Augustinianism

“ The theological thought of Augustine is concerned—to put the matter as simply as possible—with the elaboration of four fundamental ideas: the absolute sovereignty of God; the absolute dependence of man; the supernatural revelation of a divinely originated plan of salvation administered by the Church; and a philosophy of history according to which the whole created universe and the entire temporal course of events are ordered and governed from all eternity with reference to the establishment and triumph of a Kingdom of saints in the Church, the holy “City of God.” ”

“ But Christ himself is the rock, not a mortal man. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ,"--a truth reiterated even by Saint Augustine, the great and acknowledged theologian of the Catholic Church, although Augustine's views of sin and depravity are no more relished by the Roman Catholics of our day than the doctrines of Luther himself, who drew his theological system, like Calvin, from Augustine more than from any other man, except Saint Paul. ”

“ A like result appears with greater power in Augustine. His Confessions give the mode in which his spiritual progress presented itself to him some time after he had become a Catholic Christian. [55] His whole life sets forth the same theme, presenting the religious passion of the man drawing into itself his energies and interests. God and the Soul—these two would he know, and these alone. But these alone indeed! As if they did not embrace all life pointed and updrawn toward its salvation. God was the [Pg 64] overmastering object of intellectual interest and of passionate love. ”

“ Not obeying, but receiving, is the substance of the gospel. A man cannot merit salvation; he cannot buy it; but one thing he must do,—he must take it. And the least faith makes salvation ours, because it makes Christ ours.
Augustine conceived of justification as a continuous process, proceeding until love and all Christian virtues fill the heart. There is his chief difference from Paul. Augustine believes in sin and grace. But he has not the freedom of the children of God, as Paul has. The influence of Augustine upon Roman Catholic theology has not been wholly salutary. ”

“ But any knowledge or understanding of this theology of Augustine was as strange to his own Order as to the Scholastics. It was taught, indeed, that heaven was too high for man to attain to otherwise than by the grace of God. But it was also taught that the sinner, by his own natural strength, both could and ought to do enough in God's sight to earn that grace which would then help him further on the way to heaven. ”

“ Augustine had thus in a great degree 113new moulded the science of theology, and had combined with it as an essential part of divine truth, that the fate of mankind was determined by the divine decree independently of their own efforts and conduct, and that they were thus divided into the elect and reprobate, it became necessary, in order to preserve consistency, to introduce into his system a limitation with respect to baptism, and to prevent the opinions concerning it from interfering with those which flowed from the doctrine of predestination. ”

“ For these reasons the Augustinian theology prevailed, and in the Dark Ages which followed it became so deeply inwrought into the innermost fibres of Latin Christianity that it remains dominant to-day alike in Catholic and Protestant churches. With few exceptions every child born of Christian parents in western Europe or in America grows up with an idea of God the outlines of which were engraven upon men's minds by Augustine fifteen centuries ago. ”

“ All knowledge should direct itself toward knowing Him. By grace, within God’s light and love, was the Soul, knower and lover, expectant of eternal life. Nothing that was transient could be its chief good, or its good at all except so far as leading on to its chief good of salvation, life eternal, in and through the Trinity. One may read Augustine’s self-disclosures or the passages containing statements of the ultimate religious principles whereby he and all men should live, or one may proceed to examine his long life and the vast entire product of his labour. ”

“ Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustine defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platonists, whom he rates most highly among all ancient philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in Christ alone; that divine worship is due to no other being beside the triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world ”

“ Augustine says, precedes belief.
The desire of salvation, inspired by Almighty God, must also be accomplished by him. So he also works upon the soul outwardly. The most usual means which he employs to work upon the soul outwardly and lead it to the possession of the true faith is to give it an opportunity to learn the truths of salvation from the Catholic Church. “Faith is from hearing," says St. Paul. He then enlightens the intellect of man to see the truths of salvation ”

“ Despite its awkward form, however, the Enchiridion is one of the most important of all of Augustine’s writings, for it is a conscious effort of the theological magistrate of the Western Church to stand on final ground of testimony to the Christian truth.
For his framework, Augustine chooses the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The treatise begins, naturally enough, with a discussion of God’s work in creation. Augustine makes a firm distinction between the comparatively unimportant knowledge of nature and the supremely important acknowledgment of the Creator of nature. ”

“ But this is something,--and it is well for the critic and opponent of the Augustinian theology to bear this in mind,--that Augustine was an earnest seeker after truth, even when enslaved by the fornications of Carthage; and his own free-will in persistently seeking truth, through all the mazes of Manichean and Grecian speculation, is as manifest as the divine grace which came to his assistance. God Almighty does not break fetters until there is some desire in men to have them broken. If men will hug sins, they must not complain of their bondage. ”

“ Theistic Transcendentalism.—The passion of theism was the core of his personal religion. His was an experimental theism, a theism of the heart. The often quoted words, "Tu Domine fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te" (Conf. I. i.) , sum up his inmost personal experience. This is, above all, what Augustine found in the Psalms, which were his introduction to the deeper study of Scripture (supra, § 6) . "Mihi autem adhaerere Deo bonum est" (Ps. lxxii. 28, Vulg.) is the immovable centre upon which his whole religion and theology turns. ”

“ Bishop Jansen of Ypres in Belgium had devoted his life to the study of Saint Augustine and to the elucidation of the doctrines of that great father of the church. Saint Augustine is the spiritual forefather of those who in religious thought are believers in determinism, in religious fatalism, with all the consequences which it involves, such as predestination and the doctrine of primitive sin which man is apparently endeavoring in vain to expiate. ”

“ The Doctrine of Augustine.―During the first period of his Christian life, when the conflict with Manichæism still stood in the forefront of his thinking and controversial activity, Augustine, looking at faith as a self-determining of the human will, had thought a certain measure of free co-operation on the part of man in his conversion to be necessary and had therefore refused to maintain his absolute want of merit. ”

“ But by his whole life’s experience he was irresistibly led to acknowledge man’s natural inability for any positive co-operation and to make faith together with conversion depend solely upon the grace of God. The perfect and full development of this doctrine was brought about by means of his controversy with the Pelagians. Augustine’s doctrinal system in its most characteristic features is as follows: Man was created free and in the image of God, destined to and capable of attaining immortality, holiness and blessedness, but also with the possibility of sinning and dying. ”

“ The central theme in all Augustine’s writings is the sovereign God of grace and the sovereign grace of God. Grace, for Augustine, is God’s freedom to act without any external necessity whatsoever--to act in love beyond human understanding or control; to act in creation, judgment, and redemption ”

“ It must be remembered that mediæval theology never repudiated the theology of Augustine, and admitted in theory at least that man's salvation, and justification as part of it, always depended in the last resort on the prevenient grace of God; in their reverence for the teaching of Aristotle, they believed that they had also to make room for the action of the free will of man which they always looked on as the pure capacity of choice between two alternatives. ”

“ It would be a vain and useless labor for me to undertake to day to prove that Augustine is a great saint; there is nothing better known in the world, both among the learned and the ignorant; it is proclaimed by the dumb books in libraries, written by pens in the universities, spoken of by tongues in the pulpits; whenever the name of Augustine is mentioned you hear the great Augustine spoken of. So that one who has even a little knowledge of the Saint must, whenever he thinks of him, look on him as a great saint. ”

“ The views of Augustine were infinitely more cheerful than those of his adversary respecting salvation, since they gave more hope to the miserable population of the Empire who could not claim the virtues of Pelagius, and were impotent of themselves to break away from the bondage which degraded them. There is nothing in the writings of Augustine,--not in this controversy, or any other controversy,--to show that God delights in the miseries or the penalty which are indissolubly connected with sin ”

“ Augustine the substantial formula of his ideology, the origin of that ideology, or the proofs of the stability, security, and irrefutable validity of that ideology, he would always have been obliged to answer by appealing to the universal principle established by reason and the Catholic faith, that is, to the principle of creation. Therefore the genesis of the Augustinian ideology, if it had not been already traced out or properly considered before to-day, would be now as clear and certain as the light, and with the eighth book of The City of God, we might predict that it would be immortal. ”

“ Augustine showed that purity was an inward virtue, not the crucifixion of the body; that its passions and appetites are made to be subservient to reason and duty; that the law of temperance is self-restraint; that the soul was not an emanation or evolution from eternal light, but a distinct creation of Almighty God, which He has the power to destroy, as well as the body itself; that nothing in the universe can live without His pleasure; that His intervention is a logical sequence of His moral government. ”

“ At the same time the hallmark of the Augustinian philosophy is its insistent demand that reflective thought issue in practical consequence; no contemplation of the end of life suffices unless it discovers the means by which men are brought to their proper goals. In sum, Augustine is one of the very few men who simply cannot be ignored or depreciated in any estimate of Western civilization without serious distortion and impoverishment of one’s historical and religious understanding. ”

“ Augustine, on the contrary, and to all Catholic theologians who followed his teaching, what will help us before God is rather that inward righteousness which God Himself gives to man by His Holy Spirit and the workings of His grace, or, as the expression was, the righteousness infused by God. The good, therefore, already existing in a Christian is so highly esteemed that he can thereby gain merit before the just God and even do more than is required of him. ”

“ A third thing, Truth, must be first known, because through her alone are we led to know God and the soul. The book closes with a resolution to submit to God's guidance, and a prayer for faith in him and an ability to do his will.
In Book II the author propounds as the question of supreme moment: 'Am I immortal'? St. Augustine works out the solution to this problem in a manner very satis- factory to himself, no doubt, but the modern thinker would be tempted to object that 'much might be said on both sides'. The Latin Father here shows himself the forerunner of scholasticism. ”

“ Augustine, the master mind of the fifth century, whose influence yet abounds in the doctrines of both Catholics and Protestants, was under its sway. With him, as with those who preceded him, this allegorical interpretation perverted the Scriptures and obscured truth. ”

“ He began to read the Epistles carefully, and the more he read of them the more he became aware of the abyss which separates philosophy from wisdom—the one which marshals the ideas of things, the other which, ignoring ideas, leads right up to the divine realities whereon the others are suspended. The Apostle taught Augustin that it was not enough to get a glimpse of God through the crystal of concepts, but that it is necessary to be united to Him in spirit and in truth—to possess and enjoy Him. ”

“ Taken together, the Confessions and the Enchiridion give us two very important vantage points from which to view the Augustinian perspective as a whole, since they represent both his early and his mature formulation. From them, we can gain a competent--though by no means complete--introduction to the heart and mind of this great Christian saint and sage. There are important differences between the two works, and these ought to be noted by the careful reader. But all the main themes of Augustinian Christianity appear in them, and through them we can penetrate to its inner dynamic core. ”