Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  After teaching in Thagaste and Carthage, Augustine in 383 accepted an offer to teach literature and oratory in Rome, and with great anticipation he set out for the imperial metropolis. To his disappointment, however, the students there proved no less undisciplined than those back home, and so, when offered a position as a professor of rhetoric in Milan, he at once took it. His job—essentially that of court orator—brought him into contact with generals, statesmen, and philosophers. A distinguished public career seemed ensured. He quickly became disillusioned, however. Among his main tasks was delivering official panegyrics to the emperor and other officials, and the more lies he told, the more praise he received.

  In Milan, Augustine was joined by his mother. Intent on arranging a proper marriage for him, she prevailed on him to banish his mistress. She also continued to press him to accept Christ. Augustine was, in fact, falling under the spell of Milan’s bishop, Ambrose. The sermons by this future Doctor of the Church filled the city’s large basilica. Using the allegorical method, Ambrose was able to draw spiritual meanings from the rough language of the Old Testament. When Augustine began rereading it, passages that had once seemed childish and far-fetched now seemed alive with transcendent wisdom. Increasingly, he felt drawn to Christ, but more as a model man than a divine savior.

  All the while, Augustine remained attached to worldly pleasures, especially physical ones. No matter how hard he tried to control his cravings, they seemed to control him. He yearned to embrace God, but as long as he remained in the grip of the flesh, he felt unable to do so. Desperate to understand his condition, he began reading the Neoplatonists. Popular in Milan, they offered a glimpse into a universe that existed beyond the world of the senses and that was eternal and immovable. Studying Paul’s epistles, Augustine could now see that Christ was not simply a moral exemplar but the Word made flesh, sent by God to deliver mankind from its sins. When he came upon Paul’s statement in his Epistle to the Romans that man can escape the malignant forces within him only through God’s grace, he felt his heart tremble. More than ever, Augustine longed to commit himself to God, but he continued to feel himself held fast—“not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains.”

  One day in August 386, Augustine and his friend Alypius, with whom he shared a house outside Milan, received a visit from a fellow African named Ponticianus, a fervent Christian. Ponticianus—seeing a volume of Paul’s epistles lying on a table—began recounting the story of the Egyptian monk Anthony and his decision to retreat into the desert to devote himself to God. When Ponticianus described how two young acquaintances of his had, on hearing of Anthony’s feats, decided to renounce their old lives and devote themselves to God, Augustine felt overcome by shame. Thirteen years had passed since he had first read the Hortensius and embarked on his quest for truth, and though he could now see what it was, the “unclean whispers” of his body kept him from embracing it.

  After Ponticianus left, Augustine began pouring out his frustration to Alypius. Taking the volume of Paul’s letters, he went out of the house and into the adjoining garden. His friend followed. Knowing in his heart that he should accept God’s will and enter into his covenant, Augustine nonetheless continued to resist. He flung himself down beneath a fig tree and, in agony over his indecision, tore at his hair, beat himself on the head, and burst into tears. Why could he not get his body to obey his will? “How long shall I go on saying, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?”

  Suddenly, he heard a child’s singsong voice coming from a nearby house. “Take it and read, take it and read,” the voice called. Seeing in this a divine command, Augustine opened the volume of Paul’s epistles and read the first verse to catch his eye. It was Romans 13:13: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.” By the time he had reached the end of the verse, Augustine recounted, “it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” At last his mind felt free “from the gnawing anxieties of ambition and gain, from wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust.” From that moment on, he no longer “placed any hope in this world but stood firmly upon the rule of faith.” Shortly thereafter, Augustine resigned his position at the court and withdrew with some friends to a country villa in Cassiciacum, on the outskirts of Milan, to spend his days studying and contemplating God. In March 387 he returned to Milan. He then went to Rome, where he remained for a year before returning to Africa.

  Augustine’s embrace of Christ in the garden strongly echoes the conversion of Paul, who on the road to Damascus was overcome after hearing the voice of Jesus call out to him. Augustine was similarly moved upon reading a verse from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. But it was not until he began writing the Confessions, around 397, that he was able to make some sense of what had happened in the garden. By then, he had been in the seaport of Hippo for about six years, first as a priest and then as a bishop. In both capacities, Augustine had spent much time tending to the needs of his congregation, and in the process he had begun to see how similar their own struggles with their vices were to his own. North Africans were notorious swearers of oaths, for instance, and despite their sincere desire to change, they constantly relapsed. In Augustine’s case, it was his sexual urges that had defied his control.

  Augustine’s awareness of the partly unconscious nature of the power that those urges had over him gives the Confessions its modern feel. As he pondered his experience, he came to see his sexual longings as part of a more general set of selfish impulses (which he called concupiscence) that took hold of his mind, bound fast his will, and kept him from God. “My sin was this,” he wrote, “that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.” Only by relinquishing his will and surrendering himself to God had he been able to break the hold of these hidden forces. “There can be no hope for me except in your mercy,” he wrote. “Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will!”

  Augustine, however, was not yet clear on the theological implications of his new thoughts about human will and divine grace. He would spend his remaining thirty-plus years working them out. His thinking would be strongly shaped by the many fierce disputes in which he became involved—none of them more important than the one with Pelagius. Many of Augustine’s key doctrines were to emerge from his epic clash with this British ascetic—one that foreshadowed the battle that Erasmus and Luther would wage over the same subject centuries later.

  Augustine at first paid little attention to Pelagius, who was far away in Rome. Since his arrival there (sometime in the late fourth century), Pelagius had won an ardent following with his uncompromising calls for Christian austerity. (He moved in the same aristocratic circles that Jerome had a few years earlier.) God, Pelagius maintained, had endowed man with the capacity, based on the dictates of his conscience, to choose between good and evil. Distressed by the wishy-washy form of Christianity many Romans seemed to practice, Pelagius insisted that every Christian was bound to keep all of God’s commandments, large and small. When a copy of the Confessions reached him in Rome, Pelagius bristled at Augustine’s stress on human frailty and dependence. Hearing a bishop recite Augustine’s famous line—“Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will”—he became so agitated that he almost came to blows with the man.

  By then, however, Pelagius, like all of Rome, was preparing for calamity. Since the start of the fifth century, barbarian armies had been steadily advancing down the Italian peninsula. Then, in August 410, the unthinkable occurred: an army of Visigoths under the command of Alaric entered Rome. Over three days they burned, pillaged, and caroused, then withdrew. The shock spread around the Mediterranean. Th
ough Rome had by then been eclipsed by other cities in political importance, it remained the center of the Western world, and its penetration by a foreign army seemed to imperil civilization itself. Refugees poured into northern Africa, bearing tales of toppled monuments and plundered palaces.

  Pelagius was among them. Arriving in Hippo in 410, he at once sent word to Augustine, requesting a meeting. Augustine was away, however, and Pelagius soon moved on to Carthage and then Palestine. There, he began extolling free will and man’s ability to live free of sin. “It is possible to do anything which one really wants to do,” he declared. God, in making man in his own likeness, did not leave him “naked and defenseless” in the face of his desires but provided him with the armaments of reason and wisdom, so that he could choose to act virtuously. Since God holds man accountable for his every transgression, all must strive for “complete moral perfection.”

  When such statements got back to Augustine, he became furious. Aimed at an ascetic elite, they seemed certain to produce frustration and despair among ordinary Christians. Moreover, Pelagius, in ascribing such capabilities to man, was setting intolerable limits on divine power. The triumph of such views could prove injurious to man’s relationship with God—and to Augustine’s own reputation. He therefore set out to discredit and undermine Pelagius. He mobilized the bishops of Africa, enlisted the support of powerful figures in Rome, and sent Orosius, a fierce Spanish heretic-hunter, to Palestine to organize opposition to Pelagius among local prelates, including Jerome. Augustine also began turning out vitriolic tracts against him. In the Anti-Pelagian Writings, as they came to be called, Augustine’s pronouncements on human nature turned ever more bleak and extreme, holding man to be not just sinful and selfish but utterly helpless and depraved. (Jerome, in one of the era’s most memorable insults, called Pelagius “a dolt of dolts, with his wits dulled by a surfeit of his native Scotch porridge.”)

  The battle with Pelagius and his followers would loom over Augustine’s late, great masterwork, the City of God. He embarked on it in 413, three years after the Visigoths had entered Rome, and he would keep at it for the next fourteen years. In it, Augustine can be seen moving dramatically from the classical into the medieval world. The treatise (which exceeds a thousand pages in most modern editions) proposed a stark vision for a new Christian order to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing Roman Empire; it would have tremendous influence on Luther’s own thinking.

  The immediate spur for the work was provided by the Roman refugees who, arriving in Africa, blamed Christianity for the city’s fall. With its emphasis on morality and embrace of meekness, Christianity, they maintained, had weakened the warrior spirit of the empire and so undermined its ability to defend itself. In the City of God, Augustine devoted the first ten of the twenty-two books to a stinging rebuttal. He described the series of wars, assassinations, famines, and floods that had afflicted the empire since long before the coming of Christ and that the entire pantheon of Roman gods had been powerless to prevent. He mocked the gods’ petty rivalries, their puerile love affairs, their absurdly fine divisions of labor. Even at the height of its power, Rome had been driven by a lust for domination and a love of praise; in its decline, it showed the fate awaiting those who worship their own gods rather than the one true God.

  Having thus dispatched paganism, Augustine spent the remainder of his tract proposing an alternative worldview. He did not do so succinctly. Highly digressive, the City of God addresses such disparate matters as the different kinds of demons, the contrast between good and offending angels, the many giants who roamed the earth before the Flood, the perfection of the numbers six and seven, the activities of Gog and Magog as agents of the Devil’s persecution, the physical properties bodies will have after they are resurrected, and—most important—the Fall. The fateful events that occurred in the Garden of Eden are at the heart of Augustine’s theological vision. Adam and Eve, he maintained, at first lived in a state of tranquil bliss. They knew neither anger nor lust and engaged in sexual intercourse rationally and calmly. But then, in an act of “heinous” disobedience of God’s wishes, they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. As punishment, God consigned them to a life of toil and suffering, culminating in death, and fornication became a source of shame. God furthermore saw fit to punish all of their descendants. As Augustine put it, “Death has passed to all mankind through the sin of the first human beings.” In life, meanwhile, their progeny were to be enslaved to a malignant mass of needs and desires. By himself, a human being was incapable of doing good.

  Although earlier Church Fathers had raised the idea of original sin, Augustine was the first to give it such prominence. He offered a lengthy catalog of the fruits of man’s warped nature—quarrels, wars, hatred, treachery, cruelty, promiscuity, adultery, incest, and “unnatural vice in men and women (disgusting acts too filthy to be named)”—all springing “from that root of error and perverted affection which every son of Adam brings with him at his birth.”

  In the grip of this depravity, man had only one means of attaining salvation: divine grace. Only by surrendering his will to God and receiving God’s favor could he hope to overcome the evil impulses to which he had been sentenced for the first sin. God extends that grace without regard to any ostensible merits on the individual’s part; it is “undeserved.” God, who knows all things before they happen, decides who will be saved and who damned before they are even born. Only a small fraction of humankind will be earmarked for salvation; the rest are doomed to an eternity of torment, apart from any individual merit. This is Augustine’s famous doctrine of predestination. Not everyone, he acknowledged, would find such a God palatable; many would surely bridle at the idea of a collective punishment imposed on all mankind for one man’s sin. But divine majesty was unbounded and indivisible. Since God created the world and its many marvels, “why should he not have the power to make the bodies of the dead rise again, and the bodies of the damned to suffer torment in everlasting fire?”

  The “City of God” of Augustine’s title refers to the dwelling place of all those predestined to reign with God for eternity. Those doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil reside in the earthly city. The one is a community of the devout; the other consists of the irreligious. In one, love of God has been given first place; in the other, love of self. According to Augustine, these two cities arose out of two companies of angels, the light and the dark. In this sprawling work completed in his twilight years, Augustine showed that he remained beholden to the Manichean thinking to which he had been so attracted as a young man.

  Augustine’s vision of original sin, human depravity, predestination, and the condemnation of the mass of mankind apart from any individual merit was in many ways terrifying. Remarkably, though, he would succeed in getting it adopted by the Latin Church. This was due, in part, to his skills as a prosecutor and propagandist. Despite Pelagius’s repeated protestations that he was a sincere Christian, Augustine’s defaming of him would help make him a pariah and establish “Pelagian” as one of the most damning epithets in the Christian lexicon (as Erasmus would unhappily discover). In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, Pelagian theology, with its belief in free will and individual merit, was condemned and its proponents were branded as heretics within the boundaries of the empire.

  But more than Augustine’s agitation was at work. With Western civilization under threat from the barbarians and tales of brutality and cruelty mounting, Augustine’s dark vision of human nature seemed confirmed by events. In 429, another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, who had occupied Spain, headed south across the strait into Africa. Moving quickly eastward along the coast, they seized major ports while committing mass atrocities. At the time of Augustine’s death, on August 28, 430, Hippo itself was under siege. Amid such horrors, Augustine’s radical pessimism about human nature improbably became the new orthodoxy.

  Yet Pelagianism would not die. In practice, Augustine’s denial of human agency proved too chilling to serve the needs of the
Church. As missionaries headed into the heathen hinterland, a creed that featured a God who has decided in advance to sentence most of humankind to perdition through no fault of their own was hardly conducive to their work. With the chaos in North Africa, the debate over sin and salvation shifted to southern Gaul. There, some bishops and monks in the late fifth century began to teach that, though salvation ultimately depends on God’s grace, lay Christians could through their own acts help initiate that grace—a position that later came to be known as semi-Pelagian.

  Toward the end of the sixth century, Pope Gregory I—one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church—endorsed such an approach. Concerned more with pastoral matters than doctrine, he drew on another aspect of Augustine’s work—his support for ecclesiastical authority. In addition to his statements about depravity and human helplessness, Augustine offered the framework for a universal (i.e., catholic) church that would absorb all humanity and that, through administering the sacraments, would provide a pathway to salvation. From this kernel, Gregory developed a new formula: while salvation comes only through divine grace, a Christian, by performing the sacraments of the Church, could set in motion a process to attain that grace.

  Gregory’s ideas became institutionalized in the sacrament of penance—poenitentia. By showing contrition, confessing to a priest, and performing acts of satisfaction, those committing sins could obtain absolution. By the thirteenth century, this system had become entrenched, and preachers discussed salvation in terms that presumed a degree of free will. Augustinian thinking about human frailty and divine omnipotence was further diluted by the late Scholastics. By doing all that is within one, they taught, man can perform meritorious works in a state of grace and thus cooperate with God in attaining salvation—a position not far from that of Pelagius.