taint of humanity's sin. Rome, he wrote, had to perish as had the wicked cities of the Old Testament. Augustine described history as changing the world visually, like a kaleidoscope, but that history was linked, as claimed by the Hebrew prophets, with the wisdom of God -- a process that humanity could not understand because it could not see the whole, as could God. God, he claimed, ordered all events. Augustine claimed that without the coming of Jesus Christ history would have been meaningless. He described pagans such as Platonists as having failed to understand the sequence of history or its appointed end: Armageddon.
Augustine's City of God became five volumes which dealt with those who worshiped God for happiness on earth, another five volumes that dealt with those who worshiped God for eternal happiness, and twelve volumes concerning the origin and ultimate destinies of the symbolic cities of Babylon and Jerusalem. It was an elaborate work that made Augustine an Aristotle of allusions and metaphysics.
While a youth, Augustine had been an avid seeker of truth and certainty. He had rejected Christianity after having found Luke and Matthew contradicting each other. While a student at Carthage he accepted the Manichaean (Manichean) explanation to the much-asked question of the origins of evil -- whence evil? Goodness, he believed, was passive, like the suffering Jesus. Evil, on the other hand, was aggressive, like passion and rage. Augustine accepted the Manichaean view that evil resided in materiality: in the human body, in sexuality, in procreation and in the rest of material nature. He agreed with the Manichaeans that materiality was apart from God and that evil therefore came from outside God. He described evil as outside of humanity -- as an invasion.
In Carthage, Augustine had worked as a freelance teacher of rhetoric. Then he went to Rome in search of better pupils. He became a professor in Milan, and there he met and fell under the influence of the famous Bishop Ambrose, who had been influenced by neo-Platonism. With other Christians in Milan, Augustine had studied the writings of Plotinus, and he found in him a great mind that drew out what he thought was the hidden meaning of Plato. Augustine accepted Plato's view that idea, God and spirit were combined, and he accepted Plotinus' view that the power of God touched everything, molding and giving meaning to passive matter. From Plotinus, Augustine believed he had gained an understanding of a permanence that was God. He now saw God as utterly transcendent, as the creator of all, all-knowing and the source of human knowledge. He had come to believe that materiality was not evil, that the universe was a continuous active whole and that evil was merely the turning away from God. And under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, and perhaps his Christian mother, Monica, Augustine, in his mid-thirties, converted to Christianity.
As a Christian, Augustine wrote of Plato's followers being right about God but wrong about gods. Augustine drew from the Judaic-Christian view of creation and criticized the neo-Platonists for seeing creation as idea manifesting itself rather than God creating things as they should be. Here he was in agreement with, if not having borrowed from, Ambrose, who had stated that creation had not just happened and that God had not created the universe with a compass and a level but instead had commanded it.
Augustine claimed that one finds truth through revelation, a sort of flash of insight emanating from God's messenger, Jesus Christ -- rather than the weighing of generalizations. Truth he thought could be found in scripture, which he saw as the word of God. But he believed that to find it there, one had to search for it with a yearning for fulfillment -- an attempt to find what one was looking for rather than an attempt to find whatever was there. Having come to see all of creation as God's, Augustine fought against the notion that humanity was helpless before the forces of evil. People chose to be evil or not to be evil, he believed, as in Adam choosing to sin. Despair, Augustine believed, was unnecessary and an unforgivable sin. People, he believed, had the freedom to call on God to save them. A Christian's worst enemy, he believed, was inside himself: his sins, his doubts.
Although Augustine saw God as the creator of all, he believed with other Christians that the world was also influenced by devils. Pagan gods, he believed, were devils. He described devils as vile beings, as the evil spirits of which the apostles had spoken. Augustine turned the struggle against devils inward - as had Plotinus. Men, he believed, got the demons they deserved. For Augustine there were times when humans were their own devil. He saw victory over evil as depending upon an inner strength, the source of which was an inner attachment to Jesus Christ.
Augustine railed against the remnant paganism among his parishioners, including astrology. He attacked the notion that humanity's course of action could be determined by the stars while animals such as dogs remained free to chose between doing something and not doing it. He spoke of people born in the same month - even the same hour -- as not necessarily having the same destiny over the period of a day or a lifetime.
Like Origen before him, Augustine interpreted scripture allegorically. The Bible, he believed, had been veiled by God in order to exercise those seeking Him. He believed that the Bible's ambiguities provided people with ever-new facets of truth to be discovered. He saw human consciousness as the psychoanalyst Freud would see messages in dreams: truth not as simple and direct but diffracted into obscure and intricate symbols needing interpretation. Freud would believe that dreams were images rising from thoughts that had been repressed; Augustine believed that people had a repressed awareness, a loss of direct knowledge, resulting from humanity's fall at the Garden of Eden, which had left Adam and Eve able to communicate only by the clumsy artifice of language and gestures. Believing that God was the source of all knowledge, Augustine believed that direct awareness was a gift of God and that the gap between direct awareness and human consciousness was mercifully bridged by the Bible and its marvelous proliferation of imagery -- a direct awareness that humans could acquire only in flashes of insight. Thus it was that Augustine saw Rome as Babylon and saw Jerusalem as the heavenly city: imagery rather than seeing and analyzing phenomena in direct specifics. Augustine advocated a path to truth that was traditional in the long history of religion: imagination.
Augustine believed that a complete uniformity of opinion existed only among angels, but he also believed that the Church needed to exclude ideas that were contrary to fundamental Christianity. Early in his career as a bishop he combated the view among Christians that God was everywhere and everything, that God was nature rather than a unifying force at the apex of reality. Augustine also came into conflict with those Christians who believed that the Church should be restricted to those who maintained the purity they had acquired at baptism, those who believed that the Church was a source of holiness and that no sinner should have a part in it, that the Church should expel those who were guilty of mortal sins. These were the Donatists, the descendants of those North Africans who had been for a stricter standard of readmission to the Church following the great persecutions of Christians a century before. Donatists had their own congregations and churches, and in many places in North Africa they outnumbered other Christians.
Augustine believed that sin was not just a matter of choice, that sin was inherited, that the Church should embrace all of humanity, saints and sinners alike, that the good and bad would be together until Armageddon, when they would be separated. Augustine claimed that the good Christian must try to become holy but must also coexist with sinners in the same community and be prepared to rebuke and correct them. His neo-Platonic education led him to see Christians as part of a world of development, as imperfection struggling toward the ideal as manifested in God. Augustine saw the Church not as a body of purists defying society but a body that should master society, a body capable of bringing truth to the masses.
The Donatists and Augustine differed in their view of how the sacraments of the Church should be administered. The Donatists argued that for sacraments to work they had to be administered by clergymen undefiled by serious sin. They feared that any deviation from proper ritual might alienate God from the Church, as they believed the Jews of ancient Israel had angered God by their sins. Augustine argued that churchmen who received and administered sacraments merely strove imperfectly to realize the holiness in these sacraments and that these sacraments worked by the power of Christ alone unaffected by the clergyman administering them. He saw the sacrament's of the Church as holy because the Church was itself holy, participating in Christ.
Augustine led the drive against Donatism. He wanted the Donatists to come under the discipline of both church and state. Like others of his time, Augustine believed that people lacked the will and wisdom to govern themselves. He saw Adam and Eve as having too much pride and their pride having led them to attempt to govern themselves. He believed that people had to be governed by God through his representatives: officers of the Church. In 405, the Church convinced the emperor of the west, Honorius, to outlaw Donatism, and the Church deprived the Donatists of bishops and funds. Their meeting together for religious purposes was declared punishable by death. Donatists could not hold public office, protect their property in the courts, nor pass their property to their heirs. Under such duress, the purity of some Donatists cracked, as had many Christians during the persecutions a century before. Donatist support among people with property declined as such people found it in their interest to conform to the accepted orthodoxy of the Church.
While the Visigoths were marching up and down Italy in the years of 409 and 410, Rome's campaign to repress Donatism foundered, and a Donatist resurgence followed, with armed bands of Donatists seeking revenge by attacking rival Christians. Augustine was forced to go into hiding. But by 412, after the disruptions by the Visigoths had ended, Donatism was again suppressed. Many who had fought for the Donatists committed suicide. Augustine expressed support for the suppression so long as it was accompanied by instruction. He favored uprooting the Donatist heresy with arguments and opposed hunting for heretics with spies and agent-provocateurs.
Within the next ten years, some Donatists in North Africa continued to resist. They terrorized the countryside, plundering villages and rich farms, forcing non-Donatist Christian landowners to trade places with their slaves and enjoying the sight of the landowner's humiliations. They were engaging in the terrorism of the defeated, and eventually they would disappear.
A Christian monk and theologian from Britain named Pelagius was among those who fled from Rome to North Africa after the Visigoths sacked Rome, and in the city of Carthage he joined in discussions and debates with Christian intellectuals whose confidence in Roman society had been shattered. Pelagius had been disturbed by the moral laxity he had found among Christians in Rome when arriving there some thirty years before, and now, in Carthage, he advocated a stricter morality for all Christians. Pelagius and those who agreed with him believed that people could make choices between good and evil, that rather than being born sinful, people had no excuse for sinful behavior and that every sin was a deliberate act of contempt for God.
After a year, Pelagius left Carthage for Palestine, but a follower remained in Carthage and continued to influence those who wished to reform the Church. The ideas of Pelagius spread to those provinces where life had been dislocated by invasions: Britain, southern Italy and Gaul. This disturbed Augustine, and he led the attack against the Pelagians. Once again his argument involved inner feelings and patience, a belief that people should merely try to do right while convalescing within the Church. Augustine reiterated his belief in humanity's power to choose, and he added that freedom of choice was limited and, in having only a limited power to choose, people could not live flawlessly. Augustine supported his belief in the limits of will by holding up the apostle Paul as an authority on the subject and quoting Paul from Romans 7:15-18, which indicated that even Paul was incapable of doing what he willed.
Augustine saw humanity's limits of will as the result of the original sins of Adam and Eve. Wrong choices, he believed, added to one's miseries, but right choices would never alleviate the results of Adam's fall. Augustine believed that sin made people not just limited but inherently corrupt. People, he believed, could not overcome their faults through will and education, that if they could choose righteousness through their own ability to choose rather than through God and his agents they would not need the Church's rituals. He viewed the Pelagian interpretation of freedom as making virtue possible outside of Christianity, and such a virtue he associated with pagan virtue, which he believed was influenced by obscenity and filthy devils. Unlike the Stoics, Augustine saw virtue only in religious passion -- Christian religious passion. He claimed that God gave salvation to someone not from that person's outward obedience but from his or her responding to God's love with a love of their own for God.
Augustine viewed humanity's inner world as more complex than did his rivals, or as had Socrates. There was in Augustine none of Socrates' naïveté about people doing wrong only because of not knowing truth. Augustine saw the great size of one's inner world was a source of anxiety as well as strength. Augustine believed that one's inner-self was so complex and mysterious that no one could ever know his whole personality and that no one could be certain that all of oneself would live up to the standards that he or she had adopted. He wrote of people committing sins through pride, with outcomes that did not always produce pride. He wrote of sins that happened through ignorance and weakness, and people weeping and groaning in distress.
Although Augustine saw the world that God had created as overwhelmingly good, he believed that humanity was destined to envy and to lust for power. Though he had been extraordinarily active sexually in his younger days, now in his old age he saw humanity as gluttonous. Augustine described infants at the breast as filled with lust, jealousy and other vices. Adam and Eve could have had sex without lust, he wrote, but they chose instead to have it with lust. A carpenter moved his hands without lust, he added, and so too could people in sexual intercourse. Virtue, claimed Augustine, demanded complete control over one's body, but absolute control was impossible, he claimed, because of Adam' fall.
Some Christian intellectuals complained that Augustine made it seem as if the devil were the maker of humanity. They found it absurd to claim that infants were already cursed by guilt in the wombs of their mothers, and they believed that this contradicted God's love of justice. Some saw a Manichaean influence in Augustine's view of evil and the body. Pelagius argued that sin was something of the soul and not the body, and they asked how sin could be passed from the soul of parents to the body of an infant. Augustine answered that sin was passed down from Adam and Eve and from generation to generation through semen, with Jesus having escaped sin by having been born of a virgin.
The Pelagians, as greater advocates of virtue, clashed with Augustine over wealth and sharing, asserting that a rich man was surely damned. Augustine replied that the Church had to find room both for its higher civil servants and its taxpayers, including the rich landowners on whose endowments and influence the monks and clergy had come to depend. Augustine preached against rich men ruining themselves by distributing their land among the poor. Instead, he called upon them to leave their land to Catholic monasteries.
Opinion within the Church went more to agreement with Augustine than the Pelagians. Bishops who had spent years upholding the necessity of baptizing infants were inclined to reject the Pelagian argument about the innocence of infants, and many Christians were inclined to believe more in human frailty than humanity's ability to perfect itself. Many believed that people should be humble rather than righteous about their virtues and rather than dare to attempt to improve themselves by their own strengths.
Defending and pushing their beliefs, Pelagians demonstrated and fought in the streets of Rome. They were viewed as disturbers of the Catholic faith and accused of considering themselves above the rest of the Christian community. In 416, largely in response to Augustine and his followers, an African Church council met and condemned Pelagius, and the following year Pope Innocent I concurred with the condemnation and ex-communicated Pelagius. Pelagius responded with a book entitled A Brief Statement of Faith. Innocent I died in March, 417, and his successor, Pope Zosimus, who hated muddles and was impressed by Pelagius, pronounced Pelagius innocent of heresy. Augustine and his supporters then sought support for their crusade against Pelagius from the thirty-two year-old emperor of the western half of the empire: Honorius. In April, 418, Honorius denounced Pelagius as a disturber of the faith. Later he issued an edict banishing intransigent Pelagians. Pope Zosimus, before his death in December, fell into line and declared Pelagius a heretic and had him exiled back to Britain. Augustine had triumphed. He called the Pelagians windbags and restated his belief that it was not how people lived that made them right in the eyes of God -- in other words, not by the merit of their deeds -- but whether they had faith in Jesus Christ.
Recommended Books
Augustine of Hippo, by Peter Brown
Ideas of slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, by Peter Garnsey, 1997
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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. reserved.