St Augustine of Hippo
Augustine
of Hippo is probably the most significant figure in Western Christian
thought. Thomas Aquinas acknowledged his
as his main teacher; both the Roman Catholic church and the churches of the
Reformation hold Augustine as a major influence. More recently, a very particular approach to
Augustine has been taken by the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ group of theolgians. The books that have been written on Augustine
are legion, the books that Augustine himself wrote are fairly lengthy! So I am not going to offer you a
thoroughgoing account of every aspect of Augustine’s life and thought. Instead, I am going to look at a few
important moments or themes in Augustine.
I hope that will be enough.
Let me
begin with Augustine’s life. Augustine
was born on 13th November 354 at Thagaste, in modern day
Algeria. He was the son of Patritius, a
city councilor and Monica. Patritius was
a pagan, only converting to Christianity shortly before his death; but Monica
was a devout Christian. It is hard to
underestimate Monica’s importance in Augustine’s life. Her persistence is one of the features of
Augustine’s early life. In times when
infant baptism was unusual, Monica had the infant Augustine signed with the
cross and entered as a catechumen. She
had high hopes for her clearly gifted son.
But Augustine did not live up to her hopes in his early life. His childhood faith was submerged by what one
of the historians of the period calls ‘adventures in sensuality.’[1] At the age of 17 he took a concubine, to whom
he was faithful until his mother’s efforts to marry him off brought the
relationship to an end. In 372, she bore
him a son, Adeodatus (Given-by-God).
Monica wept for her son but was given a dream that suggested that
Augustine would turn out alright. This
was confirmed by a priest who advised Monica, ‘let him alone … and only pray to
the Lord for him: he himself by reading will discover his error.’[2]
Augustine
was educated in literature, and this too contributed to the decline of his
faith. He found the Bible, and especially
the Old Testament, inferior to Latin classics.
But he remained someone who had a profoundly religious streak, and so
became a member of the Manichaean sect.
The Manichees rejected the Old Testament, and seemed to offer reason
where the church only offered authority.
Manichaeism offered a view of the world as lesser, and even evil. It rejected the Old Testament largely due to
the positive view that the Bible takes of the creation. Jesus has a place, but Mani himself was seen
as the Paraclete, promised by Jesus, to reveal all truth. Augustine converted several of his friends to
Mani’s religion and became a ‘hearer’, a second level member (and crucially one
not required to become celibate).
Augustine
spent nine years as a member of the Manichaean religion, much to Monica’s
upset. But by 384, Augustine had become
skeptical and disillusioned. This
co-incided with a move to Milan. Here, he came under the influence of the
Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, and for the first time Augustine met a Christian intellectual
who he respected. From Ambrose,
Augustine learnt that there were ways to interpret the difficult passages of
the Old Testament. In Milan also, he
learnt neo-Platonism and found a philosophical way of working with Christian
faith. Finally, his mother moved in,
living with Augustine in Milan. All the
pieces were in place and in a Milan garden on a summer’s evening in 386,
Augustine became a Christian. As he sat
in the garden, he heard a voice saying ‘take, read; take read’. Picking up the Bible he opened it where it
fell and read from Paul’s letter to the Romans.
‘Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and
jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.’[3] ‘I would read no further, nor was there any
need for me to do so; for instantly, when I had finishes the sentence, by a
serene light as it were infused into my heart, all the clouds of doubt were
dispersed.’[4] Augustine and his son were baptized on Holy
Saturday in 387 by Ambrose in Milan cathedral.
Monica died that autumn and a year later Augustine left Milan for Africa
once more. In 391, on a passing visit to
Hippo he was coerced by popular pressure into being ordained priest (something
that would blow holes in the way the Church of England discerns
vocations!). Four years later he was
consecrated as coadjutor bishop of Hippo, so that no other bishop could poach
him. A year later he became bishop of
Hippo in his own right, and remained there until he died in 430.
That we
know all of this about Augustine, and in so much personal detail, is the first
of the moments of Augustine’s life and thought that I want to dwell on. In 397, Augustine published his Confessions, a sort of spiritual
autobiography in the form of an extended prayer. It created a new genre, but remains one of
the classics of the form. It is not an
autobiography with theological asides, but the autobiography and the theology
are seamlessly blended so that one cannot be understood without the other. Augustine is constantly looking for where and
how God has been involved in his life.
Why was this allowed to happen? Where was God? Rowan Williams suggests that ‘the question
repeatedly modulates into a different key; not, Where was God? but, Where was
I? … So much of the Confessions
centres on the image of homecoming. God
waits for the soul to come back to its home with him; without that home in God,
nothing can have any meaning.’[5] The Confessions
begins with the famous phrase, which has even found its way into rock music,
that ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart can find no rest until it
rests in thee.’[6] Later in the book, Augustine says this:
Too late have I loved thee, beauty so ancient and so new! Too late have I loved thee! And behold, thou wert within, and I without, and without I sought thee; and I, deformed, ran after those forms of beauty which thou hast made. Thou wast with me, and I was not with thee. Those things held me back from thee, which could have no being but in thee, Thou calledst, thou criest, and thou breakest through my deafness. Thou flashest, thou shinest and thou chasest away my blindness. Thou didst become fragrant, and I drew in my breath and panted after thee. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me and I burned for thy embrace.[7]
There is
something important in all of this in the way that the Christian life is
understood as incomplete, still moving towards its home in God. Augustine the great sensualist, has become
Augustine the theologian of desire.
Of all
the rest of Augustine’s achievements and deep thinking, I want only to look at
two things; First his argument with the
greatest British theologian of antiquity, Pelagius. Pelagius had spent time in Rome, and he had
been particularly alarmed at the moral laxity of Roman society. When he heard a bishop quote from Augustine’s
Confessions, ‘Thou commandest
continency, grant what thou commandest and command what thou wilt,’[8]
Pelagius was horrified. He had no
problem with the second part – ‘command what thou wilt’ – but the first seemed
to imply that human beings had no responsibility for their actions. Pelagius was a moralist and a rigorous
Christian. He feared that Augustine was
preaching ‘cheap grace’ (to borrow a term from a much later century). For Pelagius, human beings were capable of
living fully moral and perfect lives, otherwise they could not be judged justly
by God. God’s role in all of this was to
give teaching, and the supreme moral example of Christ. Forgiveness was a gift of grace, but advance
in the moral and spiritual life, according to Pelagius, depends on the free
choices of the will confronted by the possibilities of right and wrong. Pelagianism remains the quintessential
British heresy, popularized in such things as the saying about in pulling
oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and the distinction between the deserving and
undeserving poor. It still has a strong
hold today. (Anyone hearing in this a
link with the Coalition government’s welfare reforms and political rhetoric is
not mistaken!)
Augustine
could not agree with this. No less a
moralizer that Pelagius, Augustine understood more about sin, and its
corrupting nature. Had Pelagius been
right, then the sin of Adam would have been all about Adam (and Eve) but would
have had no effect on their descendants.
Instead, Augustine knew that sin was corrosive and pervasive. It has an effect on the whole world, not just
individual sinners. His theology of
original sin, which has its roots in the argument with Pelagius, is actually a
theology of grace. Original sin is not a
matter of seeing infants as evil and corrupt.
Infants are affected by sin, and so freedom of action for all of us,
child or adult, is compromised. Without
an intervention from God, human beings could not free ourselves from the mire
into which our own sin has placed us all.
The grace of God, the free gift of God, is forgiveness and a re-ordering
of life. Augustine has a theology of the
cross that seems missing from Pelagius.
Augustine’s emphasis on grace is what distinguishes him as a theologian,
and what made him the source of inspiration for Martin Luther.
The
final moment of Augustine’s life that I want to dwell occurred on 24th
August, 410 when Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome. It is hard to underestimate the significance
of this, it was the 9/11 of the fifth century and possibly more significant
even than that. Rome had become the
center of Christianity, and many of the Christian writers had seen in the conversion
of Constantine a moment that brought the coming of Christ closer. All of that theological romanticism was blown
apart by Alaric’s triumph. But the
Christian world was left in disarray. It
had seemed that the Christianisation of Rome was a sign of God’s approval, what
had happened? In his greatest work, The City of God, Augustine brought two
things to the theological rebuilding of Western Christianity. The first was a deeply biblical
understanding, that could see in the Old Testament the way that God had used
invasion and exile as a means of disciplining the people of Israel. The second was a philosophical approach which
could in the biblical cities of Jerusalem and Babylon an analogy of the earthly
and heavenly cities. These were not
states, but ideal societies composed of individuals. No earthly state can ensure the security of
human beings. Augustine refuses the
option of apocalyptic distrust of all human organization, and that of the
romantic identification of any existing social order with the heavenly
city. The people of God are a mixed
community, on pilgrimage to the heavenly city, containing both saints and
sinners. Perhaps Augustine’s greatest
contribution to the philosophy of history is just this, that the meaning of
history is not to be found in outward events, but in the drama of salvation, of
sin, grace and redemption.
That is,
then, a woefully inadequate account of this great sinner, saint, bishop and
theologian. In his Confessions, Augustine gives us a theology of the Christian life as
homecoming to God. In his argument with
Pelagius, Augustine gives us a theology of grace. In his City
of God, Augustine gives us a theology for the end of history. There are riches here indeed. Let me end with the collect for St
Augustine’s Day:
Merciful Lord,
who turned Augustine from his sins
to be a bishop and teacher:
grant that we may follow him
in penitence and discipline
till our restless hearts find their rest in you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Given as part of a series on 'A History of Christianity in 30 Characters' at the Chapel; of St Mary on the Bridge, Derby on 4.3.13.
[5] Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament
to St John of the Cross (DLT, 1979), p. 71.
[6] Confessions, I.i.
[7] Confessions, X.xxvii
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