Doctor of the Church (354-430)
Augustine was born in 354 in Tagaste, a modest Roman community in a river valley 40 miles (64 km) from the Mediterranean coast in Africa, near the point where the veneer of Roman civilization thinned out in the highlands of Numidia (present day Algeria). Augustine’s parents, Patricius and St. Monica (discussed in yesterday’s Daily Reflection), were of the respectable class of Roman society, owned some land, and perhaps as many as 10 European slaves. Even so, at times their finances were stretched thin. They managed, sometimes on borrowed money, to acquire a first-class education for Augustine, and, although he had at least one brother and one sister, he seems to have been the only child sent off to be educated. He studied first in Tagaste, then in the nearby university town of Madauros, and finally at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa. After a brief stint teaching in Tagaste, he returned to Carthage to teach rhetoric, the premier science for the Roman gentleman, and he was evidently very good at it.
The story of his early life is exceedingly well known. Augustine’s Confessions recounts that early life. The story is told with a sophisticated purpose, is highly selective in its choice of incidents, and theological in its structure. The goal of the book was self-justification and self-creation. None of the handful of Augustine’s contemporaries known to have read Confessions was persuaded by its narrative of youthful dissipation turned to austere maturity. Even so, Confessions was modestly successful in Augustine’s lifetime and has been triumphant ever since, defining his life on his own terms.
For Augustine, the defining moment of his life was his religious conversion to an intense and highly individual form of Christianity. He dated this experience to his time in Milan. Augustine was enrolled as a pre-baptismal candidate in the Christian church as a young child, and at various points in his life he considered baptism but deferred out of prudence. (In that age, before the prevalence of infant baptism, it was common for baptism to be delayed until the hour of death and then used to wash away a lifetime of sins.) His classical education was supplemented by a curious but dismissive reading of the Christian Scriptures, but he then fell in with the Manichaeans, who believed in an elaborate dualistic cosmology described by the struggle between a good, spiritual world, and an evil material world. Augustine enjoyed their company and their polemics for most of a decade. He sheltered himself with them and used them for political influence even after he claimed to have dissociated himself from their beliefs. He abandoned them entirely when he met St. Ambrose who was making a name for himself as a champion of orthodoxy. Augustine found that orthodoxy was satisfactory to him as something a gentleman could practice.
When Augustine accepted baptism at the hands of Ambrose in 387, thereby joining the religion of his mother to the cultural practices of his father, he managed to make it a Christianity of his own. To some extent influenced by Ambrose, Augustine made his Christianity into a rival to and replacement for the austerity of ancient philosophers. Reading Plato’s texts and correctly understanding some of their doctrine, Augustine decided for himself that Christianity was possible only if he went further than any churchman said he was required to go. From the time of his conversion, he chose to remain celibate even though he was a layman and was under no requirement to do so. His life with a succession of lovers ended. Augustine accepted sexual abstinence as the price of his religion. After a long winter in retirement from the temptations of the city, he presented himself to Ambrose for baptism, then slipped away from Milan to pursue a singularly private life for the next four years. That this life ended in his entering the Christian clergy was something he did not foresee, and he should probably be believed when he says that he did not want it.
It was in office as Christian bishop of Hippo that he chose to tell the story of his life as a drama of fall and rise, sin and conversion, desolation and grace. He told that story at a time when his own credentials were suspect—his Donatist opponents, who believed that the Clergy must be without fault, thought it suspiciously self-serving, that he left Africa a raving Manichaean and returned meekly claiming to have been baptized into the official church. It is likely that his telling of the story was meant to reassure his followers and disarm his opponents.
For the next 20 years, from the 390s to the 410s, he was preoccupied with the struggle to make his own brand of Christianity prevail over all others in Africa. Augustine and his chief colleague in the official church, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage, fought a canny and relentless campaign against the Donatists with their books, with their recruitment of support among church leaders, and with careful appeal to Roman officialdom. In 411 the reigning emperor sent an official representative to Carthage to settle the quarrel. A public debate was held in three sessions during June 1–8 and was attended by hundreds of bishops on each side. The debate ended with a ruling in favor of the official church. The ensuing legal restrictions on Donatism decided the struggle in favor of Augustine’s position.
Approaching his 60th year, Augustine found a last great challenge for himself. Taking offense at the teachings of a traveling society preacher named Pelagius, Augustine gradually worked himself up to a polemical fever over Pelagianism that taught that original sin did not taint human nature and that mortal will was capable of choosing good or evil without divine aid or assistance. Other churchmen of the time were perplexed and reacted with some caution to Augustine, but he persisted, even reviving the battle against austere monks and dignified bishops. At the time of his death, he was at work on an attack against the last and most urbane of his opponents, the Italian bishop Julian of Eclanum.
Through these years, Augustine had carefully built for himself a reputation as a writer throughout Africa and beyond. His careful cultivation of selected correspondents had made his name known in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and the Middle East. His books were widely circulated throughout the Mediterranean world. In his last years he compiled a careful catalog of his books, annotating them with bristling defensiveness to deter charges of inconsistency.
His fame notwithstanding, Augustine died in 430 a failure. When he was a young man, it was inconceivable that the Pax Romana could fall, but in his last year he found himself and his fellow citizens of Hippo prisoners to a siege laid by a motley army of invaders who had swept into Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. The attacking Vandal forces were a mixed group of “barbarians” and adventurers searching for a home. Hippo fell shortly after Augustine’s death and Carthage not long after. The Vandals held to a more particularistic (belief that some, but not all people are elected to be redeemed) version of Christianity than any of those Augustine had lived with in Africa. They would rule in Africa for a century, until Roman forces sent from Constantinople invaded again and overthrew their regime. But Augustine’s legacy in his homeland was effectively terminated with his death. A revival of orthodox Christianity in the 6th century under the patronage of Constantinople was brought to an end in the 7th century when the Islamic invasions that permanently removed North Africa from the sphere of Christian influence until the thin Christianization of French colonialism in the 19th century.
But Augustine survived in his books. His habit of cataloging them served his surviving collaborators well. Somehow, essentially the whole of Augustine’s literary output survived and escaped Africa intact. The story was told that his mortal remains went to Sardinia and thence to Pavia (Italy), where a shrine was built that is said to house those remains. We celebrate his memorial on August 28th.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!