Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (52 page)

Augustine starts with a consideration of Roman history and ridicules the old gods, but his preoccupation quickly becomes wider than the single disaster for Rome, or even the whole canvas of Roman history. It turns to the problem at the centre of Augustine's thought: what is the nature and cause of evil, and how does it relate to God's majesty and all-powerful goodness? For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, 'the loss of good', since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, though to understand why this should happen is 'like trying to see darkness or hear silence'.
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It was understandable that the ex-Manichee should thus distance himself from the notion previously at the centre of his belief, that evil was a positive force constantly struggling for mastery with the force of light, but as a definition of evil it has often been criticized. On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau or the killing fields of Campuchea, it is difficult not to feel that, in human experience at least, pure evil is more than pure nothingness; nor does Augustine seek to explain how a being created flawless comes to turn towards evil - in effect, to create it from nothing.
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Only halfway through the work, at the end of fourteen books, does Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of two cities: 'the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord'.
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All the institutions which we know form part of a struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history. If this is so, the idea of a Christian empire such as Eusebius of Caesarea had envisaged can never be a perfect reality on earth. No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, as biblical history itself demonstrated from the time of the first murderer: 'Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.' Though this remains his principle, Augustine is occasionally incautious in expression, and does indeed identify the visible Church in the world with the Heavenly City.
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Ironically, much of the influence of
The City of God
over the next thousand years came from the eagerness of medieval churchmen to expand on this identification in their efforts to make the Church supreme on earth, equating the earthly city with opponents of ecclesiastical power like some of the Holy Roman Emperors.

Yet another side of Augustine's energies was occupied in the same years with a fierce controversy over the teachings of a British monk called Pelagius.
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Upper-class circles in Rome, newly Christianized at the end of the fourth century, were anxious for spiritual direction and a number of 'holy men' hastened to supply the demand. After the abrupt departure of Jerome in 384, Pelagius had few major rivals. A central concern for him and his spiritual charges was to deal with the new established status of Christianity: were the affluent people among whom Pelagius ministered simply joining the Church as an easy option, without any real sense that they must transform their lives in the process?
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Pelagius was particularly concerned at what he read of the earlier works of Augustine: Augustine's preoccupation with God's majesty seemed to leave humankind helpless puppets who could easily abandon all responsibility for their conduct. Augustine and other like-minded contemporaries followed thoughts of Tertullian two centuries before and talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt inherited from Adam which they termed 'original sin'. This likewise seemed to Pelagius to provide a false excuse for Christians passively to avoid making any moral effort. He was determined to say that our God-given natures are not so completely corrupt that we can do nothing towards our own salvation: 'That we are able to see with our eyes is no power of ours; but it is in our power that we make a good or a bad use of our eyes . . . the fact that we have the power of accomplishing every good thing by action, speech and thought comes from him who has endowed us with this possibility, and also assists it.'
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The consequence was that Pelagius believed that the nature of a 'Holy Church' was based on the holiness of its members: exactly what the Donatists said about the Church, and so particularly liable to arouse Augustine's fury.
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As the controversy developed, Pelagius's followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose. We can choose to turn to God. We have free will. Pelagius's views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine's view of our fallen state. This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God. The world which he would have constructed on these principles would have been one vast monastery.
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It would have been impossible to sustain the mixed human society of vice and virtue which Augustine presents in the 'City of God', where no Christian has the right to avoid everyday civic responsibilities in this fallen world, even to be a magistrate who is responsible for executing other human beings, precisely because we are all caught up in the consequences of Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden. Augustine's pessimism started as realism, the realism of a bishop protecting his flock amid the mess of the world. It is worth noticing that his first denunciations of Pelagius's theology came not in tracts written for fellow intellectuals, but in sermons for his own congregation.
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The sack of Rome in 410 produced a scatter of refugees throughout the Mediterranean and this began spreading the dispute beyond Pelagius's Roman circle. One enthusiastic follower of Pelagius, a lawyer named Celestius, arrived in North Africa and began expounding Pelagius's views to an extreme point where he left no possibility of affirming original sin. So he said that there was no sin to remit in baptism: 'sin is not born with a man, it is subsequently committed by the man; for it is shown to be a fault, not of nature, but of the human will'.
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There could not have been a more sensitive issue to choose in North Africa, where much of the argument between Catholics and Donatists had centred on both sides' claim to be the true heir of Cyprian's third-century teaching on baptism as the only way to gain salvation. It was these statements of Celestius which first provoked Augustine's fury against the group of propositions which came to be labelled as Pelagianism; his relations with Pelagius himself did not descend to the same bitterness. Over the next few years, a complicated series of political moves and countermoves raised the temperature to new heights; Augustine's crusade against the Pelagians eventually resulted in their defeat and the dismissal from Church office of all their highly placed supporters.

In the process, Augustine's thoughts about the nature of grace and salvation were pushed to ever more extreme positions, which can be traced both through
The City of God
and the long series of tracts which he wrote attacking Pelagian thought. Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God's grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace. God has made the decision before all time, so some are foreordained to be saved through grace - a predestined group of the elect. The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam's original fall, in which we all have a part through original sin: Augustine repeatedly uses the terrible word 'lump' (
massa
) to describe humanity in its state of loss. It is a word to which he often returned, associating it with Latin words for 'loss', 'sin', 'filth'.
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There was much criticism of this theology of grace at the time, and it has alternately repelled and fascinated both Catholic and Protestant down to the present day. One of Augustine's modern admirers and biographers, having wrestled with the man for a lifetime, is prepared bluntly to say that 'Augustinian predestination is not the doctrine of the Church but only the opinion of a distinguished Catholic theologian.'
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Western theologians, Catholic and Protestant, would do well to ponder that. Eastern theologians, so influenced by the Eastern monastic tradition of spiritual endeavour which encompasses both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, have never found Augustine's approach to grace congenial. Contemporary opponents, in particular the clever and outspoken Pelagian aristocrat Julian, Bishop of Eclanum, pointed to Augustine's personal history and his involvement with the Manichees, with their dualist belief in the eternal struggle between equally balanced forces of good and evil.
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Such critics said that this was the origin of both Augustine's pessimistic view of human nature and his emphasis on the role of sexual reproduction in transmitting the Fall.

It would probably do more justice to Augustine to say that he was heir to the world-denying impulses of Platonists and Stoics. Augustine's early grounding in Neoplatonism undoubtedly stayed with him; references to the heritage of Plato (of whose actual works he had in fact read little), and Platonic modes of thought, shape much of his writing. Amid many approving references to Plato in
The City of God
, he can assert at length that Platonists are near-Christians; 'that is why we rate the Platonists above the rest of the philosophers'.
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This helps explain why Plato remained close to the heart of Christian thinking through the medieval period, even when Christian thinkers began to be excited by their rediscovery of many lost works of Aristotle during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398-9). Augustine did nothing to discourage Christians seeing God through Neoplatonic eyes. God in Platonic mode was transcendent, other, remote. When his image appeared in mosaic or painting, characteristically as the resurrected Christ the Judge of the Last Days, dominating a church building from the ceiling of the apse behind the altar in front of congregation and clergy, it was as a monarch whose stern gaze transfixed the viewer in awe, just as an earthly emperor would do on formal occasions.

That created all the more need for the Church to recognize a myriad of courtiers who could intercede with their imperial Saviour for ordinary humans seeking salvation or help in their everyday lives. These were the saints. Their ranks were increasingly extended beyond the ranks of the martyrs from persecution times, who had been honoured since the second century in pilgrimage centres such as that of St Peter in Rome. Now the martyrs were joined by a growing array of hermits, monks, even bishops, although not many people living their lives as layfolk in the everyday world were thus honoured. As we have noted when encountering fourth-century Christians worshipping in their new basilican churches (see pp. 197-9), the Court of Heaven with its hierarchy of angels and saints looked rather like the Court of Constantinople or Ravenna. People needed patrons in this world to get things done or merely to survive, and it was natural for them to assume that they would need them in the next world too. Moreover, friendship,
amicitia
, was a prominent aristocratic value for Romans, and it would be easy and attractive to see a saint as a useful friend in Heaven as well as a patron.
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The convenience of such saint-patrons was that their demands were likely to be infrequent, while their good turns could be called on at any time. Sometimes the growth of belief in the saints has been seen as a superstition of the ignorant or half-converted, a stealthy return of the old gods in saintly disguise: this was a favourite theme of some humanists and Protestant reformers in the sixteenth-century West. In fact it is a logical outcome of the Platonic cast of Augustine's theology, and an echo of the hierarchies which Plato and his admirers saw as existing in the cosmos around the supreme God. It is no aberration that the majestic literary architecture of
The City of God
makes space in its final book for a series of accounts of contemporary miracles associated with the saints.
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Least openly controversial in form among Augustine's major works, but ultimately the source of more ecclesiastical conflict than anything else that he wrote, was his treatise on the Trinity, the most profound study of this central enigma of Christian faith which the Latin West had yet produced. Begun around 400, it was written in consciousness that debate on the Trinity in the East had in some measure been resolved. Augustine had an imperfect knowledge of the great clashes of the previous decades in the East about the Trinity, knowing nothing, for instance (and perhaps unfortunately), of the Council of Constantinople of 381 or the creed which it created - but he may have had some Latin translations of Gregory of Nazianzus's important Trinitarian discussions in Greek.
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Whatever the source, he was inspired to develop a defence of the doctrine of three equal persons in one substance, which in its subtlety and daring both shaped the Western Church's thinking and helped to alienate Eastern Christians from the West.

Despite his increasing insistence on the fallen nature of humanity, Augustine discerned within humans an image of the Trinity, or at least analogies by which fallen humans might understand. First, Father, Son and Spirit could be represented respectively by three aspects of human consciousness:

the mind itself, its knowledge which is at once its offspring and self-derived 'word', and thirdly love. These three are one, and one single substance. The mind is no greater than its offspring, when its self-knowledge is equal to its being; nor than its love, when its self-love is equal to its knowledge and to its being.