Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  Augustine’s self-consciousness as a volitional, responsible moral agent was acute, as was his awareness of the burdens of human freedom—error and guilt, darkness and suffering, severance from God. In a sense, Augustine was the most modern of the ancients: he possessed an existentialist’s self-awareness with his highly developed capacity for introspection and self-confrontation, his concern with memory and consciousness and time, his psychological perspicacity, his doubt and remorse, his sense of the solitary alienation of the human self without God, his intensity of inner conflict, his intellectual skepticism and sophistication. It was Augustine who first wrote that he could doubt everything, but not the fact of the soul’s own experience of doubting, of knowing, willing, and existing—thereby affirming the certain existence of the human ego in the soul. Yet he also affirmed the absolute contingency of that ego on God, without whom it could not exist, let alone be capable of attaining knowledge or fulfillment. For Augustine was also the most medieval of the ancients. His Catholic religiosity, his monolithic predispositions, his otherworldly focus, and his cosmic dualism all foretokened the succeeding age—as did his keen sense of the invisible, of God’s will, of the Mother Church, of miracles, grace, and Providence, of sin, evil, and the demonic. Augustine was a man of paradox and extremes, and his legacy would be of the same character.

  It was certainly the quality and power of Augustine’s conversion—the experience of an overwhelming influx of grace from God turning him away from the corrupt and egoistic blindness of his natural self—that was the culminating factor in his theological vision, imprinting in him a conviction of the supremacy of God’s will and goodness and the imprisoned poverty of his own. The luminous potency of Christ’s positive intervention in his life left the human person in relative shadow. Yet what may have especially influenced his religious understanding was the pivotal role played by sexuality in Augustine’s religious quest. Although mindful of nature’s inherently divine ordering (and often more unstinting in his praise of the creation’s beauty and bounty than a Platonist), Augustine placed extreme emphasis in his own life on the ascetic denial of his sexual instincts as the prerequisite for full spiritual illumination—a point of view supported by his encounters with both Neoplatonism and Manichaeism, yet reflective of deeper roots in his own personality and experience.

  Love of God was the quintessential theme and goal of Augustine’s religiosity, and love of God could thrive only if love of self and love of the flesh were successfully conquered. In his view, succumbing to the flesh was at the heart of man’s fall; Adam’s eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the original sin in which all mankind participated, was tied directly to concupiscence (and indeed the biblical “knowing” had always possessed sexual connotations). For Augustine, the evil character of fleshly lust was visible in the shame that attended its expression, uncontrolled by the rational will, and that attended the mere nakedness of the sexual organs. Procreation in Paradise before the Fall would not have entailed such bestial impulsiveness and shame. Marriage now at least could realize some good out of the inherited evil, since it brought offspring, enduring commitment, and a limitation of sexuality to procreative purposes. But the primal sin infected all born of carnal generation, so that all humanity was condemned to pain in childbirth, to suffering and guilt in life, and to the final evil of death. Only by Christ’s grace and with the resurrection of the body would all traces of that sin be removed and man’s soul be freed from the curse of his fallen nature.

  It is true that Augustine held that the root of evil did not reside in matter, as the Neoplatonists suggested, for matter was God’s creation and therefore good. Rather, evil was a consequence of man’s misuse of his free will. Evil lay in the act of turning itself—of turning away from God—not in what was turned to. Yet in Augustine’s linking of that sinful abuse of freedom to concupiscence and sexuality, and to the pervasive corruption of nature thereafter, the germ of the Neoplatonic and more extreme Manichaean dualism lived on.

  On this pivot rested the tenor of Augustine’s moral theology. Creation—man as well as nature—was indeed an infinitely marvelous product of God’s benevolent fecundity, but with man’s primal sin that creation was set so fundamentally awry that only the next, heavenly, life would restore its original integrity and glory. Man’s fall was precipitated by his willful rebellion against the proper divine hierarchy, a rebellion founded in the assertion of the values of the flesh against those of the spirit. He was now enslaved to the passions of the lower order. Man was no longer free to determine his life simply by virtue of his rational will, not only because circumstances beyond his control presented themselves, but also because he was unconsciously constrained by ignorance and emotional conditioning. His initial sinful thoughts and actions had become ingrained habits and finally ineluctable chains imprisoning him in a state of wretched alienation from God. Only the intervention of divine grace could possibly break the vicious spiral of sin. Man was so bound by his vanity and pride, so desirous of imposing his will on others, as to be incapable of transforming himself by his own powers. In his present, fallen state, positive freedom for man could consist only in the acceptance of God’s grace. Only God could free man, since no action by man on his own could be sufficient to move him toward salvation. And God already knew for all time who were the elect and who the damned based upon his omniscient foreknowledge of their different responses to his grace. Although official Christian doctrine would not always accept Augustine’s more extreme formulations of predestination or his nearly complete denial of any active human role in the process of salvation, the subsequent Christian view of man’s moral corruption and imprisonment was one largely congruent with Augustine’s.

  Thus it was that the man who so decisively declared God’s love and liberating presence in his own life also recognized, with a potency that never ceased to permeate the Western Christian tradition, the innate bondage and powerlessness of the human soul as perverted by Original Sin. From this antithesis arose the necessity for Augustine of a divinely provided means of grace in this world: an authoritative Church structure, within which haven man could satisfy his overriding needs for spiritual guidance, moral discipline, and sacramental grace.

  Augustine’s critical view of human nature had its corollary in his evaluation of secular history. As an influential bishop in his own era, Augustine was dominated in his later life by two pressing concerns—the preservation of Church unity and doctrinal uniformity against the entropic impact of several major heretical movements, and the historical confrontation with the fall of the Roman Empire under the barbarian invasions. Faced with the crumbling empire and the apparent demise of civilization itself, Augustine saw little possibility for any genuine historical progress in this world. With its manifest evils and cruelties, wars and murders, with man’s greed and arrogance, licentiousness and vice, with the ignorance and suffering all human beings were forced to experience, he instead saw evidence of the absolute and enduring power of Original Sin, which made of this life a torment, a hell on earth from which only Christ could save man. Augustine answered the great criticism aimed at the Christian religion by the surviving pagan Romans—that Christianity had undermined the integrity of Roman imperial power and thereby opened the way for barbarian triumph—with a different set of values and a different vision of history: All true progress was necessarily spiritual and transcended this world and its negative fate. What was important for man’s welfare was not the secular empire but the Catholic Church. Because divine Providence and spiritual salvation were the ultimate factors in human existence, the significance of secular history, with its passing values and its fluctuating and generally negative progress, was accordingly diminished.

  Yet history, like all else in creation, was a manifestation of God’s will. It embodied God’s moral purpose. Man could not fully grasp that purpose in the present time of darkness and chaos, for its meaning would be vindicated only at the end of history. But although world history was
still under God’s command and spiritual in design (indeed, Augustine compared it to a great melody by some ineffable composer, with the parts of that melody being the dispensations suitable to each epoch), its secular aspect was not positively progressive. Rather, because of Satan’s continuing power in this world, history was destined to enact, as in the eternal Manichaean battle of good versus evil, a deteriorating and divisive evolution of the spiritual elect and the mass of the worldly damned. In the course of this drama, God’s motives were often hidden but ultimately just. For whatever apparent successes or defeats happened to individuals in this life, they were as nothing compared with the eternal fates their souls had earned. The particulars and achievements of secular history were of no ultimate importance in themselves. Actions in this life were significant mainly for their afterworldly consequences, divine reward or punishment. The individual soul’s search for God was primary, while history and this world merely served as the stage for that drama. Escape from this world to the next, from self to God, from flesh to spirit, constituted the deepest purpose and direction of human life. The one great saving grace in history was the Church founded by Christ.

  Instead of the early Christian anticipation of an immanent, as well as imminent, world change, Augustine gave up the field of this world, whose fallen tendency was naturally negative. In Augustine’s vision, Christ had indeed already defeated Satan, but in the transcendent spiritual realm, the only realm that genuinely mattered. The true religious reality was not subject to the vagaries of this world and its history, and that reality could be known only through the individual’s interior experience of God as mediated by the Church and its sacraments.

  Here the Neoplatonic influence—inward, subjective, the individual spiritual ascent—joined, and to an extent took precedence over, the Judaic principle of a collective, exterior, historical spirituality. The penetration of Christianity by Neoplatonism both augmented and explicated the mystical and interior element of the Christian revelation, especially that of John’s Gospel. But in so doing, it simultaneously diminished the historical and collectively evolutionary element that primitive Christianity, especially Paul and very early theologians like Irenaeus, had inherited and radically developed from Judaism. Augustine’s strong sense of God’s government of history—as in his dramatic scenario of the two invisible societies of the elect and the damned, the city of God and the city of the world, battling throughout creation’s history until the Last Judgment—still reflected the Judaic ethical vision of God’s purposefulness in history. Indeed, the doctrine of the two cities would have much influence on subsequent Western history, affirming the autonomy of the spiritual Church vis-à-vis the secular state. But his fundamental depreciation of the secular, combined with his philosophical background, his psychological predispositions, and his historical context, transformed that vision in the direction of a personal and interior otherworldly religiosity.

  In other essential aspects of Augustine’s thought and the evolving Christian world view—as in the dualism of an omnipotent transcendent God versus the sin-enchained creaturely man, and the need for a doctrinally and morally authoritative religious structure governing the community of chosen believers—it was the Judaic sensibility that dominated. This was particularly visible in the evolution of Christianity’s characteristic attitudes toward God’s moral commandments.

  Law and Grace

  For the Jews, the Mosaic Law was a living guide, their pillar of existential solidity, that which morally ordered their lives and retained them in good relation to God. While the Judaic tradition, as represented in Jesus’s time by the Pharisees, held forth the need for strict obedience to the Law, early Christianity asserted what it believed was a fundamentally contrasting view: The Law was made for man and was fulfilled in the love of God, which eliminated the need for repressive obedience and instead called up a liberating and wholehearted embrace of God’s will as one’s own. That union of wills was mediated only by divine grace, the unearned gift of salvation brought to mankind by Christ. In this view, the Law could establish, with its negative precepts written in stone, only an imperfect obedience by fear. By contrast, Paul declared, man could be genuinely justified only by faith in Christ, through whose saving act all believers could know the freedom of God’s grace. The Law’s strictures made man a sinner, divided against himself. Instead of being in “slavery” under the Law, the Christian believer was free, because by Christ’s grace he participated in Christ’s freedom.

  Before his conversion, Paul himself had been a Pharisee and a fervid defender of the Law. But after his conversion, he testified with self-deprecating zeal to the impotence of the Law compared with the power of Christ’s love and the presence of the Spirit working within the human person. Paul’s understanding of the Law, however, was viewed by Jews as a parody of its true nature. For them, the Law was itself God’s gift and called forth moral responsibility in man. It upheld human autonomy and good works as necessary elements in the economy of salvation. Paul, too, recognized a role for those elements, but asserted that his own life exemplified the ultimate futility of a Law-governed religiosity. More than human effort, even if divinely legislated, was required for something as fundamental and suprahuman as the redemption of the human soul. Good works and moral responsibility were necessary but not sufficient. Only the supreme gift of Christ’s incarnation and self-sacrifice made possible that life in harmony with God which the human soul so deeply desired. Faith in Christ’s grace, rather than scrupulous conformity to ethical precepts, was man’s surest path to salvation—and the evidence of that faith was the Christian’s works of love and service that Christ’s grace made possible. For Paul, the Law was no longer the binding authority, because the true end of the Law was Christ.

  Similarly underscoring the break from the Judaic Law, John’s Gospel proclaimed, “For the law was given through Moses; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The tension between God’s will and man’s, between external regulation and inner inclination, could be dissolved in the love of God, which would unite human and divine in one unitary spirit. To awaken to this state of divine love was to experience the Kingdom of Heaven. Because of Christ’s redemption, man could now attain true righteousness in the eyes of God, not by constraint but in happy spontaneity.

  Yet this contrast in the New Testament between moral restriction and divinely graced freedom was not unambiguous. The Gospels’ concern with interpersonal ethics was a dominant element in the Christian outlook, but its character seemed open to both interpretations. On the one hand, the tone of Jesus’s teachings was often extremely uncompromising and judgmental, phrased in the hard dialectic of the Semitic manner, and intensified in the light of the imminent end times. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Law is made even more strict for Jesus’s followers—requiring purity of intention as well as act, love of the enemy as well as friend, unceasing forgiveness, utter detachment from worldly things—and the demand for unconditional moral integrity is pressed to the full under the urgency of the messianic transition. On the other hand, Jesus’s emphasis was repeatedly on compassion over self-righteousness, and on the inner spirit over the external letter of the law. His demands for heightened, even absolute, moral purity—judging spontaneous thoughts as well as deliberate acts—seemed to presuppose more than human will to achieve such inner goodness, thus opening the way for faith in God’s grace. Often his intention appeared to be that of lending comfort to the poor, the desperate, the outcast and the sinful, while direly warning the proud and self-satisfied, those secure in their spiritual and mundane status. A humble openness to divine grace counted for more than legalistically righteous behavior. The Law was constantly to be measured against God’s higher commandment of love. According to the New Testament, the extent to which a legalistic morality had overcome Jewish religious practice was evidence that the Law had become entrenched and frozen in the course of time, an end in itself that was now obscuring rather than mediating the individual’s true relation to God and to o
thers.

  But even the new Christian revelation of God’s graciousness was open to antithetical interpretations and consequences, especially under later historical conditions. The Pauline and Augustinian stress on divine grace over human works and self-dependent righteousness lent itself not just to the unitary notion of human fulfillment in embrace of the immanent divine will, but also to an emphatic reduction of man’s positive volitional freedom relative to the omnipotence of God. In the struggle for salvation, man’s own efforts were comparatively inconsequential; only God’s saving power could be effective. The sole source of good was God, and only his mercy could save mankind from the natural fallen human inclination toward blind perversity. Because of Adam’s sin, all human beings were corrupt and guilty, and only Christ’s death had atoned for that collective guilt. The resurrection Christ brought to mankind was present in the Church, and the justification that every human being required lest he be condemned was dependent on the Church’s sacraments, access to which in turn demanded conformity to specific ethical and ecclesiastical standards.

  Since the Church and its sacred institutes were the divinely established vehicles of God’s grace, the Church was suprahumanly significant, its hierarchy absolutely authoritative, its laws definitive. Because human beings were intrinsically prone to sin and lived in a world of constant temptation, they required stern Church-defined sanctions against uninhibited actions and thoughts, lest their eternal souls fall to the same debased fate as their temporal bodies. Especially in the West, under the historical exigencies of the Church’s responsibility for the newly converted (and, from the Church’s perspective, morally primitive) barbarian peoples, a pervasive verticality in the institutional Church was established, with all spiritual authority flowing downward from the supreme papal sovereign. Thus the characteristic tone of the medieval Christian Church—with its absolutist moral precepts, its complex legal-judicial structure, its accounting system of good works and merits, its meticulous distinctions between different categories of sin, its mandatory beliefs and sacraments, its power of excommunication, and its forceful stress on the inhibition of the flesh against the continual threat of damnation—often seemed more reminiscent of the older Judaic concept of God’s law, indeed an exaggeration of that concept, than of the new unitary image of God’s grace. Yet such elaborate safeguards appeared necessary in the present world of moral waywardness and secular danger, to preserve a genuine Christian morality and to guide the Church’s charges into the eternal life.