16. G. Wills, Saint Augustine (London and New York, 1999), p. 93, quoting Albrecht Dihle.
17. C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 223. Stead goes on (p. 227) to consider the problems of isolating oneself from empirical evidence.
One cannot explain human knowledge as a purely active process; it always involves attention to data which are not of our own making, apart from the exceptional case where we attend to our own creative thoughts and fantasies. Augustine often seems to see this clearly enough; but he does not take the decisive step of abandoning the will-o’-the-wisp of a purely active intellect, and the artificial theories to which it leads.
There is much wisdom in this statement, and it is of relevance to the theme in this book as a whole.
18. From the article “Reason” in A. Hastings, ed., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford and New York, 2000), p. 596. Compare the words of Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, scene 5, when she is asked by Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, why she provides him with reasons for her belief in her voices. “Well, I have to find reasons for you, because you do not believe in my voices. But the voices come first; and I find the reasons after . . .”
19. Quotations taken from Wills, Saint Augustine, p. 44.
20. R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (London and New Haven, 1997), p. 94.
21. See G. Bonner, “Augustine as Biblical Scholar,” in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol 1 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 541–63. In order to show how lively Augustine’s imagination could be, I summarize (from this article) Augustine’s analysis of the 153 fish caught in the miraculous draught (John 21:11). The sum of the integers 1 to 17 is 153. Taking 17, this is the sum of 10 (the Ten Commandments) and 7 (the number of the Holy Spirit, who enables the elect to fulfill the law). Thus 153 fishes comes to represent the whole number of the elect, as regenerated by the Holy Spirit. It is also three times 50 plus 3, the persons of the Trinity. The number 50 represents the square of 7 (the number of the Spirit) with one added to show the unity of the Spirit, whose operations are sevenfold and who was sent on the fiftieth day to the disciples! Note the mildly sarcastic comment of R. Mortley in his From Word to Silence, vol. 2, The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn, 1986), p. 246: “At times it appears as if Augustine’s pursuit of meaning in the pages of Scripture is somewhat like that of the modern literary critic [note Mortley is writing in the mid 1980s], who by multiplying a series of references and subjective connections, finds a meaning which is far removed from the text itself and any possible authorial intention.”
22. See Kirwan, Augustine, p. 131, for Augustine on original sin. Paul’s influence on Augustine was profound, so much so that one scholar has gone so far as to claim that “much of western Christian thought can be seen as one long response to Augustine’s Paul” (P. Fredriksen in the entry on Paul in Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages).
23. The old question of how a god who is conceptualized as omnipotent and omniscient can allow evil seems impossible to answer. The pagan philosopher Sextus Empiricus (probably end of the second century A.D.) put the issue well in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 3:12: “For in claiming that he [God] is provident in all things, they will be saying that he is the cause of evil, but if they claim that he is provident only about some things or nothing, they will be forced to say either that God lacks good will or is weak; yet obviously only people who are impious will say this.” Quoted in M. Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy” in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999), p. 56. In the mid second century, Marcion (the champion of Paul) attempted to solve the problem by arguing that there were two Gods, the powerful Creator God of the Old Testament, whose behaviour as related in the Old Testament was quite clearly wicked, and a good, all-knowing God who was the father of Christ. See Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 71ff. An introduction to the problems can be found in any study of the philosophy of religion, for instance, that edited by B. Davies, Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology (Oxford, 2000). There is a short overview in the article “Evil, the Problem of” by Thomas P. Flint in Hastings, ed., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. I have always been unhappy with the argument that evil should be seen as the inevitable consequence of God’s gift to humanity of free will. Should one attempt to persuade those whose lives have been irretrievably ruined by the evil actions of others that this is because of the exercise of a free will given to the perpetrator of the evil by a God whom they should believe to be fully loving?
24. See Harrison, Augustine, p. 87, for the quotation from Augustine. The earlier history of Christian thinking on free will (as well as Augustine’s views) is covered by Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, chap. 6, “Nature and Grace.”
25. Pelikan’s chapter on “Nature and Grace” is outstanding on Augustine’s views. The problem remained of why anyone should behave well if it was already predestined who should be saved and who condemned. At the same time, if God can grant or withhold grace at will, then the responsibility of “allowing” human beings to go to hell is his. Augustine argued in return that God created men whose damnation he could foresee as a means of manifesting his anger and demonstrating his power. The contradictions involved in sorting out predestination can be seen in the following quotation from Augustine cited by Pelikan (p. 297): “As the one who is supremely good, he made good use of evil deeds [sic!], for the damnation of those whom he had justly predestined to punishment and for the salvation of those whom he had kindly predestined to grace.” One hardly needs to go further to explain the profound sense of insecurity that Augustine and his followers brought into the Christian tradition.
26. Harrison’s quotation comes from her Augustine, p. 28. Kirwan, Augustine, lists the “original sin” texts on p. 131. They are also discussed by Pelikan in The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, pp. 299–300. Pelikan notes how Augustine was misled by a Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12 in which “death spread to all men, through one man, in whom all men sinned,” whereas the Greek original reads, “Death spread to all men, through one man, because all men sinned.” See Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, pp. 232–33, for Augustine’s views that the number of saved equalled the number of angels. In his City of God (22:24), Augustine leaves only the smallest scope for reasoned thought in “fallen man.” “There is still the spark, as it were, of that reason in virtue of which he was made in the image of God: that spark has not been fully put out” (trans. H. Bettenson).
27. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, p. 315, for the first of Pelagius’ quotations; Harrison, Augustine, p. 103, for the second. Gerald Bonner has useful essays on Augustine and Pelagianism in his Church and Faith in the Patristic Tradition (Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1996).
28. Quoted in Kirwan, Augustine, p. 134. Richard Sorabji in his Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 2000), concludes that Julian (and Pelagius) won the philosophical argument but that the political argument (which was what now mattered) was won by Augustine. Sorabji concludes his chapter “Augustine on Lust and the Will” as follows (p. 417):
To many, myself included, the Pelagian view that lust is a good thing, which may be put to bad use, is far more attractive than Augustine’s view that lust is a bad thing which may, in marriage, be put to a good use. If Pelagius had prevailed on this and more generally on original sin, a British theologian would have been at the centre of western theology, and western attitudes to sexuality, and to much else besides, might have been very different.
The question of how an “evil” thing (sexual incontinence as Augustine conceived it) can be made good simply through the circumstances in which it is undertaken is another example of Augustine tying himself up in knots (and defying his own mentor Paul, who had condemned the idea of doing evil that good may come of it, Romans 3:8). The contradictions here ar
e dissected by J. Mahoney on “Augustinism and Sexual Morality” in his The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford, 1987), pp. 58–68.
29. The quotations are taken from the article by H. Chadwick, “Orthodoxy and Heresy,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 583.
30. The conference of 411 is well covered by M. Tilley in “Dilatory Donatists or Procrastinating Catholics: The Trial at the Conference of Carthage,” in E. Ferguson, ed., Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity (New York and London, 1999). Tilley argues that the Donatists assumed that this conference would be a proper chance to discuss theology, but in fact it turned out to be no more than “an imperial administrative process” through which to condemn them. The Donatists attempted to argue that the issue was one of the goodness of individuals and mocked Augustine’s view that good and bad individuals could co-exist within the same institution without defiling that institution.
31. The quotation from Augustine is from Kirwan, Augustine, p. 212, and that from Gregory from H. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore and London, 2000), p. 407. See C. Kirwan, Augustine, pp. 212–18, for Augustine’s shifting views on persecution. See also Rist, Augustine, “Towards a Theory of Persecution,” pp. 239–45.
32. Rist, Augustine, p. 215. Like the Homoeans, the Donatists were casualities of the new principle that there should be only one state church based on one interpretation of Christianity. As rivals to the ownership of Christian “truth,” the Donatists were treated far more harshly than Jews or pagans.
33. The quotation, itself quoted from a review, comes from Stephen O’Shea’s The Perfect Heresy: Life and Death of the Cathars (London, 2000).
34. A point made by Harrison, Augustine, p. 197, who elaborates, on pp. 200–202, the sources for the idea of “the two cities.” The rigid dichotomy between polarized extremes, good and bad, saved and unsaved, not only draws, like so much of Augustine’s thought, on Paul but is typical of Augustine’s polemical rhetoric. As such, it has created a great deal of unnecessary anxiety among Christians (if one does not agree totally with what has been defined as orthodoxy, one is condemned), and it has hindered the exploration of unresolved theological issues.
35. The City of God 19:13, quoted ibid., p. 207.
36. J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London, 1996), p. 108.
37. The point is made in Michael Signer’s article “Jews and Judaism,” in Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages, pp. 470–73. See also Harrison’s sympathetic assessment in Augustine, pp. 142–44.
38. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, p. 235.
39. Rist, Augustine, pp. 291–92. Note St. Jerome’s comment in his Letter CVC: “You are renowned throughout the world. Catholics venerate you, and look upon you as a second founder of the old faith. And, surely what is a sign of greater glory [sic], all the heretics detest you.” Mahoney, “Augustinism and Sexual Morality,” p. 69, notes that Augustine’s use of polarized language “can lead to violent and extreme language and entrenched positions, in which words become weapons with which to crush an adversary rather than inadequate counters of that humble exploration of divine reality which should be characteristic of theological discourse.”
40. Quoted by M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (London, 1985), p. 57. As she notes, the idea “is an extension of Augustine’s argument about original sin.”
41. For this period, see chap. 5, “A Divided City: The Christian Church, 300–460,” especially the section “The Primacy of Peter,” in R. Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000, 2nd ed. (London, 1999). On Rome, R. Krautheimer’s Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1208 (Princeton, 2000), is an excellent starting point.
42. A good starting point for the tortuous career of Vigilius is his entry in J. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes (Oxford, 1986).
43. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, pp. 125–27. Her chap. 3, “The Churches in the Sixth Century: The Council of 553,” is essential for more detailed study of this period.
44. Ibid., p. 182. On Gregory, Herrin has good points to make—see her chap. 4, “The Achievement of Gregory the Great.” For a fuller study, see R. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997), and for Gregory’s thought, C. Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley and London, 1988). There is also a sensitive introduction to Gregory by M. Colish in her Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 37–41.
45. Quoted in MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 97. R. A. Markus considers Gregory’s approach to secular learning in Gregory the Great, pp. 34–40.
46. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, p. 177. The longer extract from this reproach that Herrin gives has much to say about Gregory’s view of the ministry, in particular that the need for unity in the church requires that bishops should be prepared to cooperate and compromise with each other when necessary. The quotation on “compassion” and “contemplation” comes from Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis, his great work on the exercise of spiritual power.
47. Markus, Gregory the Great, p. 204.
48. Collins in Early Medieval Europe, p. 233. Chap. 13, “The Sundering of East and West,” provides a good overview of the process.
49. The story of Fursey is told by P. Brown in “Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World,” in W. Klingshirn and M. Vessey, eds., The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Later Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus (Ann Arbor, 1999), pp. 294–95. The problem of why Christianity laid such heavy stress on punishment in the afterlife is, of course, a major subject in itself and has only been partially addressed in this book. The words of Jesus in Matthew (25:31–46) have been fundamental, and Matthew 22:14, “Many are called but few are chosen,” was used “generation after generation as proof that only a minority ever reached heaven” with the majority consigned everlastingly to hell. See the article on “hell” by A. Hastings, ed., in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought.
50. N. MacGregor, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (London, 2000), p. 127. See also M. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London, 1999), although this book concentrates primarily on the crucifixion of the good and bad thieves. The chapter “Images of the Suffering Redeemer” in R. M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London and New York, 2000), provides an excellent exploration of the issues involved.
51. See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed. (Malden, Oxford, Melbourne, and Berlin, 2003), p. 119. This magnificent survey of western Christendom takes the story up to 1000.
19
1. Book 5, chap. 5. The extracts are from the Penguin edition, translated by D. Magarshack.
2. Tenth-century Ecomium of Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted in R. Lim, Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1995), p. 158. A survey of how these heresies interacted on the ground can be found in S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 91–108. Mitchell’s survey shows that in fourth-century Phrygia and Lycaonia, orthodox Christianity was virtually unknown in an area that was, however, heavily Christian.
3. J. Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven and London, 1993), is especially helpful here. See in particular chap. 3, “The Language of Negation.”
4. As reported by his fellow Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, above, p. 195.
5. Lim, Public Disputation, p. 168.
6. See ibid., pp. 158–71, for a full analysis of these orations.
7. R. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 809. Edward Gibbon made the point that if one wanted to know just how vicious debates were in these councils, one turned not to opponents of Christianity but to “one of the most pious and eloquent bishops of the age, a saint and a doctor of the church
,” Gregory of Nazianzus. A member of the Anglican commission on liturgy, the late Michael Vesey, is said to have compared preparing liturgical texts for the Anglican Synod with “trying to do embroidery with a bunch of football hooligans.” Quoted in a letter to the Independent newspaper (London), November 29, 2000.
8. Lim, Public Disputation, p. 171.
9. Ibid., pp. 171–81.
10. The first quotation is from Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, quoted in A. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley and London, 1991), p. 219. Pseudo-Dionysius claimed that his works had been written by Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of Paul’s. The claim was so successful that it was not until 1895 that his writings were recognized as coming from the fifth century. See Paul Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, eds., Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century (London, 1986); the quotation about “God being in no way like the things that have being” is taken from p. 135.
11. Quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 234.
12. Quoted in Lim, Public Disputation, p. 221.
13. I have taken these points from chap. 7, “The Orthodox Consensus,” in J. Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971). They remain recognizable in contemporary Roman Catholicism. Standard histories of Christian doctrine still tend to exclude mention of the historical context within which doctrine developed. This is one area of Christianity where the influence of Platonism remains strong. Correct doctrine is like the Platonic Forms, eternal, unchanging and available for an elite to grasp. This elite alone (the church hierarchies) has the right to interpret it for others. In such a context ideas cannot be relative to the society in which they are formed, and it is hardly surprising therefore that standard histories of Christian doctrine tend to ignore the wider historical context in which doctrine developed. Richard Hanson was one of the first theologians to declare, in The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988), that it was the emperors who were the main force in establishing orthodoxy. Even then, his view, which was supported by a mass of historical evidence, was described in one review as “provocative.”
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason Page 55