Of Saint Augustine I shall speak, in this chapter, only as a man; as a theologian and philosopher, I shall consider him in the next chapter.
He was born in 354, nine years after Jerome, and fourteen years after Ambrose; he was a native of Africa, where he passed much the greater part of his life. His mother was a Christian, but his father was not. After a period as a Manichæan, he became a Catholic, and was baptized by Ambrose in Milan. He became bishop of Hippo, not far from Carthage, about the year 396. There he remained until his death in 430.
Of his early life we know much more than in the case of most ecclesiastics, because he has told of it in his Confessions. This book has had famous imitators, particularly Rousseau and Tolstoy, but I do not think it has any comparable predecessors. Saint Augustine is in some ways similar to Tolstoy, to whom, however, he is superior in intellect. He was a passionate man, in youth very far from a pattern of virtue, but driven by an inner impulse to search for truth and righteousness. Like Tolstoy, he was obsessed, in his later years, by a sense of sin, which made his life stern and his philosophy inhuman. He combated heresies vigorously, but some of his own views, when repeated by Jansenius in the seventeenth century, were pronounced heretical. Until the Protestants took up his opinions, however, the Catholic Church had never impugned their orthodoxy.
One of the first incidents of his life related in the Confessions occurred in his boyhood, and did not, in itself, greatly distinguish him from other boys. It appears that, with some companions of his own age, he despoiled a neighbour’s pear tree, although he was not hungry, and his parents had better pears at home. He continued throughout his life to consider this an act of almost incredible wickedness. It would not have been so bad if he had been hungry, or had had no other means of getting pears; but, as it was, the act was one of pure mischief, inspired by the love of wickedness for its own sake. It is this that makes it so unspeakably black. He beseeches God to forgive him:
“Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the abyss. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee, what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously wicked, having no temptation to that evil deed, but the evil deed itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for the sake of which I committed the fault, but my fault itself I loved. Foul soul, falling from the firmament to expulsion from Thy presence; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!”*
He goes on like this for seven chapters, and all about some pears plucked from a tree in a boyish prank. To a modern mind, this seems morbid; † but in his own age it seemed right and a mark of holiness. The sense of sin, which was very strong in his day, came to the Jews as a way of reconciling self-importance with outward defeat. Yahweh was omnipotent, and Yahweh was specially interested in the Jews; why, then, did they not prosper? Because they were wicked: they were idolaters, they married gentiles, they failed to observe the Law. God’s purposes were centred on the Jews, but, since righteousness is the greatest of goods, and is achieved through tribulation, they must first be chastised, and must recognize their chastisement as a mark of God’s paternal love.
Christians put the Church in place of the Chosen People, but except in one respect this made little difference to the psychology of sin. The Church, like the Jews, suffered tribulation; the Church was troubled by heresies; individual Christians fell into apostasy under the stress of persecution. There was, however, one important development, already made, to a great extent, by the Jews, and that was the substitution of individual for communal sin. Originally, it was the Jewish nation that sinned, and that was collectively punished; but later sin became more personal, thus losing its political character. When the Church was substituted for the Jewish nation, this change became essential, since the Church, as a spiritual entity, could not sin, but the individual sinner could cease to be in communion with the Church. Sin, as we said just now, is connected with self-importance. Originally the importance was that of the Jewish nation, but subsequently it was that of the individual—not of the Church, because the Church never sinned. It thus came about that Christian theology had two parts, one concerned with the Church, and one with the individual soul. In later times, the first of these was most emphasized by Catholics, and the second by Protestants, but in Saint Augustine both exist equally, without his having any sense of disharmony. Those who are saved are those whom God has predestined to salvation; this is a direct relation of the soul to God. But no one will be saved unless he has been baptized, and thereby become a member of the Church; this makes the Church an intermediary between the soul and God.
Sin is what is essential to the direct relation, since it explains how a beneficent Deity can cause men to suffer, and how, in spite of this, individual souls can be what is of most importance in the created world. It is therefore not surprising that the theology upon which the Reformation relied should be due to a man whose sense of sin was abnormal.
So much for the pears. Let us now see what the Confessions have to say on some other subjects.
Augustine relates how he learnt Latin, painlessly, at his mother’s knee, but hated Greek, which they tried to teach him at school, because he was “urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments.” To the end of his life, his knowledge of Greek remained slight. One might have supposed that he would go on, from this contrast, to draw a moral in favor of gentle methods in education. What he says, however, is:
“It is quite clear, then, that a free curiosity has more power to make us learn these things than a terrifying obligation. Only this obligation restrains the waverings of that freedom by Thy laws, O my God, Thy laws, from the master’s rod to the martyr’s trials, for Thy laws have the effect of mingling for us certain wholesale bitters, which recall us to Thee away from that pernicious blithesomeness, by means of which we depart from Thee.”
The schoolmaster’s blows, though they failed to make him know Greek, cured him of being perniciously blithesome, and were, on this ground, a desirable part of education. For those who make sin the most important of all human concerns, this view is logical. He goes on to point out that he sinned, not only as a school-boy, when he told lies and stole food, but even earlier; indeed he devotes a whole chapter (Bk. I, Ch. VII) to proving that even infants at the breast are full of sin—gluttony, jealousy, and other horrible vices.
When he reached adolescence, the lusts of the flesh overcame him. “Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust which hath licence through man’s viciousness, though forbidden by Thy laws, took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it?”*
His father took no pains to prevent this evil, but confined himself to giving help in Augustine’s studies. His mother, Saint Monica, on the contrary, exhorted him to chastity, but in vain. And even she did not, at that time, suggest marriage, “lest my prospects might be embarrassed by the clog of a wife.”
At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage, “where there seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety…. To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness.”* These words describe his relation to a mistress whom he loved faithfully for many years,† and by whom he had a son, whom he also loved, and to whom, after his conversion, he gave much care in religious education.
The time came when he and his mother thought he ought to begin to think of marrying. He became engaged to a girl of whom she approved, and it was held necessary that he should break with his mistress. “My mistress,” he says, “being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she retu
rned to Africa [Augustine was at this time in Milan], vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.” ‡ As, however, the marriage could not take place for two years, owing to the girl’s youth, he took meanwhile another mistress, less official and less acknowledged. His conscience increasingly troubled him, and he used to pray: “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.” § At last, before the time had come for his marriage, religion won a complete victory, and he dedicated the rest of his life to celibacy.
To return to an earlier time: in his nineteenth year, having achieved-proficiency in rhetoric, he was recalled to philosophy by Cicero. He tried reading the Bible, but found it lacking in Ciceronian dignity. It was at this time that he became a Manichæan, which grieved his mother. By profession he was a teacher of rhetoric. He was addicted to astrology, to which, in later life, he was averse, because it teaches that “the inevitable cause of thy sin is in the sky.”ǁ He read philosophy, so far as it could be read in Latin; he mentions particularly Aristotle’s Ten Categories, which, he says, he understood without the help of a teacher. “And what did it profit me, that I, the vilest slave of evil passions, read by myself all the books of so-called ‘liberal’ arts; and understood whatever I could read? … For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face … itself was not enlightened.”* At this time he believed that God was a vast and bright body, and he himself a part of that body. One could wish that he had told in detail the tenets of the Manichæans, instead of merely saying they were erroneous.
It is interesting that Saint Augustine’s first reasons for rejecting the doctrines of Manichæus were scientific. He remembered—so he tells us †;—what he had learned of astronomy from the writings of the best astronomers, “and I compared them with the sayings of Manichæcus, who in his crazy folly has written much and copiously upon these subjects; but none of his reasoning of the solstices, nor equinoxes, nor eclipses, nor whatever of this kind I had learned in books of secular philosophy, was satisfactory to me. But I was commanded to believe; and yet it corresponded not with the reasonings obtained by calculations, and by my own observations, but was quite contrary.” He is careful to point out that scientific mistakes are not in themselves a sign of errors as to the faith, but only become so when delivered with an air of authority as known through divine inspiration. One wonders what he would have thought if he had lived in the time of Galileo.
In the hope of resolving his doubts, a Manichæan bishop named Faustus, reputed the most learned member of the sect, met him and reasoned with him. But “I found him first utterly ignorant of liberal sciences, save grammar, and that but in an ordinary way. But because he had read some of Tully’s Orations, a very few books of. Seneca, some things of the poets, and such few volumes of his own sect, as were written in Latin and in logical order, and was daily practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and seductive, because under the control of his good sense, and with a certain natural grace.” ‡
He found Faustus quite unable to solve his astronomical difficulties. The books of the Manichæans, he tells us, “are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, and stars, sun, and moon,” which do not agree with what has been discovered by astronomers; but when he questioned Faustus on these matters, Faustus frankly confessed his ignorance. “Even for this I liked him the better. For the modesty of a candid mind is even more attractive than the knowledge of those things which I desired; and such I found him, in all the more difficult and subtle questions.”*
This sentiment is surprisingly liberal; one would hot have expected it in that age. Nor is it quite in harmony with Saint Augustine’s later attitude towards heretics.
At this time he decided to go to Rome, not, he says, because there the income of a teacher was higher than at Carthage, but because he had heard that classes were more orderly. At Carthage, the disorders perpetrated by students were such that teaching was almost impossible; but at Rome, while there was less disorder, students fraudulently evaded payment.
In Rome, he still associated with the Manichæans, but with less conviction of their rightness. He began to think that the Academics were right in holding that men ought to doubt everything.† He still, however, agreed with the Manichæans in thinking “that it is not we ourselves that sin, but that some other nature (what, I know not) sins in us,” and he believed Evil to be some kind of substance. This makes it clear that, before as after his conversion, the question of sin preoccupied him.
After about a year in Rome, he was sent to Milan by the Prefect Symmachus, in response to a request from that city for a teacher of rhetoric. At Milan he became acquainted with Ambrose, “known to the whole world as among the best of men.” He came to love Ambrose for his kindness, and to prefer the Catholic doctrine to that of the Manichæans; but for a while he was held back by the scepticism he had learnt from the Academics, “to which philosophers notwithstanding, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the care of my sick soul.” ‡
In Milan he was joined by his mother, who had a powerful influence in hastening the last steps to his conversion. She was a very earnest Catholic, and he writes of her always in a tone of reverence. She was the more important to him at this time, because Ambrose was too busy to converse with him privately.
There is a very interesting chapter* in which he compares the Platonic philosophy with Christian doctrine. The Lord, he says, at this time provided him with “certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And therein I read, not indeed in these words, but to the same purpose, enforced by many and diverse reasons, that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: the same was in the beginning with God; all things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made: that which was made by Him is life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.’ And that the soul of man, though it ‘bears witness to the light,’ yet itself ‘is not that light,’ but God, the Word of God, ‘is that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.’ And that ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.’ But that ‘He came unto His own, and His own received Him not; but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His Name’: this I read not there.” He also did not read there that “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”; nor that “He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross”; nor that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.”
Broadly speaking, he found in the Platonists the metaphysical doctrine of the Logos, but not the doctrine of the Incarnation and the consequent doctrine of human salvation. Something not unlike these doctrines existed in Orphism and the other mystery religions; but of this Saint Augustine appears to have been ignorant. In any case, none of these were connected with a comparatively recent historical event, as Christianity was.
As against the Manichæans, who were dualists, Augustine came to believe that evil originates not from some substance, but from perverseness of will.
He found especial comfort in the writings of Saint Paul.†
At length, after passionate inward struggles, he was converted (386); he gave up his professorship, his mistress, and his bride, and, after a brief period of meditation in retirement, was baptized by Saint Ambrose. His mother rejoiced, but died not long afterwards. In 388 he returned to Africa, where he remained for the rest of his life, fully occupied with his episcopal duties and with controversial writings against various heresies, Donatist, Manichæan, and Pelagian
CHAPTER IV
Saint Augustine’s Philosophy and Theology
SAINT AUGUSTINE was a very voluminous writer, mainly on theological subjects. Some of his controversial writing was topical, and lost interest through its very success; but some of it, especially what is concerned with the Pelagians, rem
ained practically influential down to modern times. I do not propose to treat his works exhaustively, but only to discuss what seems to me important, either intrinsically or historically. I shall consider:
First: his pure philosophy, particularly his theory of time;
Second: his philosophy of history, as developed in The City of God;
Third: his theory of salvation, as propounded against the Pelagians.
I. PURE PHILOSOPHY
Saint Augustine, at most times, does not occupy himself with pure philosophy, but when he does he shows very great ability. He is the first of a long line whose purely speculative views are influenced by the necessity of agreeing with Scripture. This cannot be said of earlier Christian philosophers, e.g., Origen; in Origen, Christianity and Platonism lie side by side, and do not interpenetrate. In Saint Augustine, on the other hand, original thinking in pure philosophy in stimulated by the fact that Platonism, in certain respects, is not in harmony with Genesis.
The best purely philosophical work in Saint Augustine’s writings is the eleventh book of the Confessions. Popular editions of the Confessions end with Book X, on the ground that what follows is uninteresting; it is uninteresting because it is good philosophy, not biography. Book XI is concerned with the problem: Creation having occurred as the first chapter of Genesis asserts, and as Augustine maintains against the Manichæans, it should have occurred as soon as possible. So he imagines an objector arguing.
The first point to realize, if his answer is to be understood, is that creation out of nothing, which was taught in the Old Testament, was an idea wholly foreign to Greek philosophy. When Plato speaks of creation, he imagines a primitive matter to which God gives form; and the same is true of Aristotle. Their God is an artificer or architect, rather than a Creator. Substance is thought of as eternal and uncreated; only form is due to the will of God. As against this view, Saint Augustine maintains, as every orthodox Christian must, that the world was created not from any certain matter, but from nothing. God created substance, not only order and arrangement.
A History of Western Philosophy Page 44