Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
tion has the possibility of experiencing the vitality of Augustinian spirituality. For this purpose ten selections from his voluminous writings are presented in this book. To experience their vitality, however, is to read them prayerfully, opening one's heart to the Interior Master who alone can ensure that their vitality is actualized. Augustine himself said: We can admonish by the sound of our voice; but unless there is One who teaches interiorly, the sound we make is futile... . Let Him therefore speak to you interiorly, in that place where no one can enter, for you can have someone at your side, but no one can enter into your heart. Or rather, let there be no one in your heart—let Christ be in your heart.
Enter then into your heart, and if you have faith, you will find Christ there. There He speaks to you. I, the preacher, must raise my voice, but He instructs you effectively in silence. I speak in sounding words, He speaks within by inspiring a holy fear. It is for Him, then, to sow my words in your hearts. ... Because faith and Christ are in your hearts, He will teach you what i want to communicate to you through the sound of my words.%4
Life and Times
If you were to travel to Souk-Ahras in Algeria on the border of Tunisia you would be in the area where Augustine was born in the town of Thagaste in A.D. 354. There in the fourth century you would have heard Latin, Punic, and perhaps certain dialects spoken.
Augustine's life was spent in North Africa, then in Italy, and finally in Africa again, where he died as bishop of Hippo in A.D. 430. More specifically, he lived out his life successively in Thagaste, Madaura, Carthage, Rome, Milan, Rome, 'Thagaste, and Hippo. Thagaste was an agricultural village but his father, Patricius, was a middle-class Roman town councillor (municeps). A
93. Homilies on St. Jobn's Epistle, 3.13. 94. Augustine, Sermon, 102.2.
INTRODUCTION
pagan all his life, he was baptized at death in A.D. 370. Augustine had one sister and two brothers. Like most early Christians, he was not baptized at birth, although he had a Christian mother, Monica. After attending primary school at Thagaste, he went at age eleven to school at Madaura, twenty miles south of Thagaste, for classical studies. At sixteen he took, as they would say today, a leave of absence while his father sought to borrow money to send him for higher studies. His excessive leisure led him into excessive license. At seventeen he went to Carthage for rhetoric, his expenses paid by Romanianus, his father's friend.
Of the Carthage experience Augustine was to say: "I became to myself the barren land." Carthage was an advanced and dissipated city and he was affected by the environment. He took a concubine to whom he was loyal for all of fifteen years, and when he was eighteen they had a son whom they called Adeodatus, whose natural brilliance was evident and whose life ended when he was seventeen. When not in class, Augustine patronized the theater, and this screened him from reality. At nineteen he read Cicero's Hortensius, an invitation to philosophy, that is, to search for wisdom. He became aware that rhetoric could never substitute for having something worth saying about man's ultimate concern.
Although this reading stimulated his search for wisdom, the absence of the name of Christ in Cicero's work convinced him that Cicero could not provide the wisdom he praised. In the fervor of this early eagerness he met some Manichees who boasted that their Christian truths were demonstrable by reason. This coupled with their praise of Christ attracted Augustine, who had an almost instinctive conviction of the centrality of Christ in any search for wisdom. The Manichees also defended the New Testament by repudiating the Old, and this pleased him since he had always been repelled by Old Testament stories of scandalous actions. Moreover, by positing two principles of good and evil at war in the world, the Manichees accounted for his own tensions and he welcomed being absolved from any personal guilt. Thus began his nine-year immersiofi in Manichaeism. During this time he taught rhetoric for one year at Thagaste and for eight years at Carthage.
It was not long, however, before Augustine had to face some doctrinal difficulties as well as dilemmas regarding natural science. The Manichees could not answer his questions but they promised that Faustus, a traveling Manichaean bishop, would
INTRODUCTION
know all. Faustus proved not to know the answers. This led Augustine to lose confidence in Manichaeism and to look elsewhere.
In A.D. 383 he left Carthage for Rome to find better-disciplined pupils, and there he was exposed to the skeptical opinions of the New Academy. For a time he accepted their unusual position that only probable truth was attainable. Discovering that his Roman students could not be relied on for tuition payment, he applied for the position of Public Orator for Milan and received it with the help of Manichaen friends. In the autumn of 384 he moved to Milan.
For ten years Ambrose had been bishop of Milan. A provincial governor before his conversion, he was philosophically cultured and knew Origen's works well. Because he was eloquent, Augustine attended church to hear him. From Ambrose he learned far more than good oratory. He learned to appreciate the Old Testament, to recognize the contradictions in the positing of ontological principles of good and evil, and to discover how his free will was involved in his own evil.
Augustine had a tendency to think of God as material, and this prevented him from completely accepting all that Ambrose said of God. In 386, when reading some books of the Platonists, he learned that there was spiritual reality, and his mental block was removed. He also learned to seek unity above. Once again the absence of the name of Christ, this time from the Platonic writings, sent him to St. Paul's Epistles in search of the full meaning of wisdom and above all of the Way to wisdom.
During this period he attempted to make an intellectual ascent to God and to achieve his own moral purification. His concubine was sent back to Africa by Monica. A concubine was of a lower class and there could not be full legal marriage with her. Roman law required marriage partners to be of equal status. His concubine was not returned to Africa, therefore, because of moral scruples but because the ambitious Augustine was preparing for an advantageous marriage. In the meantime he took another mistress, and his last state was worse than his first. It was a time of intense struggle between the two wills in Augustine, the selfindulgent will and the Good-directed will, his experience of his divided self. In Ambrose he had recognized that unity of will, that integration of personal levels which he so much needed. This
INTRODUCTION
integration in others made them his exemplars, exerting on him a powerful attraction. These persons were Simplicianus, the assistant priest to Ambrose; Marius Victorinus, the great Roman rhetor and translator of Neoplatonic writings whose conversion to Christianity a generation before had been related by Simplicianus, St. Anthony, whose commitment to Christ was made known by Ponticianus; and two Roman civil servants who became monks in response to reading Anthony's life story, a fact he heard of from Ponticianus.
It was in August of A.D. 386 that the tumult in his heart arose from comparing these living examples of mature Christians with his own indecision and disintegration. He fled to the garden and, seeking direction from God, opened St. Paul's epistle to the Romans 13:13 where he read: "Let us walk becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and wantonness, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and as for the flesh, take no thought of its lusts." He was thereupon given the grace to will wholly what he was commanded and in this conversion to his God he was unified.
At the end of August he settled at Cassiciacum, fifty miles from Milan, and in the fall he resigned his post and began to compose his early Dialogues, more or less faithful reproductions of his efforts to educate his disciples—Alypius, Evagrius, Trygetius, Licentius, Adeodatus. Monica was an important participant in the discussions, often deferred to by her son for her Christian convictions.
In 387 at the end of winter he returned to Milan to give in his name for baptism and to take instructions from Ambrose. In April at the Paschal vigil Augustine, Adeodatus, and Alypius were baptized. In the autumn the group left Milan for the Roman seaport of Ostia to proceed to Africa, where they planned to live as a contemplative community. There at Ostia Monica and Augustine shared the religious or mystical experience described in Book IX of the Confessions. There also Monica fell sick and died, and there her son buried her. Since ships were not to sail for Africa for more than a year, he was detained at Rome where he wrote two important books: On the Morals of the Manichees and On the Morals of the Catholic Church.
By 388, however, Augustine was following a monastic style of life at Thagaste but in 391, on visiting Hippo, he was seen by
INTRODUCTION
Bishop Valerius in church and was taken for ordination to the priesthood—a method that was customary in those days. He became an assistant to Bishop Valerius after persuading him to agree to the continuation of a community life. For Augustine the contemplative life was to be chosen and yet the active life was to be led whenever pastoral needs constrained the cleric to leave the monastery. When Bishop Valerius died in 395 Augustine became bishop of Hippo and continued to live in the community that became the training ground for the secular clergy and gave ten future bishops to Africa. In addition to his episcopal community, he set up monasteries elsewhere for men and some for women. In all of these, intellectual work as well as manual work was required. The main requirements were charity, asceticism, chastity, poverty, with an emphasis on ministry. They were apostolic communities where the order of the day was readily sacrificed to the needs of the ministry.
During his forty years in the See of Hippo Augustine presided at the daily Liturgy and preached several times a week and often daily to his own congregation. He often preached before the Council of African Bishops at Carthage, presided over by Bishop Aurelius, his friend. Alypius became bishop of Thagaste. Augustine's days were filled with instructing converts and giving spiritual direction by word and letter as well as organizing good works to care for the poor, administering Church lands, and acting as judge in the bishop's court. Throughout this busy ministry he remained a contemplative and a writer. His contemplation illuminated his preaching and his writing influenced not only his contemporaries but people of future times.
Four major polemics engaged his attention: against the Manichees (387-400), against the Donatists (400-412), against the Pelagians (412-430), against the pagans.
Manichaeism can be traced to the Persian prophet Mani, who was born in Babylonia around A.D. 216. It was a gnostic religion seeking salvation through understanding certain books of the New Testament. In man, whose life was determined by astrological conditions at birth, the principle of evil warred against God, the principle of good, and both were material principles: darkness and light.
The Donatists were the followers of Donatus, who repudiated the episcopal consecration of Caecilianus in 312 to the See of
INTRODUCTION
Carthage because he had reportedly compromised his Christianity during the Diocletian persecution. They declared that any unworthiness of the minister of sacraments eliminated their efficacy, and therefore rebaptized Catholics who joined the Donatist group, which, in fact, comprised the majority of the African Church. This African schism engaged Augustine's attention for a long time. After trying every peaceful means to end the schism he finally accepted the offer of Roman power to do so.
The Pelagian heresy originated with the monk Pelagius, who came from the British Isles to Rome in A.D. 410. To his way of thinking he converted Coelestius, a lawyer, and influenced Julian, bishop of Eclanum. The heresy consisted in attributing to the human will alone the power to act virtuously so as to merit heaven: Grace is simply God's gift of human nature to man and it can also facilitate man's virtue. Augustine taught, on the contrary, that God gives grace to enable a person to will and to do those actions that will merit eternal life, that is, divine life. 'he Pelagians took the position that God's grace was helpful but not necessary and that the heirs of Adam were not stained with original sin. Coelestius was condemned by an African Council in 412 and eventually Pope Zosimus condemned both Pelagius and Coelestius. Bishop Julian sided with the followers of Pelagius, and it was to Julian that Augustine addressed much of his anti-Pelagian writings. In 539 the Council of Orange sustained the position of Augustine but not his extreme literal statements on predestination. But semi-Pelagianism has survived as a recurrent mentality in Christianity.
As Augustine's life drew to a close the controversies were continuing. In the end of his life he was arguing against Arianism and semi-Arianism and against the pagans who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome in A.D. 410. Although Arianism and semi Arianism had been condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381, many of the barbarians had been converted into Arian Christianity and these made their way to Africa. Augustine died in A.D. as the Vanddls were besieging the city of Hippo.
Works
Augustine left his legacy of thought to the world in 113 books of varying lengths, in 218 letters, and in about 800 sermons. He
INTRODUCTION
began by writing Dialogues at Cassiciacum after having undergone the influence of Christian Neoplatonism. In addition to his controversial works against the Manichees, the Donatists, and the Pelagians, he also wrote: ¢ theological works like On the Trinity e educational works like On Christian Doctrine and On Catechesis
exegetical works like his five commentaries on Genesis, his commentaries on the Psalms, on the Gospels, on the Epistles, and his Concordance of the Gospels
moral treatises like The Morals of the Catholic Faith, On Lying, On Fasting, On Virginity, On the Goodness of Marriage
The Confessions contain his biography, his spirituality, and the main traits of his theological thought. The City of God is a masterly reflection on the history of the world, a history divided into two parts by the Incarnation of Christ. It is also an inspired analysis of the destiny of mankind: salvation through Jesus Christ. It is worth noting that among the letters of Augustine there are doctrinal and spiritual treatises, and in his sermons we encounter again not only his exegesis but also his direction of souls toward a Biblical and Trinitarian spirituality.
In A.D. 426 he reread his books to evaluate them and to criticize them in the light of his mature faith. This review allows us to have an exact chronological list of his works with awareness of what occasioned these writings. Letters and sermons are excluded. In the Introduction to these Retractations, he said: 'For, whoever will read my little works in the order in which they were written will perhaps discover how much progress I made in writing. To enable the reader to do this, I shall take care in this work, to inform him as to this order, as far as I can."
Influence
It is impossible to estimate the vast influence of Augustine as a spiritual guide on the countless persons who have read the Confessions. Next to the Bible, it has been the most widely read book in the world. Augustine of the Confessions has helped to form Christian mystics in all historical periods. St. Teresa of Avila, who