It is a conspicuous, if seldom noted, historical truth that during the first millennium of Christian history the Church attracted many of the most gifted minds in the ancient world. The parade of luminaries is quite astonishing: Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthge, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor; and of course the four Latin doctores ecclesiae, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Yet, Augustine towers over all. It is not hyperbolic to say during his lifetime he was the most intelligent man in the Mediterranean world. Between Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece and Thomas Aquinas in the high middle ages, he has no peer.
Augustine surpasses measurement. More than any other thinker from antiquity he is a world. He lived very long, seventy-six years, wrote more profusely, and thought more deeply than any other early Christian thinker, and his imagination moved across a much larger canvas. He pondered all the great questions debated by thoughtful men and women in ancient Greece and Rome: freedom and determinism, how does one know, what is the highest good (summum bonum), what makes human beings unique, what kind of a being is God, how did the world come to be, how does one account for evil, what is the place of the affections in the virtuous life. He was fascinated by two of the most mysterious and elusive aspects of human experience: memory and time.
“Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery. . . a power of profound and infinite multiplicity.” With its huge cavern filled with mysterious and secret nooks and crannies memory eludes our understanding. In the “vast hall of my memory,” wrote Augustine, I meet “all the sensations I have experienced . . . and there I also meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it.” He recognized that memory has to do not only with recalling what one has experienced, but discovering what was already there buried deep within the recesses of the mind “even before I learned them.”
Of time he wrote: “What is time? . . . Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.”
Augustine also dealt at length with many new questions prompted by the coming of Christ and the emergence of a new kind of community, the Church: the reliability of the biblical writings, the nature of the language of the Bible, allegory and signs, history and faith, revelation and reason, sin and grace, predestination, God as triune, love, the sacraments, authority, the Church, and political power. He engaged in disputes not with one party but with many: Manichees, Platonists, Donatists, Pelagians, and learned defenders of Rome’s venerable religious traditions.
Augustine penned one of the most quoted lines of all times:
Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
"You have made us for yourself, Oh Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
Though revered as a saint of the Church, Augustine was a man made of flesh, not of marble. His letters and books, many of which speak vividly of his feelings, give us a sharper picture of Augustine as a human being than anyone from antiquity or of any time, for that matter. Chastened by experience, his thinking has a hard-won clarity. He wrote knowingly of the unpredictable and ungovernable desires that break through the order and discipline of human life.
His writings reveal a person with deep empathy for the suffering of his fellow human beings: "The attitudes and movements of the body, when they are graceful and harmonious, are reckoned among the primary gifts of nature. But what if some illness makes the limbs shake and tremble? What if a man's spine is so curved as to bring his hands to the ground, turning him into a virtual quadruped? Will not this destroy all beauty and grace of body whether in repose or in motion?"
He was a practiced, even seductive, Latin stylist and he endowed the truths of Christian faith with majestic form. He had a feeling for the ways in which words can capture what is not a matter of words. Even in English his sentences captivate and beguile the reader. “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me and I was not with you. . . . You called and cried out and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.” When one takes a book or an essay of Augustine in hand it is hard to keep one’s distance.
Not everyone, however, has been seduced by his writings. On reading Augustine’s Confessions, Nietszche wrote: “O this old rhetorician! How false and eye-rolling he is! How I laughed – for example about the theft of his youth, nothing more than a student escapade. What psychological falsity! . . . Philosophical value zero! vulgarized Platonism--that is to say, a way of thinking which was invented for the highest aristocracy of soul and which he adjusted to suit slave natures.”
Augustine wrote expositions of the Bible (on all 150 psalms, for example), a massive work in defense of Christianity (City of God), philosophical essays (on free will, the immortality of the soul, on music), educational and catechetical treatises, doctrinal essays and polemical tracts, an introspective account of his own conversion written as a prayer to God in the second person (Confessions), and hundreds of letters (plus some found only two decades ago). He preached regularly and more than 400 of his sermons are preserved (again a new batch found recently); he even wrote a book called Retractationes, or second-thoughts, a reassessment of his writings, book by book. Unlike unexceptional and unremarkable intellectuals, artists, and politicians who write autobiographies today, Augustine knew that he was a great man who would cast a long shadow after his death. Realizing that his writings would be quarried to support the most diverse views, he hoped in the Retractationes to give them, as it were, the first spin.
Augustine was fascinated by the "words" of the Bible. "My heart is much exercised by the pounding of the words of your Holy Scripture," he wrote. And it was the words of the Bible that often set his pen moving. Words such as:
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
God “has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he
wills.”
The metaphor for his most ambitious book, what he called Magnum opus et arduum, the City of God, is taken directly from the psalms: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most high.”
Even as an old man, the Scriptures continued to reshape his thinking. As he reread the history of the kings of Israel, what impressed him most was “the manner in which the hidden ways of God had caused the most reasonable policies to miscarry,” as Peter Brown, Augustine’s biographer, has written. It was this aspect of Augustine’s thought that attracted Reinhold Niebuhr, the distinguished Protestant theologian, who drew on Augustine to forge a view of political realism. Niebuhr, in turn, influenced thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan. Arthur Schlesinger once wrote that Niebuhr "persuaded me and many of my contemporaries that [belief in] original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility."
His Confessions belongs on a shelf with the ten or twelve most influential classics of Western literature, along with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear--writings that must be part of the formation of any educated person. Like all classics it is it is a work to be read again and again, a book that is ever new as one opens its pages at different stages in one’s life.
Though the Confessions is the work of Augustine most widely read today, the City of God had an enormous impact on medieval thinkers. According to his biographer, Einhard Charlemagne took great pleasure in having the City of God read aloud to him. This is a most improbable scene, given the density of the work, and one wonders whether what pleased the king most was the sound of the Latin words. For the early medievals, however, the book helped to define the new Christian culture that was being built in northern Europe in the wake of the great missionary effort among the Germanic peoples.
For moderns the City of God has often been read as an overtly political tract, a meditation on the darkness that attends efforts to build a just society. Augustine’s realism tempered dreams that human beings, guided by reason, could construct a lasting city in this world. Yet Augustine knew that the Church had a stake in “things relevant to mortal life,” as he put it. One of the most powerful images in the book is of a judge who realizes that in sentencing a condemned criminal he may be punishing an innocent man out of lack of knowledge. Augustine asks, “Will the judge take his seat, or will he lack the courage to judge?” He will sit, says Augustine, "for the claims of human society constrain him and draw him to this duty," all the while realizing that he may be acting unjustly.
Augustine revolutionized our understanding of the self, as the book by the philosopher Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self showed. For Augustine, the inner life was the most important thing about being human. “Do not go outward, return within yourself. In the inward person dwells truth.” This turning to oneself was not simply moral, but theological. The principal route to God is not through the domain of things--the beautiful and ordered world--but through the “in” of ourselves. The light of God is not just “out there” illuminating the order of being; it is also an inner light. For Augustine the turn to the self, adopting the first person standpoint, was crucial to our access to a higher condition--because it is a step on the way back to God. He inaugurated a new line of development in the understanding of the human person that has been formative for Western culture.
Augustine taught Christians to speak about the heart and the affections. Love is a form of desire, eros, the yearning, the movement, the energy that draws human beings to God. “You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love” he wrote in the Confessions. It is love that lifts us to God. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards; we grow red hot and ascend.” In a revealing phrase in his book on The Trinity, he says that “love is more effective than the will.” “There is nothing, even the hardness of iron, which the fire of love cannot subdue. And when the mind is carried up to God in this love, it will soar . . . with beautiful wings . . . to the embrace of God.”
At the same time, he is among the most rigorously intellectual of religious thinkers. He could not conceive of Christian faith apart from the quest for intelligibility. The truths of Christianity did not have to be explained away to be comprehensible, but they did need to be explained. Mature faith is nurtured on the solid meat of reasoning. For Augustine, thinking was part of believing: “No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable. . . . Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought. . . . Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking.”
It is obvious that one cannot even begin to do justice to such a person in one lecture. But “commerce with the ancients,” as Matthew Arnold said, “produces in those who constantly practice it a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment.” In that spirit, then, let me offer a few observations.
Augustine was born in 354 A.D. in the Roman province of Numidia (Tunisia) of a Christian mother and non-Christian father. His parents were not wealthy but he did receive a classical education, i.e. rhetorical education, thanks to support of a local dignitary. At the age of nineteen he was attracted to philosophy through reading Cicero's Hortensius. Characteristically he said of the book, “It changed my feelings.” That is, it changed what he loved.
Augustine became a Manichean and remained attached to this sect for nine years. The Manichees attracted proud, clever, intelligent, argumentative young men. But in time he grew weary of their sophistry and was disappointed that one of their acclaimed thinkers could not give him the answers he sought. He was even “ignorant of the liberal arts,” adds Augustine.
He moved to Rome where he taught rhetoric. From there he went on to Milan where he heard the bishop of the city, Ambrose, a skilled orator, preach. His dazzling use of Latin delighted and excited Augustine. He also learned from Ambrose how to read the Bible. Through Ambrose the example of others, notably a venerable neo-Platonist philosopher who had recently been baptized, and the witness of his devout mother Monica, Augustine enrolled as a catechumen and was baptized by Ambrose on Easter, 387.
While preparing to sail back to North Africa, his mother died in Ostia. Shortly before her death he had a mystical vision--one of the most affecting parts of the Confessions--and he resolved to found a monastery in his native country. But several years later on a trip to Hippo Regius, a provincial city on the Mediterranean coast (in present day Algeria), he was summarily ordained a priest by popular acclaim. He wept as he was ordained, but the people thought that was because he wanted to be a bishop! However, breaking with custom, his bishop allowed him to preach, and within two years he was expounding the creed to bishops. He went into retirement to study the Scriptures and then took up his duties as a priest. In 395 he was made bishop of Hippo and for the next thirty-five years (he died in 430) Augustine was bishop of a provincial city on the coast of North Africa.
Three major controversies occupied him during his lifetime, with the Manichees over the nature of evil and the created world, with the Donatists on the nature of the Church, and with Pelagius over grace. But these disputes are widely discussed in surveys of Augustine’s thought and for this audience I thought it might be more interesting to focus on other topics: his essay on marriage, his two essays on lying, and close with remarks on the City of God.
Augustine wrote On the Good of Marriage, or in the most recent English translation, “The Excellence of Marriage.” It is a relatively early work, written in response to the enthusiasm for the ascetic life that had swept across the Christian world in the late fourth century. Though Augustine was celibate and acknowledged the superiority of celibacy to marriage--he wrote a companion piece, On Virginity--he thought the extremism of certain writers, including Jerome, called for a defense of marriage.
De bono conjugali, as the little-known essay is called in Latin, was written l,600 years ago, yet so clearly and pointedly does it address a topic that is often in the headlines of the daily newspapers today that it could have been written yesterday. The treatise sets forth three “goods” or purposes of marriage, the first of which is procreation
In my survey course on the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia, I always have students read this work. By the time they study it, they have also read the Confessions and sense that Augustine is a man of depth and wisdom. The first few times I assigned the treatise to nineteen- to twenty-year-olds, I was surprised by the reaction. It was as though they were reading something quite revolutionary. I realized that for many this was the first time anyone in authority, someone they respected and admired--a parent, a teacher, a pastor--had ever said to them that marriage is first about having children, not primarily about love or intimacy or companionship.
Yet, what is remarkable about the treatise is that Augustine does not make procreation the only good of marriage. He recognizes that marriage is much more than an instrument to bring children into the world. It also has a social purpose, for it creates a union of persons based on kinship and the bond of a blood relationship. In fact, it is on this note that Augustine begins the treatise: “Human nature,” he writes, “is a social entity,” and the “first natural bond of human society is that of husband and wife,” which means that the “the bond of society is found in its children.” Marriage, in Augustine’s view, is a basic building block of human society, for continuity from one generation to another is linked inextricably to the family. Without marriage, a society will be neither healthy nor stable nor enduring.
Augustine also recognized that there was a “natural companionship between the sexes.” And it was this natural sociability based on sex that makes it possible to speak of marriage even when children are not involved--for example in the case of the elderly or those who have lost their children or had no children. Augustine’s term for this is “fidelity,” the bond between a man and woman based on trust, respect, and mutual obligation. He bases this notion of fidelity on a passage from St. Paul: “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but her husband does; and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but his wife does.” Fidelity is a “good” because it marks a relation that is sexual, permanent, and monogamous.
This, in turn, leads him to a third good, marriage as a sign, what he calls sacramentum, i.e. mystery, that “signifies the unity of all of us who will one day be subject to God in the heavenly city.” Augustine is not speaking about marriage as a sacrament in the later sense, but marriage as a symbol whose meaning transcends the relation between individuals.
His trained sensibility led him to a nuanced understanding of marriage. Though procreation is the first good, it is not the only good. Bringing children into the world is part of a much larger social good. Bound by feelings of kinship, men and women form a union that nurtures community and links the generations. The essay remains significant because it shows that one can address a fundamental human and societal question with philosophical intelligence, yet draw on a religious tradition that is grounded in sacred texts that are given.
Augustine wrote two treatises on lying and they are among his most original and forceful contributions to Western moral reasoning. Anyone who deals with the question of lying has to attend to Augustine’s arguments, notably his claim that lying is always wrong. As evidence of how current these treatises are, the philosopher Paul Griffiths recently published a book entitled Lying that is a careful exposition and defense of Augustine’s views on the topic. To drive home the enduring potency of Augustine’s thinking on lying, Griffiths puts him into discussion with an array of thinkers beginning with Plato and Aristotle, then early Christian writers Jerome and John Chrysostom, next Thomas Aquinas, and finally Immanuel Kant, John Henry Newman, and Friedrich Nietszche.
For Augustine lying had nothing to do with the truth or falsity of what is said. If you say something that is true or false and turn out to be wrong, you are deceived but have not lied. “No one,” writes Augustine, “who says something false that he takes to be true should be judged to be lying; for so far as he himself is concerned he does not deceive but is deceived. And neither should someone who has incautiously come to believe to be true what is false be accused of lying; he, rather is rash. No, so far as the person himself is concerned, he lies who says to be true what he takes to be false.” The lie has to do with a disjunction, a fissure between what you think is true and what you claim is true. The evil proper to lying, then, has to do with what is in one’s mind and heart. Its characteristic feature is duplicity, “one thing hidden in the heart and another ready on the tongue.”
The lie has to do with two things: truth and interiority. Truth, because it perverts language to serve some other purpose than communicating what is true; and interiority, because the decision of the person to set aside the truth and speak duplicitously begins within. Like all sin, lying begins in the heart. It is not the consequences of the lie that are morally significant--though that is surely true with some lies--but the inner disposition of the liar.
For other writers, e.g. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, the wrong in lying has to do chiefly with the effects. Thomas, who knew Augustine’s treatises and shared many of his ideas, located the evil of lying primarily in the realm of justice. It was the damage caused by the lie that was pernicious. In other words, what is harmful about the lie is external to the lie itself. Similar arguments were set forth by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. Kant agreed with Augustine on many points about lying, in particular that lying had to do with duplicity, but he placed the accent elsewhere--on the duties one owes to others. Lying undermines trust and hence weakens the bonds with others that make social intercourse possible.
For Augustine, lying brings about a rupture between the speaker and God. Mendacity prostitutes a precious gift of God, speech, the vehicle by which we are able to communicate with one another, to express our deepest thoughts and feelings, to enter into the mind of another person, to speak the truth to one another. Because God is truth and the source of truth, lying is a turning to self and away from God, an offense against the creator, speech driven by distorted desire. Lying offends against God. Here, too, Augustine’s contribution to the discussion, though ancient, remains fresh because he combines intelligent moral reasoning with a distinctly theological perspective.
The City of God, Augustine’s most influential work, was begun after 410 when a Gothic army under the leadership of Alaric entered Rome, sacked the city, and terrorized the inhabitants. Rome, the city that had stood for a thousand years, the symbol of security and permanence, the emblem of an entire way of life, was humbled. "If Rome can perish," wrote Jerome, "what can be safe."
Augustine reacts as a Christian and as a Roman. In one of his sermons he speaks of the “city that had given us birth according to the flesh,” to which he added, “Thanks be to God.” With the fall of Rome he felt that the world he inhabited could no longer be taken for granted. The language he loved, the writers he admired, the history he remembered--all were threatened. But the sack of Rome also heightened the tensions between Christians and pagans. For critics had seized the moment to renew attacks on the Church. Rome, it was claimed, had stood for more than a thousand years because it served the traditional gods. Now with the advent of Christianity, the gods had removed their protecting hand and the city was plundered by the barbarians.
With the coming of Constantine, some Christians, notably Eusebius, envisioned the destiny of Rome and of the Church converging. Rome was a benefactor to Christ and Christ a blessing to Rome. In the fourth century the two joined hands and the "whole world has become a choir praising Christ," as Prudentius, the first great Christian poet, had it.
As a young man, Augustine was comfortable with the Eusebian model, but as the years passed he began to have doubts about this happy marriage. His way of severing the ties between the two was to talk of two cities rather than one: the earthly city and the city of God, by which he meant those who worshipped the one God. He recognized that the two cities were inextricably bound up with each other; yet they had different goals and ends.
Accordingly in the City of God, Augustine offers no theory of political life, no analysis of the ends of the earthly city, other than to say that it strives to create such peace that will allow human beings to make use of the things relevant to this earthly life. There is no Christian politics. Christian wisdom and political power may coalesce, but they remain distinct, cooperating but never merging. At the same time he argues that if a society is not invaded by visions of the eternal, it will be neither just nor enduring. Only if virtue is oriented to a goal higher than the state can it be truly virtuous. God can never be relegated to the periphery of life or consigned to the private world of individual belief. He wishes to redefine the realm of the public to make place for the spiritual, for God. A society that has no place for God will disintegrate into an amoral aggregate of competing, self-aggrandizing interests that are destructive of the commonwealth. In the end it will be enveloped in darkness.
An important theme in the City of God is Augustine’s criticism of the social or political utility of religion. This critique was directed against Roman writers such as Varro, a close friend of Cicero and an encyclopedist who wrote on philosophy, history, the arts, and religion. Varro believed that even if one did not believe in the gods, it was advantageous for the Republic to cultivate worship of the gods. If citizens believed in the gods they would be “bolder in undertaking mighty enterprise, and more energetic in action.” In other words, public worship was “advantageous [or useful] to the citizens.” The gods were to be venerated and worshipped for the benefits religion brought to society. By such worship men strive “to create happiness for themselves amidst the unhappiness of this life.”
Here, too, is an aspect of Augustine’s thinking that has particular resonance today. With the vibrancy and energy of religious life in this country it is tempting, especially in conservative circles, to defend religion in the name of its public utility. To be sure, there are benefits of religion, as the history of our nation attests, but promoting religion for some other end than the worship of God will over time weaken rather than strengthen the religious life. And Augustine would argue, if God does not receive his due, even the earthly city will be “devoid of true justice.”
But perhaps his point can be made more effectively by a contemporary, Leszek Kolakowski, who sounds an Augustinian note in his Modernity on Endless Trial.
“There is something alarmingly desperate in intellectuals who have no religious attachment, faith or loyalty proper and who insist on the irreplaceable educational and moral role of religion in our world and deplore its fragility, to which they themselves eminently bear witness. . . . I do not blame them . . . either for being irreligious or for asserting the crucial value of religious experience; I simply cannot persuade myself that their work might produce changes they believe desirable, because to spread faith, faith is needed and not an intellectual assertion of the social utility of faith.”
The City of God is a book about “true religion,” to use the title of one of Augustine’s early writings. It is not an essay in political philosophy. Its prime actor is the God of the Bible and the end for which the city of God yearns will be brought to perfection only by God at the end of time. “The reward of virtue will be God himself.”
But the City of God is not an ideal like Plato’s republic. It is found in a community that exists in time yet is older than national communities, a fellowship that draws its citizens into a shared public life with its distinctive rituals, calendar, practices, institutions, language, architecture, art; in short, another city. And it serves society best by being unapologetically itself and bearing witness to the justice that alone makes human community possible: the justice due God. The greatest gift the Church can give society is a glimpse, however, fleeting of another city, where the angels keep festival before the face of God. The significance of Augustine’s great work for political thought, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has reminded us, “lies not so much in what it had to be say about the political order, but primarily in what it had to say about the religious order. The attempt of Christians to understand their own group life provided a new and sorely needed source of ideas for Western political thought. Christianity succeeded where the Hellenistic and late classical philosophies had failed, because it put forward a new and powerful idea of community which recalled men [and women] to a life of meaningful participation.”
In September 426, when Augustine was seventy-two years old, he made the solemn decision to hand over his responsibilities as bishop to a new successor, Eraclius. In a sermon preached on that occasion he said:
“In this life we are all bound to die; and for everyone his last day is always uncertain. Yet, as babies, we can look forward to being boys, and, as boys, to youth, as youths, to being grown up, and as young men, to reaching our prime, and in our prime, to growing old. Whether this will happen is uncertain; but there is always something to look forward to. But an old man has no further stage of life before him. Because God wished it, I came to this town in my prime: I was a young man then, now I have grown old.”
Augustine died four years later as the Vandals were overrunning North Africa and the labor of a lifetime was about to go up in flames. A year after his death, Hippo was evacuated and burnt. After the Vandals--with a brief interegnum when the Byzantines were able to regain control of Carthage--came the Muslims. By the year 1000 there was only one bishop in North Africa and today the only Christianity in the region is the result of French colonial rule.
Augustine wanted to die alone and his biographer, Possidius, who had once lived in his monastery in Hippo and remained a close friend all his life, in an unforgettable passage, described Augustine’s last days in a biography written shortly after his death.
As Augustine lay dying, wrote Possidius, “he ordered those psalms of David which are specially penitential to be copied out [‘Have mercy on me according to thy steadfast love. . . . I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight’], and when he was very weak, he used to lie in bed facing the wall where the sheets of papers were put up, gazing at them and reading, and copiously and continually weeping as he read."
Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies.
