Augustine

by Eugene TeSelle

Overview

Abingdon Pillars of Theology is a series for the college and seminary classroom designed to help students grasp the basic and necessary facts, influence, and significance of major theologians. Written by major scholars, these books will outline the context, methodology, organizing principles, method, primary contributions, and major writings of people who have shaped theology as we know it today.

For many, all theology subsequent to Augustine is a footnote. He is influential, even today, because of his doctrinal formulations, but even more important, Augustine is a stimulating thinker and constant inquirer. Starting with his philosophical interest in Platonism, which set the framework for his thinking, Eugene TeSelle examines the major themes of Augustine's thought following a more or less chronological order including human fulfillment, evil, creation, the human self, the church and its doctrines, the course of human history, and the relation of Christianity to political matters. Even those who think he was wrong in his conclusions can respect Augustine's willingness to confront problems and think through their implications.

"This book on Augustine allows the reader to appreciate how easily one moves from the fourth or fifth century into modern times and back. Eugene TeSelle thus invites the reader to appreciate some of the most significant themes of Augustine’s thought--opening a kind of dialogue between Augustine and other thinkers on topics such as evil and grace, politics and piety, and more."


Allan Fitzgerald, O.S.A., Istituto Patristico “Augustinianum,” Rome, Italy
 "This is an extraordinary book. Eugene TeSelle is one of the great masters of Augustine's thought, and here he draws upon his great erudition to present the father of Western theology cogently and comprehensively for the layperson. The book is at once short and accessible but also profound and thought-provoking; a sensitive treatment of Augustine in his own context, which also makes him wholly relevant for today. TeSelle raises the big questions and provides ample material to begin to answer them."

Carol Harrison, Lecturer in the History and Theology of the Latin West, University of Durham, Durham, Great Britain

Eugene TeSelle is emeritus Oberlin Alumni/ae Professor of Church History and Theology  at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426759567
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	04/01/2006
Series:	Abingdon Pillars of Theology
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Eugene TeSelle is Emeritus Professor, Oberlin Alumni/ae Professor of Church History and Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee. He is an Agustinian scholar.

Read an Excerpt

Augustine

Abingdon Pillars of Theology

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By Eugene TeSelle

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2006 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-5956-7

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CHAPTER 1

Augustine's Journey

Augustine wrote the Confessions in 397, soon after becoming a bishop. They are the first full-scale autobiography, much larger than any previous first-person work. He had already invented the title, and the genre, of Soliloquies—"conversations with myself." This was one of the works written soon after his religious conversion; they already contain short autobiographical passages that have been called "the first Confessions."

In writing the Confessions, Augustine was not doing something totally new. There had been others, pagan and Christian, who told about their intellectual and spiritual quests, exhorting others to follow their path to philosophical or religious conversion. The Greco-Roman world was very much like our own: diverse and cosmopolitan, presenting a variety of options as people sought "meaning" in life. But Augustine told his story with much wider scope and in a new way that became a model for later autobiographies—or something to react against. Rousseau's Confessions, written in the eighteenth century, intentionally took a new and different direction.

When he wrote the Confessions, Augustine was 43, the age of "midlife crisis" with its questioning about one's past and future. It could have been stimulated by a number of factors. He had just written On Christian Instruction, where he considered the relationships between Christianity and classical culture; perhaps this got him thinking about his own encounters with both traditions. And then his friend Alypius had been asked by an Italian bishop to tell about the beginnings of the monastic life in Africa; the section on Alypius in Book VI seems to have been written first. The Confessions may also have been written in self-defense. Here was a former Manichaean, an intellectual whom many regarded as arrogant, who had been elected bishop in a manner contrary to the canons of the Council of Nicaea (no one in Hippo knew about them). And there may have been negative reactions to his new theory of predestination, put forward about a year before the Confessions. If so, he trumped his critics, acknowledging many sins and shortcomings but tracing the hand of God throughout. There are several ways of reading the Confessions: as a narrative about his own past; as a gold mine for psychoanalysts (a case can be made for both oedipal and narcissistic themes); as reflection about, and interpretation of, his own past; as clues to influences upon his thinking; and as a literary product with an intriguing stylistic texture.

Augustine is always the intellectual. Passages are never purely factual or expressive. The purpose of recalling his life before God is to engage in constant questioning, trying to interpret events that seemed incoherent or puzzling as bare experience. Passages often reflect his theories—or perplexities—about the soul, its impulses, its origin, and its destiny. Much of their persuasiveness comes from the way they draw in the reader and stimulate similar self-examination. Peppered throughout the text are quotations from the Bible in the Old Latin translation. This looked exotic and inelegant to the cultured, but Augustine heard it as the voice of God, offering the framework within which to orient and interpret all that is said.

Augustine's mother was Monica, for whom the place Santa Monica is named. His father, Patricius, whom he did not like so much, was a member of the council (fifty to one hundred men who could be elected to office in the city), but this did not mean great wealth. When Augustine had to interrupt his studies because of his father's financial problems, he was helped by a wealthy landowner, Romanianus, whose son later became Augustine's pupil in Italy. After studying in Carthage, he taught grammar in Thagaste, then rhetoric to sons of the upper classes in Carthage and later in Rome.

He was on a successful path, and his pious mother encouraged his upward mobility. But he developed other aspirations as well. In his nineteenth year, he says, he read Cicero's Hortensius and was aroused to the life of philosophy, the quest for wisdom. This, he suggests, was the moment when he stopped bending his neck to the yoke of authority. The restless and indeterminate quest of the human spirit is evoked at the beginning of the Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you." Yes, God is the answer. But that answer is not packed into human nature; the quest may explore many possibilities and still not arrive at the answer.

Convinced that he should follow the path of reason, he turned away from the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church in North Africa. Yet he always thought of himself as Christian in some sense, and Monica kept reinforcing this. He mentions that one liaison—probably with his concubine of fourteen years—began in church. In one of the recently discovered sermons he recalls that, prior to the separation of the sexes in church, he engaged in what we would call "inappropriate touching."

Readers often scold Augustine for leaving the concubine nameless. But he does the same with the dying friend. It is not that they are unimportant. Perhaps he was protecting the reputation of the concubine, who was still alive; since Augustine says that she "vowed to God that she would know no other man," she was probably living as a nun. Their namelessness is rhetorically more effective, creating a textual mystery, perhaps a textual wound. It should be noted that even Monica and Patricius are named only once, in the last chapter of Book IX. To be named in this text is not necessarily a sign of emotive intimacy.

He fell in with the Manichaeans, who claimed to base their religion on reason rather than authority. He adopted it as a more enlightened form of Christianity (later he decided that it was myth masquerading as natural science). He had started with the religious beliefs of a provincial, strongly influenced by the simple faith of his mother. Now he identified with Carthaginian and then Roman intellectuals and looked for a more sophisticated set of beliefs.

When the position of city orator in Milan opened up, he applied for it and performed a trial oration before Symmachus, prefect of Rome. The move occurred in the fall of 384, only a few months after the pamphlet war between Symmachus and Bishop Ambrose over the removal of the Altar of Victory (the personified goddess Victoria) from the Senate chambers in Rome. The battle sounds familiar today; it corresponds almost exactly with our disputes over displaying the Ten Commandments in courtrooms. To the emperor Gratian it meant secularizing the functions of government to avoid offending either Christians or pagans (he was following the policy set by Constantine, one of the inventors of religious freedom). To Symmachus it meant abandonment of public support for traditional religious values. Symmachus was probably glad to find an orator who did not belong to the Catholic camp, and Augustine was willing to play a part in the religious wars of the time—on the side of tolerance and pluralism, including diverse modes of Christian belief, not of paganism. Later Augustine would develop, at the end of The City of God, his own theory of the secular state as distinct from the church.

Augustine was hoping for appointment to an imperial office, and his mother arranged a marriage suitable to a person with such aspirations. But he also encountered a group of intellectuals, some of them high officials in the court, who were interested in the writings of the Platonists. For them the attractions of Platonism seemed to be as strong as those of public life; perhaps they had misgivings about the flattery that is always part of official life, and they were certainly aware of the grim fate of colleagues who fell from favor.

During Holy Week in 386 there was confrontation in Milan between Ambrose and Justina, regent for the young emperor Valentinian II, who wanted to turn over one of the churches to the Arians (mostly Gothic mercenaries). When Ambrose and his supporters occupied the basilica in protest, it was surrounded by Gothic troops with their long hair and mustaches; they became steadily more sympathetic with the protesters. To keep his followers occupied and raise their spirits, Ambrose organized the antiphonal chanting of psalms and composed some metrical hymns (about ten to fifteen of them survive). Although Augustine mentions the episode and says that his mother was there, he was more preoccupied with his own intellectual and spiritual quest than with the politics of doctrine. But the confrontation may have demonstrated the weaknesses of the imperial court—and the strengths of Ambrose and the Catholic Church.

He comments that he was like those wanderers who remember their homeland but delay, gazing at the stars, roaming in the mists, hearing the enticements of sirens. Physically he had been traveling north; now, he says, he looked north figuratively, too, and began to learn about a more credible guide, a Big Dipper pointing to the Pole Star. In a narrative written soon after his conversion he emphasizes three things, which correspond roughly with Books VI, VII, and VIII of the Confessions: conversations with the bishop Ambrose, reading some "books of the Platonists," and reading the apostle Paul.

In the first phase, he learned to acknowledge the constructive role of authority, which to the Romans meant relying on the testimony of those who are better acquainted with something true or good. He says he had been imbued with the Christian religion from infancy but was repelled by its dogmatism. When he arrived in Milan he made a courtesy call on Ambrose, the bishop who had just been engaged in controversy with Symmachus; and Ambrose, he says, "received me like a father"—a better one than Patricius and one with whom Monica already had a spiritual relationship. In a few more months he enrolled as a catechumen, having decided to adhere to Catholic Christianity unless something better appeared.

But this by itself was not enough. Subjection to authority might be good enough for simple believers, but not for someone who had been ignited with the philosophic quest. Belief, which is based on authority, does indeed point toward the goal. Faith may even arrive ahead of reason, as Monica, the simple believer, frequently does in the dialogues written soon after Augustine's conversion. But it is better to make belief the beginning of a journey taken by reason, for the goal is to possess truth directly. Now another decisive factor enters the picture.

The second stage is reading what Augustine calls "a few books of the Platonists," and these certainly included several treatises from Plotinus's Enneads. In this stage Augustine was converted to Platonism, although under Christian auspices; later, after some weeks or months, he would be fully converted to Christianity, with Platonist overtones. The Christianity with which he grew up had been intellectually inadequate, driving him into a long detour; now he came to see things in a new light, for Platonism had significant similarities with Christian doctrine.

But the "books of the Platonists" did not resolve his problems; they created a new difficulty. He says repeatedly, in passages coming from all stages of his literary career, that one can glimpse the divine Light shining on one's mind but is immediately driven back, unable to endure it because one's affections are tied to lesser things (only the pure in heart shall see God, says Matt 5:8). He discovered his need for divine assistance, and this was to remain a major theme throughout his life. From this perspective, philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry were a major example of pride, thinking they could achieve union with God by their own powers. At the end of Book VII Augustine comments that it is one thing to view the homeland from a hilltop, and another thing to get there, since the road is beset with fears and temptations aroused by the rebel angels; one needs the help of Christ the heavenly commander, who gained that role by first humbling himself and becoming incarnate.

In the third stage he finally gets underway. Soon after the event, he mentions two motivating factors: the attraction of the religion that had been grafted into him as a child and the powerful example of actual lives. Marius Victorinus, translator of the "books of the Platonists" that Augustine read in Milan and a professor of rhetoric in Rome whose baptism created a public stir, was a model worth emulating. Then there was Antony the Egyptian monk, whose Life, written by Athanasius, had already influenced many others. Farther back, he may have been thinking of those two nameless figures in the Confessions: the friend who reproached Augustine by receiving Catholic baptism before he died, and the concubine, who, earlier than himself, vowed "to God" that she would live in chastity and, thus, was more faithful than he to their virtual marriage.

But the decisive moment, according to the Confessions, came when he read a passage in Paul's Letter to the Romans. The account in the Confessions is not straightforward narrative; it is so full of imagery that scholars have trouble distinguishing fact from interpretation. A year before writing the Confessions he had come to the theory that God's grace acts upon the human affections through "suggestions" that occur to us (see ch. 5); now the theory shapes the narrative, which is different from his telling of the story in the months after his conversion.

In this passage he briefly states his theory of willing. He calls attention to a monstrum, a strange phenomenon: when the mind commands the body it is obeyed, but when it commands itself it is not obeyed. The solution is not that there are two souls, as the Manichaeans thought; it is that our affections are divided, so that the desire to change is only halfhearted and is counterbalanced by what we are already accustomed to. He tells how his "old loves" plucked at his garment of flesh to keep him from going down a different path, to which he was beckoned by "Continence and her children." But only the divine call frees the will to act wholeheartedly.

How, then, does it happen? Just as Antony was converted by hearing a passage from scripture, Augustine is converted by reading another passage, and his friend Alypius by reading a third. Each person is addressed in a way that fits his own needs, that "speaks to his condition." In Augustine's case it was a passage in Romans: "not in reveling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Rom 13:13-14). He read it not with guilt or shame, but as advice and promise. It looked to him, the philosopher, like a classification of the three kinds of vice and an indication of the way to overcome them.

Augustine and his friends, and his mother Monica, went on retreat in the fall, in Cassiciacum in the hills north of Milan; he reported their conversations in several dialogues in which Augustine is the controlling figure, the new Socrates or Cicero. He returned to Milan, took instruction during Lent, and was baptized at Easter in 387. After Monica's death in Ostia, the port of Rome, he returned to Thagaste and set up a philosophic/monastic community.

A few years later, it was through the monastic life that Augustine, against his intentions, stumbled into the clergy. He had avoided any place without a bishop, but in the winter of 390/91, seeking out a friend who had expressed interest in his community, he came to Hippo Regius, whose Greek-born bishop was aging. When he entered the church he was recognized and was forcibly detained to become a presbyter and bishop-designate.

He would have preferred contemplation; now he accepts the "active life" of a churchman. Within the space of four years he had lost Monica, his friends Verecundus and Nebridius, and his son Adeodatus; links with his past had been forcibly broken. Perhaps it was to suggest the gap between then and now that he ended his autobiographical narrative in the Confessions with Monica's death, ten years before the time of writing.

Now he finds a new family in the community of the church in Hippo and the monastery he founds next to it. He begins a new career with very different responsibilities—and definitely to our benefit, for his public becomes much broader than the educated intellectuals for whom he had been writing. For a few years in the 390s he seems to have experienced "writer's block," starting several works and then abandoning them. After he became a bishop in 395/96, he found his voice, pouring out a steady flow of sermons, letters, and books until his death in 430. He was not any less an intellectual; works like On the Trinity and The City of God are proof of that. But now he was an intellectual in a quite different mode.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Augustine by Eugene TeSelle. Copyright © 2006 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Chronology,
Introduction,
1. Augustine's Journey,
2. Reason's Quest: Augustine the Platonist,
3. Why Evil? Answering the Manichaeans,
4. Time and Creation: Interpreting Genesis,
5. Original Sin and Predestination: Threats to Freedom?,
6. The Church and the Sacraments: Unity in Grace across Space and Time,
7. Trinity and Incarnation: Shaping Doctrine in the West,
8. Citizens and Sojourners: Living in Two Cities,
9. The Sunset Years: Creating a Heritage,
10. Footnotes, Queries, and Obituaries to Augustine,
Definitions,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Scripture Index,
Citations from Augustine's Works,
Citations from Other Ancient Authors,
Citations from Modern Authors,
Index of Topics, Places, and Persons,