Augustine: What's Not to Like?

It happened again this week.

Twice.

Friends got whiff of the fact that I'm no fan of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and wondered how this could be. (It should be said that neither inquirer was — yet — a close friend. Or they would already have known.) One of them even sought to bribe me with beer to extract an explanation.

This must surely be unreasonable of me. Augustine was the man who wrote the Confessions — a heart-warming tale of his spiritual journey (as our schmaltzy, postmodern argot describes such things) and his conversion to Christian faith. Even in secular literary terms, the work is lauded as virtually founding the genre of autobiography. His City of God, meanwhile, is one of the foundation texts of the West, admired by many who profess no religious faith for its political insights alone.

Indeed, after the New Testament, Augustine continues to be read today more than any other Western Christian of the ancient world until (and I'm guessing wildly here) Thomas á Kempis (he of The Imitation of Christ) in the fifteenth century.

So — what's not to like?

Brief bio.

Born in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine became a wandering scholar and teacher. For many years, he was an adherent of Manichæism — a dualist religion (spirit good; matter, bad) with roots in Persia. Gradually, he became disillusioned with it and finally found, in the person of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (340-397), an exponent of Christianity whom he could respect.

Christianity was, during the fourth century, undergoing a seismic change in its theology — partly related to the ever-increasing influence upon it of Neoplatonic philosophy, but much more to Christianity's new social and political prestige. Gradually, the sectarian call to "come out from them and be separate" (and, from 64 AD to 313, actively persecuted) was becoming the established religion of the Roman Empire — a process largely complete by the last decades of Augustine's life.

Although in his early years as a Christian (he was converted in 386), Augustine adhered to traditional Christian doctrines (insofar as these had not already shifted under the impact of the new developments), in his later career he introduced a whole raft of innovations which would decisively shape the Catholic West — and, more than a thousand years later, the Protestant Reformers. Though his influence in the Orthodox East has always been negligible, in the West he is second in influence only to the apostle Paul — whose epistles are read largely through Augustine's spectacles.

Theologiser of Christendom

It is that later phase of his career which made him the great theologiser of Christendom (i.e., the unity of church and state whereby the Christianity became the compulsory religion). That is a 180˚ reversal of everything that the faith was set up to be — and that it actually had been for the first three centuries. So the theological changes to justify this turnabout were huge.

Now, as always, we need to remember Augustine's dates: 354-430. For the evaluation of ideas is worthless without attention to their historical context.

That means that, even when he was born, the transition from persecuted sect to required religion was well underway.

So his incredibly influential theological formulations — all of which tended to rationalise the naturalness of this new situation — were undertaken in his mature years, by which time the transition was all but complete.

I am not arguing that Augustine was an intellectual schemer, sitting at his desk, giving an evil chuckle, and saying "Ahaaa! I'll make it like so and so and so".

No. He just did what countless Christians have done since: taken their own situation as 'the given', and sought to justify or 'explain' it, using such Bible verses as seemed useful, or some philosophical argumentation ... or (if desperate) spiritual-sounding arm-twisting rhetoric.

(Take a VERY modern example of this process. Take 'Christian counselling'. It didn't exist until quite recently. Yet now you can take degree programs in it. What happened? In the 1980s, 'counselling' got BIG. (Highly individualistic society; sad Westerners with no friends; massively increased psychological fragility because of family and community breakdown....) So Christians come up with their own flavour. And ... presto! They 'find' it was 'there in the Bible' all along. So they create programs proving it, and how to do it. Now, I have no big problem with that activity. (Up to a point.) But I have a problem with claiming it's part of Christian teaching — but that no one knew it until about 1990.)

The specifics of Augustine's teaching:

1)      Justifying the persecution of people outside the Church

You can't have a compulsory church unless you're prepared to persecute those who won't comply. And so Augustine developed arguments to use force. Indeed, your very favourite quotation from Augustine is, in context, part of his case for persecution.

"Love, and do as you like": so sweet. It means, of course, that if you have God's love in your heart, you can do what you please and will not be sinning, because it is love that is motivating you.

But the sentence comes in the middle of his rationale for persecuting Donatist dissidents — out of love for them.^[1]

Elsewhere, Augustine made a parallel between Nebuchadnezzar's persecution of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Book of Daniel and the persecution to which the early church had been subjected from the time of Nero onwards:

"In the time of the apostles and martyrs we find fulfilled what was prefigured when the king’s practice was to force righteous and just individuals to worship his own image and sent them to a fiery death if they refused. Now, however [i.e., in Augustine's own time], we find fulfilled what was prefigured subsequently by him after being converted to the worship of the true God. In this period he decreed that anyone in his kingdom who blasphemed against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego should be punished appropriately.”^[2]

"Appropriately". Not even Augustine can quite bring himself to say what Nebuchadnezzar had said, or to imply that this should be repeated in the present:

"Therefore I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego be cut into pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rubble...." (Dan. 3:29)

2)      A Christian gloss on Cicero's 'just war theory'

There can be no such thing as a pacifist state — so, if Christianity is the state ideology, you need a Christian justification of war.

I have said much more on this matter in my post here. (But see also my 2007 book, Gods of War.)

Even so, Augustine's statements on the matter are hardly cautious:

"What is it about war, after all, that is blameworthy? Is it that people who will someday die anyway are killed in order that the victors might live in peace? That kind of objection is appropriate to a timid man, not a religious one."^[3]

And his assertion that, in the case of atrocities, "the sinful command involves the sovereign in guilt, whereas the soldier’s subordinate rôle makes him innocent" sounds very much like the concentration camp guard's plea: "I was only following orders!"^[4]

3)      Original sin

Most Christians think that this doctrine is part of orthodox Christianity itself.

But:

a) it isn't; and

b) they don't believe it anyway nowadays.

What most Christians now believe is simply that all people are sinful — which actually is orthodox Christianity. Augustine's view — actual 'original sin' — is that everybody is born in a state of damnation because they are sexually procreated.^[5] As he saw it, sex was intrinsically sinful. Worse, he thought this was why Christ was sinless — because he wasn't sexually conceived.^[6] (Heck: if that's the story — how can we insist that Christ is as fully human as we are?)

Early Christianity had taken its view on this subject from contemporary Judaism, as expressed, for example in 2 Baruch and 2 Esdras — both late first-century works.

According to the former,

“For although Adam sinned first and has brought death on all who were not in his own time, yet each of them who has been born from him has prepared for himself the coming torment. ... For his works have not taught you, nor has the artful work of his creation which has always existed persuaded you. Adam is, therefore, not the cause, except only for himself, but each of us has become his own Adam.”^[7]

According to the latter:

“O thou Adam, what hast thou done? For though it was thou that sinned, thou art not fallen alone, but we all that come of thee. For what profit is it unto us, if there be promised us an immortal time, whereas we have done the works that bring death?”^[8]

Perhaps taking a lead from this — which is exactly what one might expect — the Church Father Justin Martyr, writing ca. 160, is the first Christian writer since Paul to mention Adam and Eve: he says that we become sinners and bring death upon ourselves:

“The Christ has suffered to be crucified for the race of men who, since Adam, were fallen to the power of sin and death and were in the error of the serpent, each man committing evil by his own fault.

[T]he Holy Ghost reproaches men because they were made like God, free from suffering and death, provided that they kept His commandments, and were deemed deserving of the name of His sons, and yet they, becoming like Adam and Eve, work out death for themselves; ... all men are deemed worthy of becoming gods, and of having power to become sons of the Highest; [yet] shall be each by himself judged and condemned like Adam and Eve.”^[9]

There was no real precedent for Augustine's doctrine, and he himself struggled to find quotations — from Ambrose, and Cyprian of Carthage — that could be pressed into service to make his case. A good recent treatment of the subject is John Toews, The Story of Original Sin (Pickwick: 2013) — though see my review on the Amazon page for minor caveats.

4)      Sex

As we can see, Augustine thought sex always sinful — but tolerable within marriage only if there is a prospect of children being conceived.^[10] (I think we can see where modern Roman Catholic unhappiness about contraception comes from.) This also entails his negative view of women, whom he sees as inferior.^[11]

5)      Predestination

According to him, God makes everything that happens, happen.

He even wrote to one enquirer showing that the mass rape of Christian women at the hands of barbarian invaders had been permitted by God — and gave a whole bunch of reasons why He might have done this ... including the 'pride' of those women ... or even in anticipation of their possible pride in the future, had this not happened.^[12]

And with this, the traditional Christian theodicy — the explanation of how a good God can permit evil — falls to the ground.^[13] Irenæus and Tertullian, among others, had argued that evil was possible because God had made us free agents, and that we had used this freedom for evil. That is to say, that evil was a result of God's permission — not His will. Augustine was saying that God's permission and His will were one and the same: evil happened because God willed it.

Consistent with this, he saw the fall of Adam and Eve as having been preordained.^[14] This required that he posit two wills of God: his open will ("Do not do this") ... and his secret will, whereby a person is ordained to break that commandment.

And, of course, this entails the doctrine of individual predestination to salvation or damnation that we are familiar with from (much later) Calvinism. In all of this, Augustine was the first. Literally all Christians before him had taught — and taught assertively — that people had free will. And that this freedom was precisely why people were answerable before God.

Indeed, Augustine himself had taken this view during his early years as a Christian, and had a written a book "On the Freedom of the Will", asserting it. But it was the later Augustine who reversed himself entirely on this point and became the first Christian predestinarian. (Before this, only the heretics, like the gnostics, had been fatalists — a fact which had reinforced the Church Fathers to write in favour of free will.)

Since Augustine did not read Greek (!) and so did not write in it, his writings had almost no impact in the East — which is why no Eastern Orthodox have ever supported predestinarianism. (Actually, I did come across the exception to this rule some years ago in a reference that now, sadly, eludes me: some Orthodox fellow in the eighth century, I think. But he remains a total outlier.)

I give a fuller treatment of the issue of free will here. But one of the best treatments of the biblical material on the subject (as opposed to Augustine's views about it) is R. Forster and P. Marston, God's Strategy in Human History(2 vols. 2013).

6)      'Invisible church'

If individuals are predestined (rather than the 'in Christ' as a group — as the NT and the Early Church Fathers had maintained), then it follows that we cannot know who the saved are: they are known only to God.

But this was 'good' if what we want is a compulsory state church that embraces everyone. Because a believers' church is impossible. Individual predestination and its accompaniment, the 'invisible church', have made it so — because we can't even tell who the true believers are.

7)      The lostness of unbaptised infants

Infant baptism had been growing as a practice for some time before Augustine — though he himself and almost all of the other major fourth-century Christian writers were not baptised until they were adults. The reason for the rise of infant baptism is to do with changing theology around sacraments — which is a huge subject that would take us off course here. But the idea that unbaptised infants are lost acted as a mighty reinforcement of infant baptism — especially since, before modern times, so many babies died.^[15] It was an ideal way of ensuring, in an era before modern bureaucracies and birth certificates, that all were included within the compulsory church.

8)      cessation of the charismata

It is true that charismata were progressively less used with the passing of the centuries. But this was because the church was increasingly highly structured — both in terms of its people (one-man ministry; bishops etc.) and its services (liturgy came to predominate).

Since 1900, when the Pentecostal movement began, many of its churches have been repeating the same trajectory. And, since the 1970s, many of the [no longer] 'new' charismatic churches have been doing the same.

But there is abundant evidence from multiple Church Fathers of the continuing use of charismata, and expectation of miracles, long after the immediate apostolic period.

However, if you are going to have an official state church, God cannot be allowed to speak through Fred and Joe and [even worse!] Mary on the back pew. He has to content Himself with speaking only through official channels.

And Augustine, once again, is the first to articulate the view that the charismata were only for the NT period.^[16]

9)      Amillennialism

Early Christians had taken a view that we would nowadays call 'historic premillennialism'. (Not the same as dispensationalism — which no one taught at all until 1830.) Christ would return and end the present world, and bring in a 1000-year reign of the saints on a new earth. And Christians were enjoined to "hasten the coming of the day of God" (2 Peter 3:12).

This was, obviously, intolerable to the pagan Roman Empire. But it was no less intolerable to the 'Christian' Roman Empire. Or indeed to any state. For it asserted that the present shape of things is impermanent — and that we must try to hurry up the return of Christ.^[17]

So once Christianity started getting imperial favour under Constantine, many Christians got queasy about the traditional view, and abandoned it. But for what? They didn't know. In the East, most churches didn't accept the canonicity of Revelation anyway. (They eventually did — but, to this day, it is never read out in church.)

It was Augustine who first formulated an alternative reading, much more compatible with social and political stability. There is no millennium.

Well, he didn't quite say that. He said that we are living in it right now. That it's a mere metaphor.^[18] So, although Christ will return sometime, we can basically forget about it in the interim. And all state churches — without exception — have taken this view.

Demurs about early-church millenarianism had been raised before — especially because of their apparent incompatibility with Neoplatonism — but never with a coherent counter-rationale. Augustine did not actually invent amillennialism: he took the idea from Tyconius, a North African Donatist whom Augustine actually wanted to persecute!^[19] But it was Augustine's formulation that dominated the Catholic Middle Ages and the Reformation.

Perhaps the giveaway that Augustine knew himself to be departing from what most Christians had always thought is in his repeated admissions that he had changed his mind.

Concerning persecution:

"For originally my opinion was that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we must act only by words, fight only by arguments, and prevail by force of reason, lest we should have as fake Catholics those whom we had known as open heretics. But this opinion of mine was overcome, not by the words of those who controverted it, but by the conclusive instances to which they could point. For, in the first place, there was set over against my opinion my own town which, although it was once wholly on the side of Donatus, was brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts...."^[20]

Persecution, he pointed out, worked!

Concerning predestination:

“I laboured indeed on behalf of the free choice of the human will, but God’s grace overcame...."^[21]

Concerning premillennialism:

"I also entertained this notion at one time. But...."^[22]

In each case, the position he held in his early years as a Christian was the historic one; the new position, more appropriate to a compulsory religion that upheld the social order.

It simply will not do to claim that these features — or whichever among them one dislikes — are unfortunate blemishes (accidental qualities, so to speak) in his overall theology which one persists in considering 'sound'. The theologisation of Christendom — of a compulsory church allied to the state — is the meaning of his system. And if his latter-day devotees do not wish to see that, the Catholic authorities at the time, and the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, could. And acted accordingly.

The legacy in Protestantism

The entire project of the Protestant Reformers was built squarely upon an Augustinian foundation. They, too, wanted a compulsory church that embraced the whole population — but their own, 'correct' church rather than the Catholics' 'false' one.

However, they tweaked the Augustinian legacy in several ways:

a)      They removed the sexual component from 'original sin'. This left them with big problems that were not entirely resolved to their own satisfaction until roughly the 1570s — when the Reformed scholastics (Beza et al.) plumped for 'covenantal headship': sin was imputed to all people (except Christ) on account of Adam's sin — using the same 'legal fiction' concept they had used in respect of Christ's righteousness.

b)      They took a 'lower' view of sacraments — and this meant they were not bound in to saying that unbaptised infants were lost.

c)      Concerning the 'invisible church' idea, Augustine had said that one could not know who was among the elect — even in respect of oneself. The Reformers uniformly taught that one could know in respect of oneself — but not in respect of anyone else. It didn't change anything: as before the Reformation, the church continued to embrace the entire population, by force — because one couldn't know who the true believers were.

Despite these details (and they were at least relatively minor), among the Church Fathers it was still overwhelmingly Augustine upon whom the Reformers relied — and to whose authority they appealed.

This can easily be illustrated by glancing at the list of references to the Church Fathers in the back of standard editions of Calvin's Institutes. Augustine accounts for about 50% of them!

Hermeneutics ^[23]

There remains the topic of the vast shift in biblical hermeneutics underway in the fourth century — which Augustine's writings merely reflect and reinforce, rather than caused.

The Early Church Fathers related the two Testaments in the same way that Paul had done: the OT was to be read in the light of the NT (or the 'Christ event', as groovy theologs like to call it nowadays).

But you can't build a compulsory, all-inclusive church on the basis of the come-out-of-the-world sectarian vision of the gospels and epistles; you need to take OT Israel as your model, and make (erroneous) parallels between that and the population of the country / kingdom / empire in which you live.

And so the relationship between the Testaments was now stood on its head also. The OT was no longer just a quarry for information about who God is; who humans are; devotional truth and wisdom [wisdom lit.]; and prophecies of the coming of Christ. It was now The Model.

From now on, the NT merely told you how to get saved.

It was all ... a very long way from home....

---

^[1] Augustine, Eighth Homily on 1 John, 8, 11

^[2] Augustine, Epistolæ, 93.3.9

^[3] Augustine, Against Faustus, 22.74-5

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] "Now, since their tender age could not possibly have contracted sin in its own life, it remains for us, even if we are as yet unable to understand, at least to believe that infants inherit original sin."

Augustine, On Forgiveness of Sins and Baptism, iii.7-8

^[6] “Christ was begotten and conceived without any fleshly pleasure and so he also remained free from every kind of defilement by original sin.”

Augustine, Enchiridion, 13.41

"And so": being conceived without "fleshly pleasure" was why Jesus was free from original sin.

^[7] 2 Baruch 54:15, 18-19

^[8] 2 Esdras 7:48-49

^[9] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 24

^[10] “The birth of children is what you [Manichees] most abhor in marriage, and thus you turn your ‘hearers’ into adulterers of their own wives, when they are alert to see that their wives do not conceive.... They wish to have no children, for whose sake alone marriages are contracted. Why then aren’t you the sort of people who forbid marriage ... if you are trying to take away what constitutes marriage in the first place? For if that is taken away, husbands are shameful lovers, wives are harlots, marriage beds are bordellos, and fathers-in-law are pimps.”

 Augustine, Against Faustus, 15.7

“Then why should we not believe that [before the Fall] the sexual organs could have been the obedient servants of mankind, at the bidding of the will, in the same way as the other [organs], if there had been no lust, which came in as the retribution for the sin of disobedience? ...

Then (had there been no sin) the man would have sown the seed and the woman would have conceived the child when their sexual organs had been aroused by the will, at the appropriate time and in the necessary degree, and had not been excited by lust.”

Augustine, The City of God, XIV.23, 24

“True marital chastity avoids intercourse with a menstruating or pregnant woman; indeed it refrains from any marital encounter where there is no longer any prospect of conception, as with older people. ... What cannot occur without lust [i.e. procreation] should not, however, occur because of lust. ... If there was any other way to have children, then every sexual act would quite obviously be a surrender to lust.... [Since children can’t be made any other way, couples who have sex for this purpose only make] a good use of this evil.”

Augustine, Against Julian [of Eclanum], 3.21; 5.9, 46

^[11] “I don’t see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes the purpose of procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude. How much more pleasure is it for life and conversation when two friends live together than when a man and a woman cohabitate.”

Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, 9.5-9

“He [a Christian husband] loves the fact that she [his wife] is human, and hates the fact that she is a woman.”

 Augustine, On the Sermon on the Mount, 1.41

^[12] As to those whose hearts, when interrogated, reply that they have never been proud of the virtue of virginity, widowhood, or matrimonial chastity ... even such faithful women, I say, must not complain that permission was given to the barbarians so grossly to outrage them.... Moreover, it is possible that those Christian women, who are unconscious of any undue pride on account of their virtuous chastity, whereby they sinlessly suffered the violence of their captors, had yet some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into a proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell them in the taking of the city. As, therefore, some men were removed by death, that no wickedness might change their disposition, so these women were outraged lest prosperity should corrupt their modesty. Neither those women then, who were already puffed up by the circumstance that they were still virgins, nor those who might have been so puffed up had they not been exposed to the violence of the enemy, lost their chastity, but rather gained humility; the former were saved from pride already cherished, the latter from pride that would shortly have grown upon them.

Augustine, City of God, i.28

^[13] One of the best recent treatments of the subject is Greg Boyd, Satan and the problem of Evil (InterVarsity: 2001). My own brief treatment can be found here.

^[14] “These are the great works of the Lord, ... and so wisely sought out, that when the intelligent creation, both angelic and human, sinned, doing not His will but their own, He used the very will of the creature which was working in opposition to the Creator’s will as an instrument for carrying out His will, the supremely Good thus turning to good account even what is evil, to the condemnation of those whom in His justice He has predestined to punishment, and to the salvation of those whom in His mercy He has predestined to grace. For, as far as relates to their own consciousness, these creatures did what God wished not to be done: but in view of God’s omnipotence, they could in no wise effect their purpose. For in the very fact that they acted in opposition to His will, His will concerning them was fulfilled. And so it is that ... in a way unspeakably strange and wonderful, even what is done in opposition to His will does not defeat His will. For it would not be done did He not permit it (and of course His permission is not unwilling, but willing); nor would a Good Being permit evil to be done only that in His omnipotence He can turn evil into good.”

Augustine, Enchiridion, 100

^[15] “The inevitable conclusion from these truths is this, that, as nothing else is effected when infants are baptized except that they are incorporated into the church, ... unless this benefit has been bestowed upon them, they are manifestly in danger of damnation. Damned, however, they could not be if they really had no sin. ... [D]oes not truth proclaim without ambiguity, that unbaptized infants not only cannot enter into the kingdom of God...? ... [F]or no other reason are they carried by pious hands to Jesus (that is, to Christ, the Saviour and Physician), than that they may be healed of the plague of their sin by the medicine of His sacraments.”

Augustine, On Forgiveness of Sins and Baptism, iii.7-8

^[16] “At the Church’s beginning the Holy Spirit fell upon the believers, and they spoke with tongues unlearnt, as the Spirit gave them utterance. It was a sign, fitted to the time… The sign was given and then passed away. We no longer expect that those upon whom the hand is laid, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, will speak with tongues. When we laid our hands on these ‘infants’, the church’s newborn members, none of you (I think) looked to see if they could speak with tongues, or seeing that they did not, had the perversity to argue that they had not received the Holy Spirit.... If then the Holy Spirit’s presence is no longer testified by such marvels, on what is anyone to ground assurance that he has received the Holy Spirit? Let him enquire of his own heart: if he loves his brother, the Spirit of God abides in him.”

Augustine, Sixth Homily on 1 John, 10

^[17] "Hastening the coming of the day of God", of course, fits perfectly with a free-will view of human actions — but not at all with one in which everything is fixed and predestined.

^[18] “Now some people have assumed, in view of this passage [Rev.20.1-6], that the first resurrection will be a bodily resurrection. They have been particularly excited, among other reasons, by the actual number of a thousand years ... a kind of seventh day of Sabbath rest for the final thousand years, with the saints rising again, obviously to celebrate this Sabbath.

This notion would be in some degree tolerable if it were believed that in the Sabbath some delights of a spiritual character were to be available for the saints because of the presence of the Lord. I also entertained this notion at one time. But in fact those people assert that those who have risen again will spend their rest in the most unrestrained material feasts.... But this can only be believed by materialists; and those with spiritual interests give the name 'Chiliasts' to the believers in this picture, a term which we can translate by a word derived from the equivalent Latin, 'Millenarians'.

Now the thousand years, as it seems to me, can be interpreted in two ways. ... [Either] our author used the term 'a thousand years' to denote the last part of this millennium — or 'day' — which remained before the end of the world, employing the figure of speech by which the whole stands for the part. Alternatively, he may have intended the thousand years to stand for the whole period of the world's history, signifying the entirety of time by a perfect number.”

 Augustine, The City of God, XX.7

^[19] Augustine got his 'invisible church' doctrine from the same source. And on both occasions had the good grace to say so.

^[20] Augustine, Epistolæ, 93.17-18

^[21] Augustine, The Predestination of the Saints, 8

^[22] Augustine, The City of God, XX.7

^[23] The principles by which one interprets a text — in this case, Scripture.