| #### 4. THE INFLUENCE OF ST. AUGUSTINE |

| #### #### St. Augustine, however, did more than merely fight the Pelagians as the great controversialist he undoubtedly was. The need of the moment brought from him the work which is his chief title to glory as a theologian, the construction of a whole theory to explain the original state of man, the nature and effect of the first man's fall, the nature of the Redemption, and the way in which, in virtue of the Redemption, God acts upon the souls of the redeemed. It is a work in which he had singularly little help from preceding writers, and a work which was to give rise, as it still gives rise, to passionate discussions; a work, too, since proved erroneous in more than one point, but a work which in its main lines has long since passed into the traditional theology of the Catholic Church. #### Adam was, by a special act of the divine liberality, created with the gift of immortality, with a will inclined to good, a harmony of reason and senses, with infused knowledge, in habitual justice. He sinned, and his sin is transmitted ever after to all his posterity, as Scripture, the Christian writers, the rite of Baptism and -- a point of which St. Augustine makes very much indeed -- the chronic misery of mankind testify. The universal misery from which no man has ever escaped, the opposition between spirit and flesh, especially in what relates to sex, are for the saint a final culminating argument, and in the anarchic desire for sex pleasure that, of itself, denies all restraints, he sees that effect of Adam's sin through the instrumentality of which it is transmitted to us. "Hoc est malum peccati in quo nascitur omnis homo." [ ] #### This is not a radical vitiation of human nature. Human nature is not, since Adam, a thing of simple badness. But it suffers a permanent inherited weakness, a disability that is inherent and is therefore transmitted to all who possess a human nature. The channel by which that transmission is effected is, once again, the anarchic activity of sex-desire which accompanies the act of sex. Adam's progeny then, is, inevitably, born deprived of those special gifts -- immortality and the like -- which graced him, and, deprived of the will’s inclination to good, needs henceforward a special divine help if it is to avoid sin. All mankind, since Adam's sin, left to itself is inevitably, eternally, lost: a mass of perdition, a mass condemned -- of itself helpless, in a pit whence nothing but a new divine act can extract it. From this abyss God has in fact delivered us all, creating man anew, giving mankind the beginnings of a new life through the Redeeming death of the God-Man Jesus Christ. For St. Augustine the religion of the Church is essentially a redemption, a redemption based on the Incarnation. #### In the new arrangement, God, as always, gives everything, even the first help to arrive at that belief upon which all is built. With the God-Man Jesus Christ, by incorporation with Him, Humanity is to be re-created, made one with Him in Baptism and the Holy Eucharist -- and this not in so many isolated individual unions, but as a corporate body. This idea of the salvation of Humanity as the members of Christ -- members of a body whose head is the God-Man -- is the very heart of St. Augustine's theology. His explanation of the system by which from the head the members receive direction and power to move -- in more technical language his theory of Grace -- is but his application of this theology to a special point. #### The Redemption is the work of the Incarnate God in His historical earthly activity. This activity is continued, and continuously manifested thenceforward, in all the subsequent supernatural activity of the redeemed: manifested as the very source and internal principle of that supernatural activity. It is then really Jesus Christ Who prays, Who lives, Who performs the salvific actions in the individual. This is the meaning of St. Augustine's elaborate, well-articulated theory of Grace. It is St. Paul re-thought, the tradition set out afresh with new profundity, new lucidity, with passionate fervour, disciplined logic and a wholly new rhetorical splendour, in answer to the menace of Pelagius' sterilising divorce of man from God in the spiritual life. Thanks to St. Augustine's genius the tradition would conquer and mould anew the piety, the interior life, of all the succeeding centuries. It is this which most of all survives of his work. Far from Grace -- the freely- given divine aid that makes possible man's production of actions supernaturally valuable -- being unnecessary to Christians, Christianity is essentially Grace! and the primary attitude of the Christian is humility, the complete consciousness of his unlimited dependence on God. Nor can the Christian be solitary in his Christianity, for Christianity's very life is the union between all who are Christians, the union between each as a Christian and Christ Himself, so that the whole Church is nothing more than "the one Christ loving Himself." The importance of the Church in St. Augustine's theology it is impossible to overestimate. #### The system constructed by St. Augustine had its difficulties-particularly in the matter of adjusting the relations between the divine activity of Grace and man's free-will, difficulties about which, after further centuries, men still dispute as keenly as in St. Augustine's time. #### To the Catholics of his own day St. Augustine was the great champion of the church against the Manichees, the Donatists, the Pelagians. To the Catholic of a day fifteen hundred years later he is still the doctor of Grace and Ecclesiology, the builder who set on the stocks every single one of the later treatises of systematic theology. But to Catholics of the thousand years which followed his death he was more even than all this. He was almost the whole intellectual patrimony of medieval Catholicism, a mine of thought and erudition which the earlier Middle Ages, for all its delving, never came near to exhausting. He was the bridge between two worlds, and over that bridge there came to the Catholic Middle Ages something of the educational ideals and system of Hellenism; there came the invaluable cult of the ancient literature, the tradition of its philosophy and all the riches of Christian Antiquity. In St. Augustine were baptised, on that momentous Easter Day of 387, the schooling, the learning, the learned employments, and the centuries of human experience in the ways of thought, which were to influence and shape all the medieval centuries. His own great achievement, and the authority it gave to his genius, legalised for all future generations of Catholics the use in the service of Catholic thought of the old classic culture. For this prince of theologians is no less a prince of the humanities, and in himself he determines, once and for all, the Christian attitude to the pre-Christian arts, poetry and thought. This genius, the range of whose mind is encyclopaedic, gifted with an insatiable desire to know yet more, with a passion for work and the temperament of a poet, the disciplined thinker whose very profession it is to reason and expound, saw Christianity as a whole, with a completeness beyond anything that any of his philosophical predecessors had known. And from his masterly understanding there comes the most masterly presentation hitherto seen, and which will endure for nearly a thousand years without a rival, until there comes another mind, as great as his own, and equipped with still better instruments. [ ] #### In theology, beyond what has been already described, St. Augustine is responsible for a philosophically inspired exposition of the teaching on the Trinity which is one of the marvels of Christian thought; and which remains to this day impossible to better. In his teaching on the Incarnation, there is, once again, a richness of new light and a new precision, thanks to his philosophical mind; and as his exposition of the Trinity precludes the difficulties over whose solution Eastern Catholicism tore itself to shreds, so here his solutions leave no place for the misunderstandings out of which Nestorianism and Monophysitism were to rise. #### He readily gives philosophy a role in the provinces of faith. Philosophy it is which first of all must test the credentials of faith. If these satisfy the mind, then faith henceforward has the principal role. By faith the mind accepts the mysteries. The office of reasoning is now secondary: the better understanding of truths acquired by faith, the explanation of them and of their mutual harmony. In his own use of reason to explain the truths of faith, St. Augustine employs the philosophy of his adoption, Neoplatonism as he had re-thought it. It was by no means a perfect instrument, as he himself uneasily realised. But with a happy confidence in the ultimate coincidence of all true teaching, relying on the surer way of faith where philosophy failed, he yet managed to build up with Neoplatonism the greatest philosophical exposition of its religion which the Church had yet seen. His was a mind that never ceased to develop, and a recent writer has been able to describe the years of Catholic life to which, with Grace, Neoplatonism brought him as "a continual argument with Neoplatonism. . . a progressive deliverance from Neoplatonism and a growth into essential Christianity". [ ] Something of the Neoplatonist spirit, however, survived all this argument, to provide him with problems he never lived to solve and which, unsolved, remained to confuse the philosophical Catholic until the great deliverance wrought by St. Thomas. #### Like his secular master Plato -- and unlike Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas -- St. Augustine has, from the very beginning, been eagerly read far beyond the limited circle of professional philosophers and theologians. "There was passion in his philosophy," [ ] it has been excellently said; and again, equally truly that " everything he writes is inspired by (his own mystical experiences) and looks backward or forward to them." [ ] No other theologian is so personal. Never before nor since, was there given to the sacred sciences a thinker for whom, in this passionate degree, there was but one reality -- the action of God in his own soul -- and a thinker of genius so mighty that, writing all he wrote in the light of this reality, he has somehow written the history of the hearts of all who read him. It is this passion for psychological self-portrayal, the dominant colour of all his work, which has led so many of his admirers to see in him the first of the moderns; and it is undoubtedly the explanation of his unsurpassed hold-which not even his most serious defects have shaken -- on the Christian imagination, affection and understanding. It is also, inevitably, one great source of weakness. #### Another source of weakness is the fact that his great corpus of thought and learning lacks systematic organisation. The score of mighty tomes that confronts the student of St. Augustine is the varied production of a man, who, for all that nature cast him for a student, was forced for the best part of his time into the less congenial life of a man of affairs. His works are the productions of a busy bishop, harassed with a thousand temporal cares, from the ordering of diocesan charities to the high business of the State, and it is not surprising that, occasionally, they suffer from a lack of co-ordination and harmony. Thence, too, no doubt, derive in part the apparent and unexplained contradictions -- despite the famous Retractations written as a correction at the end of his days. St. Augustine never had Newman's comparative leisure in which to revise and to bring into harmony the detail of his vast output of half a century's exposition and polemic. Hence it is, that often enough, both sides in a vital dispute can make some claim to call him their master; and that partial study has sometimes been able to make out of him whatever it chooses. But whatever the flaws in the vast work, the work remained and remains. St. Augustine, in the East only a name, is in the West everything for the next eight hundred years, and without some knowledge of him the life of these centuries is unintelligible. #### There is one book, especially, of St. Augustine which never ceased to be read and studied for the next thousand years and to influence western thought and even political action -- the De Civitate Dei. [ ] Not only was this a principal means whereby much of the saint's theological teaching passed into the minds of others than the professional theologians, into the minds of schoolmasters and lawyers and administrators and even rulers, forming the mind of the educated layman, but the book was the first attempt to understand the meaning of history, and it was the foundation of all the later Christian speculation about what we now call social philosophy. For a thousand years it was the European's guide to the rights and duties of man vis a vis the state, his vade mecum in the complexity where he found himself, subject at once of his temporal lord and of the spiritual kingdom which was the Church. It is a very lengthy book, [ ] and, in its discursive somewhat meandering fashion, it is encyclopaedic in the generality of problems it raises and endeavours to solve. There is here, in fact. a little of everything: brilliantly written religious apologetic; criticism of non-Christian ideals and solutions, that is humane, humorous, witty; expositions of the Christian mysteries fired with the fervour of a great love. It was the most popular, and to this extent, the most influential, book St. Augustine ever wrote; and its influence is by no means ended yet. #### The City of God took the saint something like fourteen years to write, and he published the parts as they were completed, between the years 412 and 426. When he began it he was in the full maturity of his powers; he was an old man of seventy- two when he wrote the last wonderful pages "on the quality of the vision with which the saints shall see God in the world to come," and " of the eternal felicity of the City of God, and the perpetual Sabbath." What inspired the book was the storm of anti-Christian recrimination that followed Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. Had the empire not gone over to Christianity, said the pagans, those things would never have happened. So the saint examines Paganism, and its history, in the light of Christian teaching and ideals. He lays bare what Paganism was, and must be. and what its effects on human nature. And he sets forth, constructively, the positive hope, and achievement, of Christianity and the Catholic Church. The Church as it exists, is not, indeed, adequated with the saint's City of God, any more than the ancient pagan empire is identified with that other "city" which is under the rule of sin. But the vision is presented of the Church, God's creation, as "the new humanity in process of formation, and [of] its earthly history [as] that of the building of the City of God which has its completion in eternity." [ ] #### Not only is a solution offered for the difficulties urged by the pagans, [ ] but a solution too for those difficulties which the facts of imperfect Christianity present, only too continuously, to believers also. The work brings out the ideal of the Church “as a dynamic social power," and it expounds a Christian social doctrine, of moral freedom and of personal responsibility, that is necessarily fatal to ideas of the state as superhuman and ever omnipotent, and to an organism so destructive of human personality as was the ancient Roman empire. St. Augustine is commonly declared to be, by this book, the founder of what is called the philosophy of history. It is no less true that the theories he there sets forth "first made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon a free personality and a common effort towards moral ends." [ ] #### The City of God was the favourite reading of Charlemagne, whose empire may be fairly considered as the mighty attempt of a somewhat less than saintly Christian genius, to set that City up as an actual political institution; and seven hundred years later still, it was with a series of public lectures on the work that the author of the Utopia introduced himself to London, and to Europe, as a political thinker and reformer. ####  |