The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  A major psychological benefit of conversion was that Augustine could now make his peace with his mother. She had appeared in Milan, arranged a suitable marriage for him (now that he appeared to be well established in the imperial administration) and was probably responsible for sending his lover of so many years back to Carthage. (Augustine was distraught and sought comfort in another relationship.) In his new state he felt that marriage was impossible, although reconciliation with Monnica was not. One of the most moving parts of the Confessions describes Augustine and Monnica together leaning from a window in Ostia, the port of Rome, shortly before Monnica’s death.

  And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh, leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an ending—far, far different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old and gives life to all things.13

  It is a significant passage, partly for its spiritual beauty, but also because it shows that an intellectual can share with a devout and less-educated believer a recognition of the divine.

  Augustine returned to north Africa in 388, at a time when orthodox Christianity was on the defensive there. Christians were outnumbered by the Donatists and (as studies of inscriptions show) still surrounded by pagans. A man of Augustine’s learning and personal qualities was desperately needed by the orthodox Christian communities, not least to act as a mediator with the civil authorities. So he was persuaded to become a priest (391) and then a bishop, of Hippo on the coast (395–96). Here Augustine was to remain until his death in 430. His hopes that he would live a life of intellectual discussion in semi-monastic seclusion with a chosen group of friends were disappointed, while his busy life as pastor was made more onerous by the mass of legal work that now came any conscientious bishop’s way. The challenges were many, from the Donatists, the Manicheans and his own flock, most of whom were illiterate. Yet for the thirty-five years during which he was bishop, Augustine appears to have been an excellent pastor, and he was particularly concerned with bridging the gap between himself, as a highly educated man, and the mass of his congregation. In this he seems to have been exceptional for his time, above all in the way he thought deeply on how to present the complexities of theology to uneducated minds. In such a busy and committed life, the scale and breadth of his writings were remarkable, but as the years went by they were marked increasingly by Augustine’s cultural isolation. He was gregarious by nature and perhaps he needed the intellectual vitality of a Rome or a Milan. Hippo was a backwater in comparison, and the African tradition of theology bleakly authoritarian. The combination of increasing age (Augustine was over forty when he became bishop) and remoteness from any centre of debate narrowed his perspectives as the years passed. His debates were no longer set among friendly equals with whom there was a genuine attempt to explore issues but became polarized confrontations conducted on an imperial stage. They did not always show his subtle mind at its best. The use of reason in his writings diminishes as his reliance on faith increases, and the results were not happy. As far as his intellectual development goes, moving back to Africa seems to have been a mistake.

  None the less, it was in these early years as bishop that Augustine wrote his most famous and accessible work, the Confessions, which reviews his early life and his path to conversion. The word “confessions” carried connotations of testimony or witness as much as “confession” as such, although the work is certainly infused with Augustine’s revelation of his past “sins.” It is not a coherent work. While the first nine chapters deal with Augustine’s past life and chapter ten with his present one, the last three chapters are unrelated reflections on the Book of Genesis. One can, however, bind the three parts together as the story of a soul coming to accept God and the implications of reaching the end of the search. Even so, many scholars feel that when the suddenness of his conversion is put alongside his writings from the mid-380s, he represented the process as much more coherent and final than perhaps it was. It has been suggested, for instance, that, for his readers, he deliberately modelled his own dramatically sudden conversion on Paul’s own.14

  What is remarkable about the Confessions is that for the first time in western literature the world of the interior mind—with, in this case, all its guilt and uncertainty—is explored in detail in what is essentially a dialogue with God. Augustine knows he is breaking new ground. “Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves.” He will pay attention to himself, and in the breach of convention required in doing so one senses just how deeply inward his creative mind had been driven by his upbringing. One cannot read the Confessions without being aware of Augustine’s preoccupation with his own sinfulness. He is deeply overcome, for instance, by what seems a fairly harmless prank of shaking down the ripe pears from a tree and stealing them. His sexual feelings and experiences, even if in reality they were relatively limited, disturb him continuously. Augustine talks in the Confessions, as throughout his writings, of the supreme importance of the love of God, but the dominant picture he gives in the Confessions is of a God who is angry and punitive.

  I broke all your lawful bounds and did not escape your lash. For what man can escape it? You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to look for others unallied by pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for you teach us by inflicting pain, you smite so that you may heal and you kill us so that we may not die away from you.15

  Far from being a Platonic God—above earthly things and free of emotion—this is a God who actively punishes as a form of showing love (as, Augustine was often to remark, a schoolmaster would). It is a confused and unsettling picture and becomes even more disturbing as Augustine elaborates his doctrine of original sin. God’s punishment even extends to life on earth, so that the slave is a slave because God wishes him punished. The contrast with Origen’s loving God who welcomes all souls, even that of Satan, back to him is obvious.

  Yet Augustine had found his home, and from within its confines he set about sweeping floors clean, exploring the nooks and crannies, transforming the decor, even if with the most sombre of hangings, while preserving and strengthening the foundations. However, the house had walls outside of which he did not venture. It was also under continual attack. Much of Augustine’s work is developed in responses to challenges from the Manicheans, the Donatists and later the Pelagians. Against all these he worked within the orthodox tradition. One sees this in his major study on the Trinity, De Trinitate, which he worked on over many years (it was completed only in 427). It is largely a defence of the Trinitarian creed developed at Nicaea, though with the western bias towards emphasizing the common divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, somewhat at the expense of their individual “personalities.” (There is no evidence that Augustine knew of the creed’s endorsement at Constantinople in 381.) Augustine reviews the Arian and Homoean positions and interprets the scriptures so as to discredit them. Any saying of Jesus that seems to suggest he is subordinate to the Father is attributed to his human nature and, Augustine argues, does not detract from his divinity. There is nothing here that contradicts the new orthodoxy, but where there are loose ends Augustine ties them up. He sorts out some of the philosophical confusions caused by the use of Latin terminology, preferring to use essentia instead of substantia, which had caused difficulty when translated into Greek, for the “substance” of which God was made. He worried, too, that describing the Holy Spirit as “processing” from the Father but making no mention of a procession from the Son might give the impression that the Son was lesser than the Father. So he added “procession” from the Son (the so-called “do
uble procession”). While this became dogma in the west, the east regarded it as no more than a private idea of Augustine’s, and it has never been accepted there. It was later to become one of the doctrines on which the schism between east and west was consolidated. Also within De Trinitate is an imaginative and original development of human psychology. Augustine suggests that when creating the soul, God endowed it with self-awareness, understanding and will. Will is an essential element of Augustine’s thought—intelligent life is always lived with energy and purpose and the will is the embodiment of this. It has been suggested that “the notion of will, as used in many philosophical doctrines from the early Scholastics through to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, was invented by St. Augustine.”16 These qualities are linked to each other within the soul but also have their distinctive roles, and so provide a mirror, as it were, of the Trinity. If God chooses to give an individual his grace, the human soul, because of its “trinitarian” make-up, will be better able to respond: through knowing God, Augustine suggests, one knows oneself. For Augustine, therefore, the soul is naturally Christian, with the implication that a rejection of Christianity is a rejection of one’s human nature. De Trinitate is typical of Augustine’s work in so far as it is rooted in orthodoxy, but uses that orthodoxy as a springboard for further highly original speculation. This work was so much more sophisticated than that produced by any other western theologian on the Trinity (Augustine went far beyond his mentor Ambrose in originality, perceptiveness and depth) that Augustine’s dominance in western Christianity was assured.

  The springs of Augustine’s theology soon came to lie in faith rather than reason. In his earliest writings from the 380s Augustine appears to have accepted the importance of reason in finding truth. In his On Order, written about 386, for instance, he outlines a rational ascent towards the incorporeal through the academic disciplines in much the same way as plotted by Plato. However, there are now signs of an intellectual struggle in which Augustine explores whether one can ever know anything fully. He concludes that some things have to be taken on trust and this involves the acceptance of the authority of others. This acceptance of authority in itself requires humility, and here the humility of Christ in becoming human provides the model for one’s own humility. Augustine follows Paul’s example in deriding “the philosophers” as arrogant in the belief that they can find truth for themselves. “For Augustine the root of sin lies in pride, and this includes pride in one’s own intelligence.”17

  From here Augustine moves to the authority of the church and thence to the authority of the scriptures. “I would not have believed the Gospels, except on the authority of the Catholic Church.” The problem remains that while it is true that in many situations one has to rely on the authority of others, there is no reason why that authority should be accepted blindly or uncritically; perhaps Augustine’s own psychological need for certainty was the most important factor here. One of the benefits of making the leap to faith, Augustine argues, is that in doing so one breaks through a barrier and reaches a higher level of understanding. “Unless you believe you will not understand,” as the prophet Isaiah had put it. By 396 Augustine had progressed to saying belief in God, faith, is a gift of God. Reason now plays only a supporting role as the means through which one learns that authority must be accepted. “The main use of reason by the mature Augustine,” writes Adrian Hastings, “is unquestionably to understand what is already believed.”18 Augustine’s later stress on the debilitating effects of the Fall provided him with further support for his beliefs—man, now corrupted, is incapable of using reason to grasp the incorporeal and can only rely on God to reveal himself.

  Parallel to these developments is Augustine’s growing acceptance of miracles. In the 380s Augustine was sceptical and distanced himself from those who were “daunted by the hollow claims of the miraculous.” Later, in about 390, in True Religion, he argues that “miracles would not have been allowed to stretch into our time, or the soul would always be looking for sensations, and the human race would go jaded with their continual occurrence.”19 By the end of his life, however, Augustine is reporting miracles as everyday occurrences and using them to encourage faith. He regaled his congregations with a long list of cures that had been effected at the shrine to St. Stephen in Hippo, including those of a number of people who had been raised from the dead. A local landowner had brought back some earth and baptismal water from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These brought about so many cures that Augustine advised him to place them in a special shrine so that they could be available to the public at large. 20 In Augustine’s own development, we can see in microcosm a crucial shift away from the Greek tradition of rational thought.

  From the 390s Augustine studied the scriptures intensively, writing commentaries on them, among which those on the Psalms and the Gospel of John are the best known. The basis for interpretation of scripture, he argued, was the love of God and love of one’s neighbour (drawing on Matthew 22:37–40), and ultimately the scriptures had to be used to play a full role in the daily life of the church, in service, in fact, of its pastoral activity. This approach enabled Augustine to relate the scriptures to the real world around him. As a biblical scholar, however, Augustine was severely handicapped. He could not read Hebrew and had relatively little Greek (and in any case there is no evidence that he ever saw any original Greek version of the Gospels). The Latin versions of the scriptures he used were often so badly translated as to be near to incomprehensible. (When he came across passages he could not understand, far from blaming the translation, Augustine argued that God had deliberately made them difficult so as to humble those who thought interpretation would be easy.) Yet he was not to be deterred. He followed conventional thinking in being convinced that all scripture had an inner coherence and that passages could not contradict each other. Similarly, as the truth according to the doctrines of the Catholic Church is already known, exegesis is mainly a matter of interpreting texts, allegorically and thus imaginatively if necessary, to fit orthodoxy (as in the opening of John’s Gospel described earlier) or the life of the contemporary church. So a verse of the Song of Songs in which the bridegroom addresses his bride with the compliment “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are shorn” (4:2) is interpreted by Augustine to refer not only to the saints (“the teeth of the church, tearing men away from their errors and bringing them into the church’s body, with all their hardness softened down, just as if they had been torn down and masticated by the teeth”) but also to the newly baptized, who are like shorn sheep in that they have laid down their fleeces, a metaphor for the burdens of the world.21 With imagination allowed such a free rein, difficulties in finding scriptural sources for church doctrine are easily dissolved.

  Augustine believed that every other form of learning had to be subordinated to the scriptures, so in De Doctrina Christiana, his major work on the exegesis of scripture, worked on throughout his later life, secular knowledge, whether provided by mathematicians, scientists or philosophers, is said to be valid only in so far as it leads to an understanding of scripture. However, in this respect Augustine was more broad-minded than those scholars who would have nothing to do with secular learning at all; witness John Chrysostom’s exhortations to Christians to empty their minds of secular knowledge. The result was that Augustine thought less critically about the scriptures, believing that they could be interpreted only in such a way as supported orthodoxy. Augustine’s uncritical reliance on the inadequate Latin translations of the original Greek and Hebrew versions made things worse. For instance, he interpreted the Latin of verse 12 of chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to mean that all individuals sinned through Adam, hence to support the doctrine of an original sin, whereas if he had gone back to the original Greek he would have found that sin, which entered the world as a result of Adam’s transgression, was a “cosmic” force burdening all humanity in general rather than being born uniquely in each individual. No wonder the concept of original sin never travelled to the Greek wor
ld.

  In so far as he came to take refuge in scriptures, Augustine was particularly influenced by Paul, and, as noted above, it was from a misreading of Paul that Augustine developed his doctrine of original sin.22 He was tackling a major theological and philosophical problem, perhaps the most profound and challenging of all, the cause of evil. There are various ways of approaching the problem of evil. Clearly human beings can act, knowingly or unknowingly, so as to produce evil consequences for those around them. In the Platonic tradition evil was the result of the withdrawal of the soul from God/the Good and its increasing subjection to the material body with its emotions, passions and desires. The focus here was on the individual soul, which in the interpretation offered by Origen could move “upwards” or “downwards” of its own free will, closer to God, or away from him, away from the demands of the body, or more deeply into its snares—even to the point of becoming a demon. However, all was not lost if one could posit that God was benevolent and ready to reach out to the soul, which might have its own innate desire to reach back. Here was the basis of a coherent theology incorporating free will, giving God a role that was providential and offering the hope and possibility of reward for all. It also accepted the reality of human evil, making it the responsibility of its perpetrators. There remained unresolved issues. In so far as there were those souls that refused or failed to begin the return to God and sank themselves into the lower reaches of the material world and thus into commission of evil, there was the implication either that God lacked the power to prevent them from doing so or that he was willing to allow the continuation of evil in the world. One response has been to argue that free will is God’s gift and that he considers that it is better to be used even for evil purposes than to be constrained; in other words, he condones evil.23