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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.
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