2. Augustine
. Life. —Aurelius Augustine (the prænomen "Aurelius" is attested by contemporaries but does not occur in his own works or in his correspondence) was born of mixed heathen and Christian parentage
November 13, 354 a.d., at Tagaste, a small municipality in proconsular Numidia. He was taught in his childhood the principles of Christianity, and great sacrifices were made to give him a liberal education. From his youth he was consumed by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and was so inflamed by the reading of Cicero's "Hortensius" in his nineteenth year that he thenceforth devoted his life to the pursuit of truth. The profession to which he was bred was that of rhetorician, and this profession he practiced first at Tagaste, and then successively at Carthage, Rome, and Milan up to the great crisis of his life (386). In his early manhood he had fallen away from his Christian training to the Manichæans, who were the rationalists of the age (373); and subsequently (383) had lapsed into a general skepticism; but he had already fought his way out of this, under the influence of the Neo-Platonists, before his conversion to Catholic Christianity took place at Milan in the late summer of 386. He spent the interval between this crisis and his baptism (Easter, 387) in philosophical retirement at Cassiciacum,
and then, after a short sojourn at Rome, returned to Africa (autumn, 388) and established at his native town a sort of religio-philosophical retreat for himself and his friends. Early in 391 he was almost forcibly ordained presbyter at Hippo Regius, and nearly five years later (shortly before Christmas, 395) was raised to the rank of coadjutor-bishop. From the first he sustained practically the entire burden of the administration, and, soon succeeding to its sole responsibility, continued bishop of that second-rate diocese until his death, August 28, 430.
In this simple framework was lived out the life of one who has been strikingly called incomparably the greatest man whom, "between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian Church has possessed." 1
We cannot date from him, it is true, an epoch in the external fortunes of the Church in the same sense in which we may from, say, Gregory the Great or Hildebrand. He was not, indeed, without ecclesiastico-political significance.
He did much to heal the schisms which tore the African Church. He regenerated the clergy of Africa by his monastic training school. And it must not be forgotten that the two great Gregorys stood upon his shoulders. But his direct work as a reformer of Church life was done in a corner, and its results were immediately swept away by the flood of the Vandal invasion.
2. Writings.—It was through his voluminous writings, by which his wider influence was exerted, that he entered both the Church and the world as a revolutionary force, and not merely created an epoch in the history of the Church, but has determined the course of its history in the West up to the present day. He was already an author when he became a Christian, having published (about 380) an æsthetical study (now lost), on "De pulchro et apto." But his amazing literary productivity began with his conversion. His first Christian writings were a series of religio-philosophical treatises, in which he sought to lay the foundations of a specifically
Christian philosophy. These were followed by a great number of controversial works against the Manichæans, Donatists, Pelagians, interspersed with Biblical expositions and dogmatic and ethical studies.
The whole was crowned by four or five great books in which his genius finds perhaps its fullest expression. These are his "Confessiones" (397–
400), in which he gives an analysis of his religious experience and creates a new genre in literary form; the "de Doctrina Christiana" (397–426), in which the principles of his Biblical exposition are expounded; the "Enchiridion ad Laurentium" on Faith, Hope, and Charity (421), which contains his most serious attempt to systematize his thought; the "De
Trinitate (395–420), in which its final formulation was given to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity; and the "De Civitate Dei" (413–426), in which are laid the foundations of a rational philosophy of history.
He seems to have been himself aware of the significance of the writings into which he had so unstintedly poured himself, and he devoted some of his last years to a careful survey and revision of them in his unique
"Retractationes" (426–428), in which he seeks to compact them into an ultimate whole. The influence which they exerted from the beginning is attested no less by the spiteful comments on their volume which escaped from those less well affected to them (e.g., the interpolators of Gennadius), than by the wondering admiration of the better disposed (already,
Possidius, "Vita," chap. vii.). In point of fact they entered the Church as a leaven which has ever since wrought powerfully towards leavening the whole mass.
3. Influence.—(a) Its extent.—The greatness of the influence exerted by Augustine is fairly intimated by the suggestion that the division between the Eastern and Western Churches may properly be represented as having been "prepared" by him. 2 No doubt, according to Renan's saying, the building of Constantinople contained in it the prophecy of the division of
the Empire, and the division of the Empire the prophecy of the division of the Church. But it was Augustine who imprinted upon the Western section of the Church a character so specific as naturally to bring the separation of the Churches in its train. It must not be inferred, however, that his influence was felt only in the West. The prevailing impression to this effect implies some failure to appreciate not only the extent of the intercourse between the East and the West in Augustine's day, but also the indebtedness of the East to the West for its theological constructions. The interest of the Antiochenes in Western Christological thought, as illustrated, for instance, in the "Eranistes" and the correspondence of Theodoret, is only one example of a much wider fact; and in any event, the great doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, which form almost the entirety of "dogma" in the East, so far from being a gift from the East to the West, as often represented, had their origin in the West, and were thence communicated to the East—the former through the intermediation of "the great Hosius," and the latter through that of Leo the Great. Augustine, through whom—working, no doubt, in full knowledge of what had been done by the Greeks, but in entire independence of them—the doctrine of the Trinity received its completed statement, came too late to affect the Greek construction of this doctrine, and accordingly gave form on this great topic only to the thought of the West. But his Christological conceptions underlay the formulations of Leo, as those of Ambrose underlay his, and through Leo determined the Christological definitions of the East as well as of the West. Accordingly, while the doctrines of the East and the West on the Person of Christ have remained identical, in their doctrines of the Trinity the two sections draw somewhat apart, not only with respect to that perennial bone of contention, the filioque clause in the definition of the procession of the Spirit, but in what underlies this difference—their general conception of the relations of the Trinitarian
Persons. This in the East is ruled by subtle subordinational inheritances (embedded in the Nicene formulary in the phrase θεὸς ἐκ θεοῦ and its equivalents), while in the West it is dominated by that principle of equalization which found its sharpest assertion in the ascription of αὐτοθεότης to Christ by Calvin, whose construction marks the only new
(subordinate) epoch in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity after Augustine. This complete determination of Western thought on the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity fairly illustrates at once the place of Augustine in Western Christian thought, and the effect of his supreme influence there in creating a specifically Western type of Christianity.
It is worth while, no doubt, to distinguish between the actual influence exerted by Augustine in the West, and what may perhaps, in a more external sense, be called the authority enjoyed by his name in the Latin Church. To no other doctor of the Church has anything like the same authority been accorded, and it seemed for long as if his doctrine of grace at least was to be treated as a definitely defined dogma, de fide in the Church. Already in 431
Celestine sharply reproved the bishops of Gaul for permitting Augustine's authority to be questioned in their dioceses; and soon afterwards, Gelasius
(493) addressed to the bishop of Picenum a similar letter of rebuke for the like carelessness. Subsequent deliverances of Hormisdas (520), and Boniface II (530–531), and John II (534) confirmed the authority thus assigned him; and their encomiums were repeated by many later Roman bishops. It very naturally became, therefore, the custom of the "Augustinians" in the Church of Rome—like Diego Alvarez, Jansen, Noris
—to ascribe "irrefragable authority" to his teaching; and the question was gravely debated among the theologians whether a truly plenary authority were really to be attributed to him, or whether he were only to rank as the first of the Church's authorized teachers. The result was very naturally that
every tendency of thought in the Church was eager to claim for itself the support of his name; and the extraordinary richness of his mind, and the remarkable variety of, so to say, the facets of his teaching, lent him more than ordinarily to the appeal of numerous and even divergent points of view. The possibility of this was increased by the long period of time covered by his literary activity, and the only gradual crystallization of his thought around his really formative ideas. The Augustine of Cassiciacum or even of the presbyterate was a somewhat different Augustine from the Augustine of the episcopate; and not even at his death had perfect consistency been attained in his teaching. Accordingly the most amazing variety of doctrine, on almost every conceivable subject, throughout the Middle Ages, and later in the Church of Rome, has sought support for itself in some saying or other of his; and both sides of almost every controversy have appealed with confidence to his teaching. Schools of thought which had drifted entirely away from his most fundamental postulates still regarded and represented themselves as "Augustinian"; and the Church of Rome itself, whose whole history since the second Council of Orange (529) has been marked by the progressive elimination of Augustinianism from its teaching, is still able to look upon him as the chief doctor of the Church, upon whom its fabric is especially built. Confusion became so confounded that the Confession of Faith which Pelagius presented to Innocent was inserted quite innocently into the "Libri
Carolini," and was even produced by the Sorbonne in 1521 against Luther as Augustine's own.
Obviously this universal deference to the name of Augustine furnishes no accurate measure of his real influence. It supplies, however, a fair general reflection of its extent. In point of fact the whole development of Western life, in all its phases, was powerfully affected by his teaching. This, his unique ascendancy in the direction of the thought and life of the West, is
due in part to the particular period in history in which his work was done, in part to the richness and depth of his mind and the force of his individuality, and in part to the special circumstances of his conversion to Christianity. He stood on the watershed of two worlds. The old world was passing away; the new world was entering upon its heritage; and it fell to him to mediate the transference of the culture of the one to the other. It has been strikingly remarked that the miserable existence of the Roman Empire in the West almost seems to have been prolonged for the express purpose of affording an opportunity for the influence of Augustine to be exerted on universal history. 3 He was fortunate even in the place of his birth and formative years; although on the very eve of its destruction, Africa was at this precise moment, in the midst of the universal decadence, the scene of intense intellectual activity—into which he entered with all the force of his ardent nature. He gathered up into himself all that the old world had to offer, and re-coining it sent it forth again bearing the stamp of his profound character. It belonged to the peculiarity of his genius that he embraced all that he took up into himself "with all the fibres of his soul"; not, as has been said, "with his heart alone, for the heart does not think, nor with the mind only; he never grasps truth in the abstract, and as if it were dead," 4 but with his whole being, giving himself to it and sending it forth from himself as living truth, driven on by all the force of his great and inspiring personality. Accordingly, when, having tested everything that the old world had to offer and found it wanting, he gave himself at last to Catholic
Christianity, it was with no reserves. Catholicism, frankly accepted as such, became his passion, and into the enthusiastic maintenance of it he threw all his forces. It was primarily as a Catholic Christian, therefore, that he thought, and worked, and lived. But the man who threw himself with such zeal into the service of Catholic Christianity was a man who had already lived through many experiences and had gathered much spoil in the
process. He had sounded the depths of heresy in its most attractive form and had drunk the waters of philosophy in its culminating development; life in the conventicles of the sects and in the circle of cultured heathenism was alike familiar to him. But, above all the spoil he brought from without, he brought with him himself. He was a man of the highest and most individual genius—intellectual, but far beyond that, religious—who had his own personal contribution to make to thought and life. If we cannot quite allow that there were in very truth many Augustines, we must at least recognize that within the one Augustine there were very various and not always consistent currents flowing, each of which had its part to play in the future. Within the Catholic Christian a philosopher of the first rank was restlessly active; and within both a religious genius of the highest order was working; while for the expression of the resulting complex of feelings and ideas a literary talent was available second to none in the annals of the Church.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the Western Church has felt the force of his influence in all the main lines of its development, and in no one of its prominent characteristics could it have been without him what it has become. In him are found at once the seed out of which the tree that we know as the Roman Catholic Church has grown; the spring or strength of all the leading anti-hierarchical and mystical movements which succeeded one another through the Middle Ages; at least the promise and preformation of the great types of Western philosophical thought; and, above all, the potent leaven of vital religion. Beginning in the first force of its fresh promulgation by overcoming the ingrained rationalism of the popular
Christianity expressed in Pelagianism and its daughter movements, it refused to be bound by the compromises of the Council of Orange, compacted though they were into a system by the genius of a Thomas, and given irrefragable authority in the Church of Rome by the decrees of Trent,
but manifested its power by outbreak after outbreak, from Gottschalk in the ninth to Jansen in the seventeenth century; and then burst all bonds and issued in the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
(b) Augustine as a Church-teacher.—No doubt it is preeminently as the great Catholic doctor that Augustine stands out on the page of history. To his own consciousness he was just a Catholic Christian; and the whole mass of his teaching was conceived by him as simply the body of Catholic doctrine. It is, accordingly, interesting to observe that it is precisely as the Catholic doctor that he has lived in the hearts of the people. The legends which have gathered around his name picture him preëminently as the expounder of the principia of the Christian faith, particularly of the mysteries of the Godhead, who abode continually in excelsis disputans de gloria excellentissimœ Trinitatis, and communicated to the Church the results of his high meditations "as he was able"—a note of humility caught from his own habitual tone when speaking of himself. 5 The task to which he consciously gave himself was to apprehend, so far as it was given to him to apprehend, to proclaim, maintain, and defend the Catholic truth; and from this task he never swerved. It was no empty formula with him when he declared, as he repeatedly declared, "This is the Catholic faith, and it is therefore also my faith"; and he was altogether in earnest when he exhorted his readers not to love him more than the Catholic faith, and his critics not to love themselves more than the Catholic truth. 6 The body of Catholic doctrine constitutes thus the traditional element in Augustine's teaching.
But, of course, it by no means left his hands precisely as it entered them.
Nor did he contribute to it merely intellectual precision and logical completeness; he impressed on it the stamp of his religious fervor, and transmuted its elements into religious entities.
It was particularly in the doctrine of the Church, which he thus took up and transfigured, that he became in a true sense the founder of Roman
Catholicism, and thus called into being a new type of Christianity, in which "the idea of the Church became the central power in the religious feeling" and "in ecclesiastical activity," "in a fashion which has remained unknown to the East." 7 This idea of the Church was, to be sure, so little the creation of Augustine that he took it over whole from his predecessors, and in his innermost thought, indeed, never thoroughly homologated it. It was
Cyprian, not Augustine, who identified the Church with the episcopate, and to whom the Church outside which there is no salvation was fundamentally the hierarchical institution. It was Gregory the Great who first spoke of the organized Church as the divine civitas. To Augustine the Church was fundamentally the congregatio sanctorum, the Body of Christ, and it is this Church which he has in mind when he calls it the civitas Dei, or the Kingdom of God on earth. He is, however, not carefully observant of the distinction between the empirical and the ideal Church, and repeatedly
—often apparently quite unconsciously—carries over to the one the predicates which in his fundamental thought, belonged properly to the other. Thus the hierarchically organized Church tends ever with him to take the place of the congregatio sanctorum, even when he is speaking of it as the Kingdom or City of God in which alone any communion with God is possible here, and through which alone eternal blessedness with God is attainable hereafter.
In the Donatist controversy, although the distinction between habere and utiliter or salubriter habere is made to do yeoman service, the conception of the Church as the sole sphere of salvation, passing into the conception of the Church as the sole mediatrix of grace, and therefore the sole distributor of salvation, was necessarily thrown into high emphasis; and the logic of the situation too directly and too powerfully identified this
Church with the empirical Church for the deeper-lying conception of the congregatio sanctorum to remain in sight. Thus Augustine, almost against
his will, became the stay of that doctrine of the Church as the sole instrument at once of true knowledge of the divine revelation and of saving grace which provides the two foci about which the ellipse of Roman
Catholic doctrine revolves. What before him was matter of assertion became in his hands a religion and went forth to conquer the world. His profounder conception of the Church as the congregatio sanctorum, and the consequent distinction between the empirical and the ideal Church, with all its implications with respect to the action of the Sacraments and the effect of ecclesiastical decrees, and even of excommunication, did not indeed remain unobserved or unutilized when occasion demanded. Thus, for example, they came forward in their completeness in the arguments of the Imperialists in the great controversies of the later eleventh century. 8
These also, and in a truer sense than the Papalists in that debate, were "Augustinians." But the main stream of Augustine's influence flowed meanwhile in the traditionalist channel, and gave the world the Church as the authoritative organ of divine truth and the miraculous vehicle of saving grace, through which alone the assured knowledge of the revelation of God could be attained, or the effective operations of His redeeming love experienced. Many of the subsidiary conceptions which fill out the system of Roman Catholic doctrine also find their direct prop in his teaching—its doctrine of merit, the distinctions between precepts and counsels, mortal and venial sins, and particularly the elaborate sacramental system, with its distinction between matter and form, its assertion of ex opere operato action, and of the indelible character of baptism and ordination, and even the doctrine of intention. On this side of his teaching the Roman Catholic
Church may well be accounted Augustine's monument.
(c) As a thinker.—But beneath Augustine the traditionalist lay Augustine the thinker, and as a thinker he gave law not only to the Church but to the world. From the moment of his conversion, to be sure, religion
became paramount with him. But this did not quench his philosophical impulse; it only made his specifically a religious philosophy, and himself, to adopt Rudolph Eucken's more precise definition, 9 "the single great philosopher on the basis of Christianity proper the world has had"—in the richness of his thought and poetry of his expression alike, not unworthy of comparison even with his great master Plato. 10 He brought with him into Catholic Christianity not only a sufficient equipment of philosophical knowledge, but a powerful and trained intelligence, and an intellectual instinct which had to find scope. It was in the rôle of Christian philosopher, seeking to give form and substance to fundamental verities from the Christian standpoint, that he first came forward in the service of faith; and though later the religious teacher and defender of the faith seemed likely to swallow up the philosophical inquirer, they never really did so, but his rich and active mind kept continually at work sounding all depths. Thus not only was there imparted to all his teaching an unwonted vitality, originality, and profundity, but "the activities set in motion were not confined to the narrow circle of theological science, but extended, directly or indirectly, to all forms of human life." 11 In every department of philosophical inquiry he became normative for the succeeding centuries; and until the rise of Aristotelianism in the twelfth century and its establishment in influence by the advocacy of such teachers as Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Augustinianism reigned supreme.
Throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages it contended masterfully with its great rival, forming many compromises with it, and tending to offset the rationalism into which Aristotelianism was ever degenerating by itself falling into mysticism. It thus became the support of the tendency towards mysticism which prevailed through the Middle Ages, or rather its protection from the pantheism into which, when drawing more directly from Neo-Platonic sources, it was ever liable to deteriorate. From it every
Catholic reformer drew his strength, and to it the whole body of reformers before the Reformation made their appeal. From its partial obscuration it emerged at the Renaissance, and burst against into full view in the seventeenth century to lay the foundations of modern thought. Siebeck accordingly bids us see in Augustine "the first modern man"; 12 and, if Eucken questions the exactness of the designation, he is free to allow that the modern world finds in Augustine many points of contact, and, not only in questions of religious philosophy may wisely take its start from him rather than from Luther or Thomas, Schleiermacher or Kant, but in purely philosophical matters will find him in many respects more modern than
Hegel or Schopenhauer. 13
It was in the spheres of psychology and metaphysics that the dominion of Augustine was most complete. He aspired to know nothing, he tells us, but God and the soul; but these he strove with all his might to know altogether. His characteristic mark as a thinker was the inward gaze; the realities of consciousness were the primary objects of his contemplation; and from them he took his starting point for reflection on the world.
Antiquity supplies no second to him in the breadth and acuteness of his psychological observation. And in his establishment of "immediate certainty of inner experience," as Windelband calls it, 14 in "the controlling central position of philosophic thought" he transcended his times and became "one of the founders of modern thought." If he may truly be said to have derived from Plato and Plotinus, in a far truer sense he stood above his Neo-Platonic teachers, and of his lineage have come Descartes and Malebranche and all that has proceeded from the movements of thought inaugurated by them. Even the famous ontological argument for the being of God, and, indeed, the very cogito, ergo sum of Descartes, have not merely their material but their formal pre-formation in him. It was not, however, in abstract thought alone, or chiefly, that he made his mark on the ages; his
own thinking was markedly concrete, and nothing characterized it more strongly than the firmness of its grasp upon the realities of life, to the understanding and direction of which it was held strictly ancillary.
His impact upon the world might accordingly not unfairly be summed up, from one point of view, in the ethical revolution which he wrought. "In essence," remarks Harnack, 15 "Augustine's importance in the history of the Church and dogma lies in his giving to the West in the place of the StoicChristian popular morals, as that was recapitulated in Pelagianism, a religious, specifically Christian ethics, and so strongly impressing this on the Church that at least its formulas maintain up to to-day their supremacy in the whole extent of Western Christianity." Indeed, we might do worse, in seeking an index of his influence as a thinker, than fix upon the place he has occupied in political theory and practice. The entire political development of the Middle Ages was dominated by him; and he was in a true sense the creator of the Holy Roman Empire. It was no accident that the De civitate
Dei was the favorite reading of Charlemagne: "he delighted," Einhard tells us (Vita Caroli, 24), "in the books of St. Augustine, and especially in those that bear the title 'Of the City of God.' " And in the great struggle between the Empire and the Papacy in the later eleventh century it was expressly to him that the controversialists on both sides made their appeal. No Father is quoted by them as often as he, except, perhaps, Gregory the Great; and no series of documents is cited more frequently than his writings, except, perhaps, the pseudo-Isidorian decretals. 16 Not only do writers like Walram of Naumburg and Wido of Ferrara reflect accurately his conception of the Church, with its emphasis on unity and its vacillation between the ideas of the congregatio sanctorum and a hierarchical organization—echoes of which still sound in William of Occam's "Defensor Pacis" and the discussions of the conciliatory party in the Roman Church whose ornament was Gerson
—but they made their appeal to Augustine in their endeavors to give
validity to their defense "of the State as a Divine institution, of the moral significance and relative independence of the earthly sovereignty, of the necessary concordance of the Sacerdotium and Imperium," and the like. 17
On the theoretical side he must be accredited, in this aspect of his thought, with the creation of the science of the Philosophy of History. For the primary significance of the De civitate Dei lies in the fact that "in it for the first time an ideal consideration, a comprehensive survey of human history found its expression." 18 No doubt his external position at the division of the ages, when the Old World was dying and the New World, under the dominion of Christianity, was struggling into its place, supplied him with incitement for the creation of this new science; and the demands which the times, in the crash of the secular order, made for an apology for Christianity, powerfully determined him to a general historical philosophy.
But it was Christianity itself, as the entrance into the world of a renovating force, and his own particular conception of Christianity (leading him to conceive the history of human society no less than the course of the individual life, as the continuous evolution of the divine purpose, and impeling him to interpret all the forces of time as working harmoniously onward towards that faroff divine event to which all creation moves) that gave him not only the impulse to work out a philosophy of history, but the elements of the particular philosophy of history which he actually presents in his epoch-making treatise, which, incomplete and perhaps one-sided as it is, still retains full validity in its fundamental traits.
(d) As a regilious genius.—Not even, however, in Augustine the philosopher do we find the Augustine whose influence has wrought most powerfully in the world. The crisis through which he passed at his conversion was a profound religious revolution; and if he gave himself at once to the task of constructing a philosophy, it was distinctively a Christian philosophy he sought to construct, built though it was largely out
of Platonic materials: the authority of Christ, he tells us in the earliest of the writings in which this task was prosecuted, ranked with him even above that of reason. And if he devoted all his powers to the exposition and defense of the Catholic faith, it was because he saw in the Catholic faith the pure expression of religion, and poured into the Catholic faith all the fulness of his religious emotion. It is not Augustine the traditionalist, or Augustine the thinker, but Augustine the religious genius, who has most profoundly influenced the world. The most significant fact about him is that he, first among Church teachers, gave adequate expression to that type of religion which has since attached to itself the name of "evangelical"; the religion, that is to say, of faith, as distinct from the religion of works; the religion which, despairing of self, casts all its hope on God, as opposed to the religion which, in a greater or less degree, trusts in itself; in a word— since religion in its very nature is dependence on God—religion in the purity of its conception, as over against a quasi-religious moralism. What requires particularly to be noted is that he gave full expression to this type of religion both in its vital and in its thetical aspects—the former most adequately in that unique book in which he reveals his soul, and admits us as spectators to the struggles of his great heart as it seeks to cleanse itself of all trust in itself and to lay hold with the grasp, first of despair, next of discerning trust, and then of grateful love, on the God who was its salvation; and the latter most adequately in that long series of writings in which he expounds, defends, and enforces with logical argument and moving exhortation the fundamental elements of the theology of grace, as against the most direct assailants which that theology has been called upon to meet in the whole history of Christian thought. The great contribution which Augustine has made to the world's life and thought is embodied in the theology of grace, which he has presented with remarkable clearness
and force, vitally in his "Confessions," and thetically in his anti-Pelagian treatises.
It would be altogether a mistake to suppose that Augustine consciously discriminated between the theology of grace, which was his personal contribution to Christian thought, and the traditional Catholicism, which he gave his life to defend and propagate. In his own consciousness, the two were one: in his theology of grace he was in his own apprehension only giving voice to the Catholic faith in its purity. Nevertheless, however unconsciously, he worked with it a revolution both in Christian teaching and in Christian life, second in its depth and its far-reaching results to no revolution which has been wrought in Christian feeling and thought in the whole course of its history. A new Christian piety dates from him, in which, in place of the alternations of hope and fear which vex the lives of those who, in whatever degree, hang their hopes on their own merits, a mood of assured trust in the mercy of a gracious God is substituted as the spring of Christian life. And a new theology corresponding to this new type of piety dates from him; a theology which, recalling man from all dependence on his own powers or merits, casts him decisively on the grace of God alone for his salvation. Of course, this doctrine was not new in the sense that it was Augustine's invention; it was the doctrine of Paul, for example, before it was the doctrine of Augustine, and was only recovered for the Church by Augustine, though in that age, dominated in all its thinking by the dregs of Stoic rationalism, it came with all the force of a new discovery. And, of course, Augustine did not discover it all at once.
Because his conversion was a vital religious experience, in which the religious relation was realized in thought and life in unwonted purity and power, the fundamental elements of his religious revolution were from the first present in his mind and heart; in his earliest Christian writings he already gives expression to both the formal and the material principles, as
we may term them, of the theology of grace. The authority of the divine revelation in and through Christ, embodied in the Scriptures, and the utter dependence of man on God for all good (potestas nostra Ipse est, da fidem), are already the most intimate expression of his thought and life. But just because the religious system to which he gave himself on his conversion was taken over by him as a whole, time was requisite for the transfusion of the whole mass by the consistent explication and conscious exposition of the "Augustinianism" implicitly summed up in such maxims. The adjustment went on slowly, although it went on unbrokenly. It required ten years before the revived Paulinism attained even a fully consistent positive enunciation (first in the work, "De diversis quæstionibus ad
Simplicianum," a.d. 396); and, though the leaven worked steadily thereafter more and more deeply and widely into his thought, death intervened before all the elements of his thinking were completely leavened. That is the reason why Augustine was both the founder of Roman Catholicism and the author of that doctrine of grace which it has been the constantly pursued effort of Roman Catholicism to neutralize, and which in very fact either must be neutralized by, or will neutralize, Roman Catholicism. Two children were struggling in the womb of his mind. There can be no doubt which was the child of his heart. His doctrine of the Church he had received whole from his predecessors, and he gave it merely the precision and vitality which insured its persistence. His doctrine of grace was all his own: it represented the very core of his being; and his whole progress in Christian thinking consists in the growing completeness with which its fundamental principles applied themselves in his mind to every department of life and thought. In this gradual subjection to them of every element of his inherited teaching, it was inevitable, had time been allowed, that his inherited doctrine of the Church, too, with all its implications, would have gone down before it, and Augustine would have bequeathed to the
Church, not "problems," but a thoroughly worked out system of evangelical religion.
(e) Augustine and Protestantism.—The problem which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for solution, the Church required a thousand years to solve. But even so, it is Augustine who gave us the Reformation.
For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church.
This doctrine of grace came from Augustine's hands in its positive outline completely formulated: sinful man depends, for his recovery to good and to God, entirely on the free grace of God; this grace is therefore indispensable, prevenient, irresistible, indefectible; and, being thus the free grace of God, must have lain, in all the details of its conference and working, in the intention of God from all eternity. But, however clearly announced and forcefully commended by him, it required to make its way against great obstacles in the Church. As over against the Pelagians, the indispensableness of grace was quickly established; as over against the SemiPelagians, its prevenience was with almost equal rapidity made good. But there advance paused. If the necessity of prevenient grace was thereafter
(after the second Council of Orange, 529) the established doctrine of the Church, the irresistibility of this prevenient grace was put under the ban, and there remained no place for a complete "Augustinianism" within the Church, as Gottschalk and Jansen were fully to discover. Therefore, when the great revival of religion which we call the Reformation came, seeing that it was, on its theological side, a revival of "Augustinianism," as all great revivals of religion must be (for "Augustinianism" is but the thetical expression of religion in its purity), there was nothing for it but the rending of the Church. And therefore also the greatest peril to the Reformation was and remains the diffused anti-"Augustinianism" in the world; and, by a curious combination of circumstances, this, its greatest enemy, showed
itself most dangerous in the hands of what we must otherwise look upon as the chief ally of the Reformation—that is to say, Humanism. Humanism was the ally of the Reformation in so far as it, too, worked for the emancipation of the human spirit; and, wherever it was religious, it became the seed-plot of the Reformation.
But there was a strong anti-"Augustinian" party among the Humanists, and from it emanated the gravest danger which threatened the Reformation. Where this tone of thought was dominant the Reformation failed, because religious depth was wanting. What Spain, for example, lacked, says R. Saint-Hilaire justly, was not freedom of thought, but the Gospel. In the first stages of the Reformation movement in the North, this anti-"Augustinianism" may be looked upon as summed up in Erasmus; and Erasmus, on this very ground, held himself aloof from the Reformation movement, and that movement held itself aloof from him. "I am at present reading our Erasmus," wrote
Luther six months before he nailed his theses on the door of the SchlossKirche at Wittenberg, "but my heart recoils more and more from him.…
Those who ascribe something to man's freedom of will regard these things differently from those who know only God's free grace." Do we realize how much we owe to Erasmus and his friends that they remained Roman
Catholics, and thus permitted the "Augustinianism" of the Reformation to plant its seed and to bear its fruit?
Literature.—The literature upon Augustine is immense. An excellent selection from it is given by Loofs at the head of the article "Augustinus" in Herzog, "Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche,"3 ii. pp. 257 f.f, with which should be compared that given by Harnack,
"History of Dogma," v. pp. 61 f. The following deal directly with the influence of Augustine: Feuerlein, "Ueber die Stellung Augustins in der
Kirchenund Kulturgeschichte,"in von Sybel's "Historische Zeitschrift,"
1869, xxii. pp. 270–313; Reuter, "Augustinische Studien," Gotha, 1887,
vii. pp. 479–516; Cunningham, "S. Austin and his place in the History of Christian Thought" (Hulsean Lectures for 1885), London, 1886; Schaff,
"History of the Christian Church," iii., New York, 1884, § 180, pp. 1016– 1028; Eucken, "Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker," Leipzig,
1890 (2nd ed. 1897, pp. 216–250; 4th ed. 1902, pp. 210, etc.); Nourrisson, "La Philosophie de Sant Augustin," Paris, 1866, ii. pp. 147–276; Werner,
"Die Scholastik des späteren Mittelalters," iii., Vienna, 1883, and "Die Augustinische Psychologie in ihrer mittelalterlich-scholastischen Einkleidung und Gestaltung," Sitzungsberichte der phil.-hist. Classe der kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1882, pp. 4350–494; Siebeck,
"Die Anfänge der neueren Psychologie," in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Pädagogik, 1888, pp. 161 f., cf. his "Geschichte der Psychologie"; Ehrle,
"Der Augustinismus und der Aristotelismus in der Scholastik gegen Ende des xiii. Jahrhundert," "Archiv für Literaturund Kirchengeschichte des
Mittelalters," 1889, v. pp. 603–635, cf. also Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie, Innsbruck, 1889, xiii. pp. 172–193; Mirbt, "Die Stellung
Augustins in der Publicistik des gregorianischen Kirchenstreits," Leipzig, 1888; Koch, "Der heilige Faustus, Bischof von Riez," Stuttgart, 1895, pp.
129–191; Gwatkin, "The Knowledge of God,"2 1908, ii. p. 179; Portalié, "Augustine," in "Catholic Encyclopædia," ii. pp. 84–104, New York, 1907.
The text of Augustine is most generally accessible in "Patrologia Latina," xxxii.–xlvii.; and his chief writings are translated in "Nicene and PostNicene Fathers," First Series i.–viii., Oxford and New York, 1886–1888.
1. Harnack, "Monasticism and the Confessions of St. Augustine," p. 123.
2. Reuter, "Augustinische Studien," vii. p. 499.
3. Harnack, "Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte," E. T. "Outlines of the History of Dogma," p. 335.
4. Portalié, in Vacant-Mangenot, "Dictionnaire de la Théologie Catholique," i. col. 2453.
5. Cf. Stilting, "Acta Sanctorum," Aug. vi.
6. "De Trinitate," I. iv. 7; III. præf. 2.
7. Reuter, op. cit., p. 499.
8. Mirbt, "Die Stellung Augustins in der Publicistik des gregorianischen Kirchenstreits," p. 80.
9. Eucken, "Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker2, p. 216.
10. Cf. E. Norden, in "Die Kultur der Gegenwart, i. 8, 1905, p. 394:
"Augustine was the great poet of the ancient Church, though just as little as Plato did he write in verse. These two go together as the great poetphilosophers of all time."
11. Mirbt, op. cit., p. 1.
12. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Pädagogik, 1888, p. 190.
13. Eucken, op. cit., p. 249.
14. "A History of Philosophy," pp. 264, 270, 276.
15. "Dogmengeschichte" [E. T. v. p. 30]; cf. on Augustine's place in the history of ethics, Joseph Mausbach, in "Die Kultur der Gegenwart," i. 4,
1906, p. 526.
16. Mirbt, op. cit., p. 75.
17. Reuter, op. cit., p. 508.
18. Seyrich, "Die Geschichtsphilosophie Augustins," 1891, p. 68.