Folk
Augustine's tomb in the Church of San Pietro
Augustine was declared a saint even before the official canonization process was instituted in the Catholic Church in the 12th century, and in 1298, Pope Boniface VIII recognized Saint
Augustine as a Doctor of the Church, marking his designated feast day as August 28.
Chapter 6: Augustine's Legacy
Considered by many scholars to be the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, Saint Augustine is credited with fusing the religious principles of the New Testament with traditional Greek
Piatonic philosophy, then becoming the conduit by which that melding was conveyed to medieval Roman Catholicism and Renaissance Protestantism. Given the passage of so many centuries and the way in which Christianity has branched out, that Augustine is hailed as so vital to every Christian is truly remarkable.
In addition to influencing how subsequent Christian philosophers thought, Augustine's writings provided an opinion on a countless number of social and religious issues, many of which continue to be hot button topics today. For example, Augustine "vigorously condemned the practice of induced abortion" but also differentiated between fetuses being "formed" and "unformed", which would seemingly put him at odds with the belief that life begins at conception. Augustine also expressed views on cosmology and astrology that were unusual for his time, likely because he spent so much time studying philosophy and secular topics. Augustine cautioned against the use of astrology and a reliance on the "science" behind astrology, writing, "Hence, a devout Christian must avoid astrologers and all impious soothsayers, especially when they tell you the truth, for fear of leading his soul into error by consorting with demons and entangling himself with the bonds of such association."
Augustine was also not afraid to question literal interpretations of the Bible, a stance that was quite remarkable considering that Christianity was still a relatively new religion. Most notably, he believed the Bible should be interpreted metaphorically and allegorically, as opposed to literally, a viewpoint that was way ahead of its time and even today remains more progressive than some Christians. For example, Augustine wrote about the Book of Genesis: It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation...
With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation..."
One of Augustine's most important contributions to philosophy was his framing of the concept of just war. Given that Christian teachings emphasized pacifism, Augustine was careful to point out that his advocacy of just warfare was his own, writing, "What is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition. The sacred seat of virtue is the heart." However, he personally believed it was a sin to be a pacifist if the wrong could only be righted with violence, pointing out that holy war was sometimes necessary to further the interests of the Church: "The commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged wars on the authority of God, or those who have imposed the death-penalty on criminals when representing the authority of the state, the justest and most reasonable source of power... But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars." In other words, sometimes the best way to establish peace, and avoid further war, is to conduct war in the first place.
Though it may come as a surprise today, now that he is recognized as one of Christianity's most important thinkers, Augustine was mostly considered peripheral in his day. He resided in a province in North Africa on the margins of classical culture, and though he was a rhetorical master with Latin, he was a scholar who did not even speak Greek, which at the time was the language of the international intelligentsia. Thus, his primary influence did not come from his ecclesiastical rank but his writing. Naturally, far fewer people had access to those writings in Augustine's time than today, which is how a man whose works were so staggering in insight and quality could be overlooked among his own peers.
Of course, his voluminous body of work all but assured that some of what Augustine wrote would be controversial, and without question, the most controversial issue both in his lifetime and in subsequent centuries has been his position on "grace and free will." To reasonably assess these doctrines today, modern theologians stress the necessity of placing them within their proper context, pointing out that Augustine was reacting to Pelagianism and thus attempting to present a doctrine as true to Orthodox interpretation as possible within the limitations of his own theological perspective. As history and his own writing reflect, Augustine was the most outspoken opponent in the West of Pelagius, who denied the necessity of God's grace for salvation, making clear that Augustine believed it was his spiritual duty to direct the devout to the truth.
Ultimately, Orthodoxy considers the fundamental flaw in Augustine's thinking and writing to be his overstatement of the role grace plays in Christian life, and his understatement of free will.
In their view, Augustine was inevitably driven to this "exaggeration" by his own experience of conversion, and his propensity to define this question too precisely. And while the blatant denial of free will was never a real consideration for Augustine, since his founding of monastic communities to deal with ascetic struggles makes clear that he thought free will existed in some capacity, he certainly had an opinion that was not shared by most of his contemporaries. As demonstrated in his treatise "On Rebuke and Grace," Augustine wrote, "Will you dare to say that even when Christ prayed that Peter's faith might not fail, it would still have failed if Peter had willed it to fail? As if Peter could have in any measure will otherwise than Christ had wished for him that he might will.""!° As scholars then and today observe, Augustine's position here is clearly one-sided, by unnecessarily overemphasizing grace while suggesting what might be considered "'irresistible grace", which man must accept whether willed or not. Conversely, Orthodoxy has long held that there is no contradiction whatsoever in the cooperation of grace and free will, and that it is only human logic that finds the so-called contradiction when it tries to understand this question from an abstract perspective apart from real life. Thus, as an intellectual first and a Christian convert second, Augustine's attempt to resolve the issue and present it in a manner palatable to all 5" century Christians side-stepped the primary Orthodox teaching of the "cooperation of God and man," and of the necessity of ascetic struggle and the certain will of God that all may be saved.
Scholars today believe the most serious of Saint Augustine's exaggerations regarding grace and free can be found in his unique stance on predestination. While his view of grace and free will has itself been cause for much philosophical and theological debate, it is his conceptualization of predestination that has produced the most criticism from his detractors. Founded on the teachings of Saint Paul, the Orthodox view of predestination is as follows: "For whom He foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His son . . . and whom He predestined, them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified." (Romans 8: 29—30). In Saint Paul's words, predestination, regarding those foreknown and fore-ordained by God for eternal glory, involves the free choice of those being saved, and the cooperation of God and man as later known by the term synergism (a cooperation of Divine grace and human freedom, neither acting independently nor autonomously).
While scholars contend that Augustine most certainly did teach the accepted Orthodox view of predestination, he taught it in an exaggerated way (much like grace and free will) that was easily misinterpreted and invited scrutiny. From the Orthodox perspective, Augustine's view of predestination ignored the unknowable aspect of God. Admitting the complexity of attempting to solve this mystery with ordinary logic, Augustine asks, "If one is in the number of the 'predestined,' does he need to struggle for salvation? And, if he is not in their number, can he give up struggling altogether?" Essentially, Augustine was asking whether man could or should do anything if God has preordained the result ahead of time.
10 New Advent.org website, "On Rebuke and Grace."
Similarly, Augustine's pursuit of logical deduction led him to address the Apostles' statement that God wills all men to be saved (I Tim. 2:4), reasoning that this cannot be literally true. If God predestines only some to be saved, then he must will only some to be saved. In On Rebuke and Grace, Augustine writes, "He wills all men to be saved is so said that all the predestined may be understood by it, because every kind of man is among them."'! To further qualify his perspective, he also writes of a "negative" predestination of eternal damnation (a concept not supported by the Scriptures), and of a class of men predestined to destruction, writing, "To those whom He has predestined to eternal death, he is also the most righteous awarder of punishment."
Scholars emphasize that statements like these are easy to misinterpret as suggesting that God determines, or wills, man to do evil, which is certainly not what Augustine intended to imply.
Bible scholars today stress the importance of framing the modern view of Saint Augustine within an accurate historical context, accounting for the misinterpretations of Augustine's writing perpetuated by both proponents and opponents of Augustine's views, as well as subsequent criticisms (both intended and accidental) that have come to color the contemporary understanding of Augustine and his massive collection of work. Equally important is the need to place Augustine properly within his own time and place, framing him within the circumstances and events that came to define and guide his life. He grew up in a poorer class among parents with two religions in Africa, moved to Italy and subsequently adopted Manichaeism, before converting and becoming its most outspoken skeptic. Augustine invested much of his life in search of truth and purity, distracted by his own competing natures, but he ultimately found God while becoming both mystic and iconoclast. Furthermore, through the decades Augustine became a master of language and often used paradox to discuss complex issues that others would have had a hard time expressing.
At the heart of Augustine's message is his acknowledgement that for Catholicism, faith is strictly a personal response to God as "Revealer," an intellectual act rooted in the individual and ultimately driven by human will. Faith for the Catholic is a "free" assent to proposals revealed by God as true. In Confessions, he wrote, "I believe this is true, not because I see it by reason or direct experience, but because God tells me so; and God is an absolutely reliable authority who can neither deceive nor be deceived." Thus, he affirms his intimate knowledge that the act of faith takes place within the context of a personal life, and that it overcomes all the influences which would pull an individual away from his or her commitment to God. Given the life he led, nobody understood that concept better than Augustine.
On Film
In the 1972 made-for-TV movie Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine was portrayed by Dary Berkani.
'! New Advent.org website, "On Rebuke and Grace."
In the 2010 mini-series Augustine: The Decline of the Roman Empire, Saint Augustine was portrayed by Franco Nero.
In Print
In the Flann O'Brian novel The Dalkey Archive, Saint Augustine appears in a surrealistic scenario in which he is summoned to an underwater cavern by an absurd scientist named De
Selby, where the two discuss life in heaven and the characters of other saints.
Jostein Gaarder's book Vita Brevis is a translation of a letter Gaarder claimed to have found in a bookshop in Buenos Aires, Argentina, assumed to be a letter to Saint Augustine from his concubine after he became Bishop of Hippo.
In Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Saint Augustine is credited as possibly being the first to propose a theory of evolution.
In Song
Folk/Rock legend Bob Dylan recorded a song titled "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
Rock musician Sting pays homage to Saint Augustine's struggles with lust in his song "Saint
Augustine in Hell," which appears on his 1993 album Ten Summoner's Tales.
The Christian Rock group Disciple recorded "The Ballad of St. Augustine" for their 2010 release Horseshoes and Handgrenades.
The American Rock band Moe paid homage to Saint Augustine with "St. Augustine," on their 1994 release, Headseed.
The song "St. Augustine" appears on Girlyman's album, Supernova.
A List of Augustine's Major Works
All told, Saint Augustine wrote more than 93 books, nearly 300 letters, and over 500 sermons.
386 Against the Academics
386/387 The Soliloquies
386-429 Letters
387/389 On the Catholic and the Manichaean Way of Life
388-395 On Free Choice
389/391 On True Religion
393 On Faith and Creed
393/394 On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis (unfinished )
393-430 Sermons
397-401 Confessions
399 On the Nature of the Good
399-419 The Trinity
400/401 On Baptism Against the Donatists
401 On the Good of Marriage
410 On the Destruction of the City of Rome
412 On the Grace of the New Testament (Letter 140)
413-427 City of God
414/415 On Nature and Grace
417 On the Proceedings concerning Pelagius
418 On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin
419/420 On Marriage and Concupiscence
420 Against Two Letters of the Pelagians
421 Against Julian
426/427 On Grace and Free Choice
426/427 Retractions
429-430 Incomplete Works Against Julian
Bibliography
Augustine. (Trans. Henry Chadwick). Saint Augustine: Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991.
Brantl, George (ed.). Catholicism. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. CA: University of California Press, 1967.
Ellwood, Robert S., and McGraw, Barbara, A. Many Peoples, Many Faiths. New Jersey: Pearson, 2005.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.
King, Ursula. Christian Mystics: Their Lives and Legacies Throughout the Ages. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
McBrien, Richard P. Catholicism, Volume One. MN: Winston Press, Inc., 1970
Catholicism, Volume Two. MN: Winston Press, Inc., 1980.
Meyer, Paul W. The Word in This World: Essays in New Testament Exegesis and Theology. Westminister John Knox Press, 2004. Accessed via: http://books.google.com/books?id=3kbZM WvLnEAC&pg=PA 136&Ipg=PA 136&dq=Augustine: +%E2%80%ICMen+will+not+do+whattistright,+either+becausetthetright+ist+hidden+from+t hem+ort+because+they+find+no+delight+in+it.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=- YGahEcq0Q&sig=IOPQ2b8yvF gydRQ66CSz6_hoFQ&hl=en&sa=X &ei=3 Ej TUJSIM4z68QTBnoDABg&ved=0CDIQ6AEwA A#v=onepage &q=Augustine%3A%20%E2%80%ICMen%20will%20no0t%20do%20what%20is%20ri ght%2C %20either%20because%20the%20right%20is%20hidden%20from%20them%20o0r%20because %20they%20find%20n0%20delight%20in%20it.%E2%80%9D&fHfalse 12.21.2012.
New Advent.org website, "St. Augustine of Hippo." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02084a.htm Accessed 12.21.2012.
"On Grace and Free Will." http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1510.htm Accessed 12.21.2012.
City of God, "Book VIII."
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120108.htm Accessed 12.21.2012.
"On Rebuke and Grace" http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1513.htm Accessed 12.21.2012.
O'Donnell, James J. Augustine, a New Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Rose, Fr. Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press, 1983.
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.
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