The late fourth and early fifth centuries produced a number of profound thinkers who had been brought up in the traditional world of classical learning, converted to Christianity, and then deployed their penetrating intellects in the service of the church. The hero of many of these men was the apostle Paul who enjoyed an important revival in the late fourth century. In Constantine’s day he had been honoured in Rome by no more than a shrine over the supposed place of his martyrdom. In the 380s this was transformed into a great basilica, San Paolo fuori le mure. Paul’s attraction lay in his stress on authority at a time of apparent social and political breakdown and he was used as an intellectual battering ram against the pagan elites who remained strong in Rome until early in the fifth century. His distaste of sexuality also appealed to the more ascetic Christians. He was especially important for Augustine to the extent that the scholar Paula Fredriksen has claimed that ‘much of western thought can be seen as one long response to Augustine’s Paul’.
An equally fervent supporter of Paul was John Chrysostom, ‘the golden-mouthed’ (c.347-407). John was born into the Greek-speaking elite of Antioch in Syria. From an early age he was such a gifted speaker that it was assumed that he would become a lawyer or civil servant like his father. However, he was baptized when 21 and then took to a life of solitude in the caves around Antioch. He emerged, his health per-
Manently damaged, with a loathing for finery and self-indulgence. Any hint of greed or arrogance aroused his anger and it was said that he would sternly fix his eye on the women in his congregation who appeared overdressed. His harshness was modified, however, by his concern for the poor of his congregations, many of whom welcomed his denunciations of the rich. His sermons were full of powerful imagery. ‘Do you pay such honour to your excrements as to receive them in a silver chamber pot when another man made in the image of God is perishing of cold?’ On Paul he told his congregations, ‘If I am regarded as a learned man, it’s not because I’m brainy. It’s simply because I have such a love for Paul that I have never left off reading him. He has taught me all that I need to know. And I want you to listen to what he has to teach you. You don’t need to do anything else [sic].’
Until he was 50 John served in Antioch, earning an empire-wide reputation as a preacher. However, Paul was not his only concern. It was during these years that he preached his eight sermons warning Christians against Judaism. The context appears to have been the continuing vigour of Judaism in Antioch and the readiness of Christians to attend synagogues. John’s invective bordered on the deranged and his sermons, translated into Latin and transferred to the west, later fuelled antiJewish hysteria in medieval Europe.
In 398 John was forced by the imperial family to accept the bishopric of Constantinople. It was an unhappy move. He was never at ease in the shadow of an opulent court, offended many by his habit of eating alone, and aroused the anger of many clergy through prurient insinuations about their sex lives. A determined attempt to unseat him by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria (who remained incensed by the elevation of Constantinople above his ancient see), proved successful when John forfeited any remaining support in the court by what appeared to be attacks on the worldliness of the empress Eudoxia. Only the poor remained loyal but their rioting in his favour was never likely to secure his survival. Finally he was exiled to a remote village on the coast of the Black Sea where he died in 407. (See J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ithaca, NY, 1998.)
John Chrysostom moved in a Christian world that was gradually being divided into Greek-speaking east and Latin-speaking west. Symbolically, an important moment came in the 380s when bishop Damasus of Rome ordered the use of Latin rather than Greek for the liturgy in the western empire on the grounds that Greek was no longer understood. As Greek became less widely spoken in the west, many of the works of the eastern church fathers now never reached Rome. A letter to an eastern contact survives from Augustine, whose Greek was limited, pleading for more translations.
This linguistic isolation was reinforced by the distance of Rome from the Greekspeaking Christian communities and the decline of the city as an administrative centre of the empire. The bishops of Rome were outraged when the Council of 381 affirmed that ‘the bishop of Constantinople has the privileges of honour after the bishop of Rome because it is the new Rome. Things were not helped by the administrative division between the eastern and western empires that became permanent in 395. Even if neither side was as yet prepared to recognize the fact, two distinct churches (later, of course, but not officially until 1054, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches) were in the process of emerging.
One of the last of the major Christian thinkers to be at home in both east and west was Jerome. Jerome had been born in the Balkans about 347 of Christian parents but by the age of 12 he was studying philosophy and rhetoric in Rome. He developed a profound love of classical authors and one of the most shattering events of his life was a dream in which God accused him of preferring Cicero to the Bible, for which failing he was flogged. He resolved never to read a pagan author again (though his letters remain full of classical allusions).
Jerome’s life was restless and tormented. He travelled incessantly and underwent periods of severe asceticism. In the words of Peter Brown, ‘the human body remained for Jerome a darkened forest, filled with the roaring of wild beasts, that could be controlled only by rigid codes of diet and by the strict avoidance of occasions for sexual attraction. His letters to adversaries are deeply vindictive. At the same time, however, he studied assiduously and mastered both Greek and Hebrew in addition to his native Latin. It was this breadth of knowledge that recommended him to bishop Damasus of Rome, who employed him first as his secretary (382-4) and then as the translator of the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Old and New Testaments into Latin.
A unified and authoritative translation had long been needed. There were all too many Latin translations of varying quality circulating in the western empire. Jerome faced formidable problems in achieving his task. In Rome his censorious personality and suspicion over a new translation made him so unpopular that after the death of Damasus he was forced to leave the city. The last thirty-four years of his life were spent in Bethlehem in a monastery and it was here that his translation was finally brought to a conclusion. At first it received little recognition but by the eighth century it was accepted by the church as the authoritative Latin version of the original texts. As the Vulgate (the ‘common version’) it lasted unchallenged in the Catholic church for centuries and remains one of the great achievements of early Christian scholarship. (The life and works are well covered in J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies, London and New York, 1975.)
It was to Jerome that Augustine sent his letter asking for more translations of the Greek Christian texts. Augustine had been born in Thagaste (modern Algeria) in 354, had studied rhetoric at Carthage thanks to the patronage of a family friend, and eventually been recommended to the post of the city orator in Milan. His mother was a Christian but Augustine had been drawn to Manichaeism, an austere sect based on the teachings of the Persian sage Mani that was sweeping the empire. In Milan, however, he moved in new directions after he had encountered Ambrose. Up to now he had found the scriptures shallow but Ambrose, himself a convert, of course, convinced him otherwise. Augustine’s studies of Plotinus (see above, p. 598) also helped consolidate his theological thinking. The moment of his conversion came after many doubtings when he heard the voice of a child asking him to take up the New Testament. He opened it at the words of Paul, ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.’ Suddenly he had found his true haven, in the church. Once he had renounced the satisfaction of his sexual desires for ever, he was able to be baptized. (His partner of many years, with whom he had had a son, was discarded.)
(For Augustine, there are excellent biographies by Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, updated edition, Berkeley and London, 2000, and Serge Lan-cel, St. Augustine, trans. Antonia Nevill, London, 2002. Studies in Augustine’s theology include Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, Oxford and New York, 2000, and John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptised, Cambridge and New York, 1994.)
After his conversion and baptism, Augustine returned to his native Africa and was pressurized into becoming bishop of Hippo, where he remained until his death in 430. Hippo was a provincial town, if a prosperous one, and there were 700 other similar bishoprics in the provinces of Africa, so this was hardly a prestigious office. Soon Augustine took to writing. He detailed the experiences leading to his conversion in the Confessions, a brilliant account of a tortured mind searching for absolute peace and perhaps the first great autobiography in western literature. In the tradition of Paul, who had also been preoccupied by his sinfulness, Augustine presents himself as a deeply unworthy man, tormented by his sexuality and harried, although he took some time to recognize the fact, by the looming power of God.
I broke your lawful bounds and did not escape your lash. For what man can escape it? You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to lead me on to look for others unallied with pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for you teach us by inflicting pain, you smite so you may heal and you kill us so that we may not die away from you. (Translation: R. Pine-Coffin)
Augustine came to accept that God’s love becomes available to sinners only when they make complete submission to him.
While he preferred the life of the monk, Augustine cared deeply about the needs of the ordinary Christians who thronged his churches and was more sensitive than most church leaders to their earthly desires. (He was prepared, for instance, to accept sexuality as an intrinsic part of marriage.) It was his determination to be heard (several hundred of his sermons survive) that gave him his prestige. In the remaining years of his life, he applied the brilliance and clarity of his mind to some of the major theological issues of the day. Perhaps the most famous was the dispute with Pelagius, an ascetic who may have been of British birth, over the nature of free will. (The Pelagian controversy is explored at length in Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle, chapters 19-22.)
Pelagius argued that each individual had the freedom to follow God’s will or not. The hope, of course, was that he or she would choose to aim for a life of perfection, with Christ as the model. Pelagius insisted that such perfection was possible through the exercise of free and unhampered will and he expected that the committed Christian would adopt an ascetic life. If so he could achieve salvation for himself. Augustine, on the other hand, developed a different approach, one that had only been dimly formulated before his time. This was the view that, as a result of Adam and Eve’s transgressions in the Garden of Eden, God had burdened all human beings with an ‘original sin’ which was passed on from generation to generation. The concept of original sin had never been mentioned by Jesus and Augustine relied on one verse from St Paul (Romans 5: 12) for support. The consequences of the sin were, however, profound. Even the power of human reason, suggested Augustine, had been reduced to a spark and as a result (as Plato would have agreed) human beings were drawn to the earthly pleasures of the world. Only the grace of God could liberate them from the degradation of these pleasures. This grace could be passed on through the sacraments, especially those of baptism and the Eucharist, but it was always a gift from God, not the right of any individual, however good his or her life. This was a direct challenge to Pelagius’ optimism that all could be saved if they themselves wished it.
Augustine’s God was, therefore, selective. Only a few would be saved. While the first Christians had been convinced of their salvation in heaven, now none of them could be sure of it. This left uncomfortable questions to be resolved. Was it possible to live a good life and still be deprived of the grace of God? What would happen to those who did not receive this grace or who were never baptized? When challenged by his opponents over what would happen to the souls of babies who had died before they were baptized Augustine was forced to accept that their original sin left them unprotected and they could never be admitted to heaven. Independently Augustine also came to reject Origen’s view that the concept of eternal punishment was incompatible with the goodness of God and became one of the foremost defenders of a hell where punishment would be harsh and eternal. There would be no mercy for those to whom the grace of God was not extended. (Augustine’s thoughts on these issues were spelled out relentlessly in the closing chapters of his The City of God.)
Augustine’s concept of original sin was, in the early fifth century, a minority view held only by some of his fellow bishops in north Africa. As another opponent, Julian of Eclanum (a town near Benevento, Italy), commented, the whole idea was improbable, making it seem as if the devil, not a loving God, had created man. What was remarkable, however, was that through sheer persistence and intellectual energy (and, his opponents suggested, some cleverly targeted bribery) Augustine managed to get his view accepted as the official doctrine of the western church after the emperor Honorius insisted the Italian bishops adopt it. Pelagius was condemned and Julian, one of the most attractive and intellectually sophisticated bishops of his day, was hounded out of his bishopric and forced to move to the east. The concept of original sin received no support elsewhere. It never travelled to the east (Augustine wrote only in Latin), nor was it adopted by any other monotheistic religion.
The Pelagian debate was an unhappy one in the history of the church. It was true that the life of perfection that Pelagius insisted on would have been beyond most believers but the theological arguments over the place of free will in human behaviour were immensely important ones and deserved to be debated openly. Augustine’s approach, that the freedom of will that had existed, for a brief moment, in Adam had been largely extinguished by his sin, was highly speculative. Some kind of balanced solution between the two extremes might have been found, but the high-handed behaviour of Augustine and his demonization of his opponents made this impossible. Already much of the vitality of theological debate had been sapped by the edicts of Theodosius, but now the Pelagian dispute made nonsense of the idea of theology making progress through reasoned discourse.
Augustine also made an important contribution to the definition of ‘the Church’ (The capital ‘C’ is used to note Augustine’s belief that there was one single institution that truly represented the Christian community, a view adopted, of course, by the medieval Catholic Church.) Joining the Church and receiving its sacraments presumably increased the chance of receiving the gift of God’s grace but the logic of Augustine’s views suggested that membership of the Church did not guarantee salvation and that those who did not join the Church were not necessarily deprived of it. The Church, however, had a duty to ensure that all who wished to join and receive the benefits of its sacraments could do so. Augustine’s main opponents here were the Donatists (still a majority of the Christians in Hippo and north Africa as a whole), who continued to insist that the state church had been fatally contaminated by accepting back those members who had lapsed during the persecutions and that they were right to keep their own Christians from joining it.
To counter this attack Augustine argued that the validity of his Church did not depend on the worthiness of its members. The sacrament of baptism given by an unworthy priest was still valid in the eyes of God. It followed that the Donatists, through their intransigence, were depriving those who might be eligible for God’s grace from receiving it through the sacraments. Therefore it was legitimate to destroy the sect and release its followers to their proper home in the Church. This approach reinforced the view taken by Theodosius and Ambrose, that the orthodox Christianity, backed by the state, had the right to deal with heresy. Although Augustine cautioned restraint in the methods employed against heretics, his words were used in later centuries to justify the persecutions of medieval and Reformation Europe. (Again, see Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, Cambridge, 2011.)
Augustine’s last major work, The City of God, was prompted by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 (see Chapter 34). Although the physical damage was not immense (and the Christian Visigoths left the city’s churches untouched), the psychological shock certainly was. It seemed as if the world as all had known it was at an end. Much of the work is concerned with pointing out the failure of traditional Roman religion to save the city or to provide anything more than a self-glorification of the state. Augustine argued that the true ‘city’ was, instead, that inhabited by the believers loved by God, a community that extended from earth into heaven. An earthly city, even one so great as Rome, was only a pale reflection of the heavenly one and it was to the heavenly city that the aspirations of men and women must be directed. The fall of Rome was thus of little significance in the eyes of God. In The City of God, Augustine makes a dramatic break with the Graeco-Roman conception of the city as the context in which human beings achieve their highest state of being. Now the city is no more than a backdrop to their lives although the Church can hope that it will be given tolerance. In his description of society Augustine comes across as a social conservative, supporting traditional hierarchies and slavery and cynical about the possibilities of social progress. Perhaps more than any other Christian thinker, Augustine is responsible for the alliance of the churches with the authority figures of the day that has risked eclipsing the more radical message of the Gospels.
Augustine’s influence on Christian theology was profound. His writing and sermons had a clarity and majesty that was unrivalled. His mind penetrated every nook and cranny of Christian thought. Much of his writing, in Book IX of The Confessions, for instance, where his last conversations with his mother are recorded, is deeply moving. He was not a cold intellectual but a human being acutely aware of the power of his emotional feelings. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for him in his agonizing searches for his God. Ultimately, however, his message was a chilling one. There was no salvation without divine grace and this could not necessarily be gained through living a ‘good’ life. His conflict with Pelagius over free will was resolved in his favour but only after an aggressive campaign, as much political as theological, had silenced his opponents. He justified the right of his Church to prosecute heretics and to call on the state to support it. Only those who are convinced that divine grace is theirs and who through it have liberated themselves from their body’s desires can read his works with total ease. The legacy of Augustine remains controversial not least because he was given a status by the medieval church that threatened the priority of the Gospels as a source of faith and theology.
World History
