NPNF1-01. The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustin, with a Sketch of his Life and Work [ThML]
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[div1] Title Page
<pb n="iii" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0003=iii.htm" />A SELECT LIBRARY
OF THE
NICENE AND
POST-NICENE FATHERS
OF
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
EDITED BY
PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D., LL.D.,
PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK,
IN CONNECTION WITH A NUMBER OF PATRISTIC SCHOLARS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA.
VOLUME I
THE CONFESSIONS AND LETTERS OF ST. AUGUSTIN,
WITH A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK
T&T CLARK
EDINBURGH
__________________________________________________
WM. B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN
[div1] Preface
<pb n="v" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0005=v.htm" />Preface
————————————
Encouraged by the assured co-operation of competent Patristic scholars of Great Britain and the United States, I have undertaken the general editorship of a Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. It is to embrace in about twenty-five large volumes the most important works of the Greek Fathers from Eusebius to Photius, and of the Latin Fathers from Ambrose to Gregory the Great.
The series opens with St. Augustin, the greatest and most influential of all the Christian Fathers. Protestants and Catholics are equally interested in his writings, and most of all in his Confessions, which are contained in this volume. They will be followed by the works of St. Chrysostom, and the Church History of Eusebius.
A few words are necessary to define the object of this Library, and its relation to similar collections.
My purpose is to furnish ministers and intelligent laymen who have no access to the original texts, or are not sufficiently familiar with ecclesiastical Greek and Latin, with a complete apparatus for the study of ancient Christianity. Whatever may be the estimate we put upon the opinions of the Fathers, their historical value is beyond all dispute. They are to this day and will continue to be the chief authorities for the doctrines and usages of the Greek and Roman Churches, and the sources for the knowledge of ancient Christianity down to the age of Charlemagne. But very few can afford to buy, or are able to use such collections as Migne’s Greek Patrology, which embraces 167 quarto volumes, and Migne’s Latin Patrology which embraces 222 volumes.
The three leaders of the now historic Anglo-Catholic movement of Oxford, Drs. Pusey, Newman, and Keble, began, in 1837, the publication of “A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, anterior to the Division of the East and West. Translated by Members of the English Church,” Oxford (John Henry Parker) and London (J. G. F. & J. Rivington). It is dedicated to “William Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England.” The editors were aided by a number of able classical and ecclesiastical scholars. Dr. Pusey, the chief editor and proprietor, and Dr. Keble died in the communion of the church of their fathers to which they were loyally attached; Dr. Newman alone remains, though no more an Anglican, but a Cardinal of the Church of Rome. His connection with the enterprise ceased with his secession (1845).
The Oxford Library was undertaken not so much for an historical, as for an apologetic and dogmatic purpose. It was to furnish authentic proof for the supposed or real agreement of the Anglo-Catholic school with the faith and practice of the ancient church before the Greek schism. The selection was made accordingly. The series embraces 48 vols. It is very valuable as far as it <pb n="vi" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0006=vi.htm" />goes, but incomplete and unequal. Volume followed volume as it happened to get ready. An undue proportion is given to exegetical works; six volumes are taken up with Augustin’s Commentary on the Psalms, six with Gregory’s Commentary on Job, sixteen with Commentaries of Chrysostom; while many of the most important doctrinal, ethical, and historical works of the Fathers, as Eusebius, Basil, the two Gregorys, Theodoret, Maximus Confessor, John of Damascus, Hilary, Jerome, Leo the Great, were never reached.
In 1866, Mr. T. Clark, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and an Elder in the Free Church of Scotland, who has done more than any publisher for the introduction of German and other foreign theological literature to the English reading community, began to issue the valuable “Ante-Nicene Christian Library”, edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts, D. D., and James Donaldson, LL. D., which was completed in 1872 in 24 volumes, and is now being republished, by arrangement with Mr. Clark, in America in 8 volumes under the editorship of Bishop A. Cleveland Coxe, D. D. (1884–1886). Mr. Clark, in 1871, undertook also the publication of a translation of select works of St. Augustin under the editorial care of Rev. Marcus Dods, D. D., of Glasgow, which was completed in 15 volumes. The projected translation of Chrysostom was abandoned from want of encouragement.
Thus Episcopal divines of England, and Presbyterian divines of Scotland have prepared the way for our American enterprise, and made it possible.
We must also briefly mention a similar collection which was prepared by Roman Catholic scholars of Germany in the interest of their Church, namely the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Auswahl der vorzüglichsten patristichen Werke in deutscher Uebersetzung, herausgegeben unter der Oberleitung von Dr. Valentin Thalhofer (Domdekan und Prof. der Theol. in Eichstätt, formerly Professor in Munich). Kempten., Köselsche Buchhandlung. 1869–1886. Published in over 400 small numbers, three or four of which make a volume. An alphabetical Index vol. is now in course of preparation by Ulrich Uhle (Nos. 405 sqq.). The series was begun in 1869 by Dr. Fr. X. Reithmayr, Prof. of Theol. in Munich, who died in 1872. It embraces select writings of most of the Fathers. Seven volumes are devoted to Letters of the Popes from Linus to Pelagius II. (a.d. 67–590).
“The Christian Literature Company,” who republish Clark’s “Ante-Nicene Library,” asked me to undertake the editorship of a Nicene and Post-Nicene Library to complete the scheme. Satisfactory arrangements have been made with Mr. Clark and with Mr. Walter Smith, representing Dr. Pusey’s heirs, for the use of their translations, as far as our plan will permit. Without such a preliminary arrangement I would not have considered the proposal for a moment.
I have invited surviving authors of older translations to revise and edit their work for the American series, and I am happy to state that I received favorable replies. Some of them are among the list of contributors, others (including Cardinal Newman) have, at least, expressed a kindly interest in the enterprise, and wish it success.
The Nicene and Post-Nicene Library will be more complete and more systematic as well as much cheaper than any which has yet appeared in the English language. By omitting the voluminous Patristic commentaries on the Old Testament we shall gain room for more important and interesting works not embraced in the Oxford or Edinburgh series; and by condensing three or more of these volumes into one, and counting upon a large number of subscribers, the publishers <pb n="vii" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0007=vii.htm" />think themselves justified in offering the Library on terms which are exceedingly liberal, considering the great expense and risk. It will be published in the same handsome style as their Ante-Nicene Library.
May the blessing of the Great Head of the Church accompany and crown this work.
Philip Schaff.
New York, October, 1886.
[div1] Contents
<pb n="ix" />Contents.
__________
I. Prolegomena: St. Augustin’s Life and Work
By Philip Schaff, D.D.
Chapter I.—Literature
Chapter II.—Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin
Chapter III.—Estimate of St. Augustin
Chapter IV.—Writings of St. Augustin
Chapter V.—The Influence of St. Augustin upon Posterity and his Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism
Chief Events in the Life of St. Augustin
II. The Confessions of St. Augustin:
Translated by J.G. Pilkington, M.A.
Translator’s Preface
St. Augustin’s Opinion on his Confessions
The Confessions
III. The Letters of St. Augustin:
Translated by J.G. Cunningham, M.A.
Translator’s Preface
The Letters
[div1] Prolegomena: St. Augustin’s Life and Work
<pb n="1" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0009=1.htm" />Prolegomena.
——————
St. Augustin’s Life and Work
From Schaff’s Church History, Revised Edition.
New York 1884. Vol. III. 988-1028.
Revised and enlarged with additions to literature till 1886.
[div2] Literature
CHAPTER I.—Literature.
[div3] Sources
I. sources.
Augustin’s Works. S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi Opera…Post Lovaniensium theologorum recensionem [which appeared at Antwerp in 1577 in 11 vols.], castigatus [referring to tomus primus, etc.] denuo ad MSS. codd. Gallicanos, etc. Opera et studio monachorum ordinis S. Benedicti e congregatione S. Mauri [Fr. Delfau, Th. Blampin, P. Coustant, and Cl. Guesnié]. Paris, 1679-1700, 11 tom. in 8 fol. vols. The same edition reprinted, with additions, at Antwerp, 1700-1703, 12 parts in 9 fol.; and at Venice, 1729-’34, in 11 tom. in 8 fol. (this edition is not to be confounded with another Venice edition of 1756-’69 in 18 vols. 4to, which is full of printing errors); also at Bassano, 1807, in 18 vols.; by Gaume fratres, Paris, 1836-’39, in 11 tom. in 22 parts (a very elegant edition); and lastly by J. P. Migne, Petit-Montrouge, 1841-’49, in 12 tom. (“Patrol. Lat.” tom. xxxii.-xlvii.). Migne’s edition gives, in a supplementary volume (tom. xii.), the valuable Notitia literaria de vita, scriptis et editionibus Aug. from Schönemann’s “Bibliotheca historico-literaria Patrum Lat.” vol. ii. Lips. 1794, the Vindiciæ Augustinianæ of Cardinal Noris (Norisius), and the writings of Augustin first published by Fontanini and Angelo Mai. So far the most complete and convenient edition.
But a thoroughly reliable critical edition of Augustin is still a desideratum and will be issued before long by a number of scholars under the direction of the Imperial Academy of Vienna in the “Corpus Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum.”
On the controversies relating to the merits of the Bened. edition, which was sharply criticized by Richard Simon, and the Jesuits, but is still the best and defended by the Benedictines, see the supplementary volume of Migne, xxi. p. 40 sqq., and Thuillier: Histoire de la nouvelle éd. de S. Aug. par les PP. Bénédictins, Par. 1736.
The first printed edition of Augustin appeared at Basle, 1489-’95; another, in 1509, in 11 vols.; then the edition of Erasmus published by Frobenius, Bas. 1528-’29, in 10 vols., fol.; the Editio Lovaniensis, of sixteen divines of Louvain, Antw. 1577, in 11 vols. and often reprinted at Paris, Geneva, and Cologne.
Several works of Augustin have been often separately edited, especially the Confessions and the City of God. Compare a full list of the editions down to 1794 in Schönemann’s Bibliotheca, vol. ii. p. 73 sqq.; for later editions see Brunet, Manuel du libraire, Paris 1860, tom. I. vol. 557-567. Since then William Bright (Prof. of Ecclesiast. Hist. at Oxford) has published the Latin text of Select Anti-Pelagian Treatises of St. Aug. and the Acts of the Second Council of Orange. Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1880. With a valuable Introduction of 68 pages.
English translations of select works of Augustin are found in the “Oxford Library of the Fathers,” ed. by Drs. Pusey, Keble, and Newman, viz.: The Confessions, vol. I., 1838, 4th ed., 1853; Sermons on the N. T., vol. xvi., 1844, and vol. xx. 1845; Short Treatises, vol. xxii., 1847; Exposition of the Psalms, vols. xxiv., xxv., xxx., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxix., 1847, 1849, 1850, 1853, 1854; Homilies on John, vols. xxvi. and xxix., 1848 and 1849. Another translation by Marcus Dods and others, Edinb. (T. & T. Clark), 1871-’76, 15 vols., containing the City of God, the Anti-Donatist, the Anti-Pelagian, the Anti-Manichæan writings, Letters, On the Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the Enchiridion, On Catechising, On Faith and the Creed, Commentaries on the Sermon on the Mount, and the Harmony of the Gospels, Lectures on John, and Confessions. There are several separate translations and editions of the Confessions: the first by Sir Tobias Matthews (a Roman Catholic) 1624, said, by Dr. Pusey, to be very inaccurate <pb n="2" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0010=2.htm" />and subservient to Romanism; a second by Rev. W. Watts, D.D., 1631, 1650; a third by Abr. Woodhead (only the first 9 books). Dr. Pusey, in the first vol. of the Oxford Library of the Fathers, 1838 (new ed. 1883), republished the translation of Watts, with improvements and explanatory notes, mostly borrowed from Dubois’s Latin ed. Dr. Shedd’s edition, Andover, 1860, is a reprint of Watts (as republished in Boston in 1843), preceded by a thoughtful introduction, pp. v.-xxxvi. H. de Romestin translated minor doctrinal tracts in Saint Augustin. Oxford 1885.
German translations of select writings of Aug. in the Kempten Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, 1871-79, 8 vols. There are also separate translations and editions of the Confessions (by Silbert, 5th ed., Vienna, 1861; by Kautz, Arnsberg, 1840; by Gröninger, 4th ed., Münster, 1859; by Wilden, Schaffhausen, 1865; by Rapp, 7th ed., Gotha, 1878), of the Enchiridion, the Meditations, and the City of God (Die Stadt Gottes, by Silbert, Vienna, 1827, 2 vols.).
French translations: Les Confessions, by Dubois, Paris, 1688, 1715, 1758, 1776; and by Janet, Paris, 1857; a new translation with a preface by Abbé de la Mennais, Paris, 1822, 2 vols.; another by L. Moreau, Paris, 1854. La Cité de Dieu, by Emile Saisset, Paris, 1855, with introd. and notes, 4 vols.; older translations by Raoul de Præsles, Abbeville, 1486; Savetier, Par. 1531; P. Lombert, Par. 1675, and 1701; Abbé Goujet, Par. 1736 and 1764, reprinted at Bourges 1818; L. Moreau, with the Latin text, Par. 1846, 3 vols. Les Soliloques, by Pélissier, Paris, 1853. Les Lettres, by Poujoulat, Paris, 1858, 4 vols. Le Manuel, by d’Avenel, Rennes, 1861.
[div3] Biographies
II. BIOGRAPHIES.
Possidius (Calamensis episcopus, a pupil and friend of Aug.): Vita Augustini (brief, but authentic, written 432, two years after his death, in tom. x. Append. 257-280, ed. Bened., and in nearly all other editions).
Benedictini Editores: Vita Augustini ex ejus potissimum scriptis concinnata, in 8 books (very elaborate and extensive), in tom. xi. 1-492, ed. Bened. (in Migne’s reprint, tom. i. col. 66-578).
The biographies of Aug. by Tillemont (Mém. tom. xiii.); Ellies Dupin (in “Nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclésiastiques,” tom. ii. and iii.); P. Bayle (in his “Dictionnaire historique et critique,” art. Augustin); Remi Ceillier (in “Histoire générale des auteurs sacrés et ecclés.,” vol. xi. and xii.); Cave (in “Lives of the Fathers,” vol. ii.); Kloth (Der heil Aug., Aachen, 1840, 2 vols.); Böhringer (Kirchengeschichte in Biographien, vol. i. P. iii. p. 99 sqq., revised ed. Leipzig, 1877-’78, 2 parts); Poujoulat (Histoire de S. Aug. Par. 1843 and 1852, 2 vols.; the same in German by Fr. Hurter, Schaff h. 1847, 2 vols.); Eisenbarth (Stuttg. 1853); C. Bindemann (Der heil. Aug. Berlin, 1844, ‘55, ‘69, 3 vols., the best work in German); Edw. L. Cutts (St. Augustin, London, 1880); E. de Pressensé (in Smith and Wace, “Dictionary of Christ. Biogr.” I. 216-225); Ph. Schaff (St. Augustin, Berlin, 1854; English ed. New York and London, 1854, revised and enlarged in St. Augustin, Melanchthon and Neander; three biographies, New York and London, 1886, pp. 1-106). On Monnica see Braune: Monnica and Augustin. Grimma, 1846.
[div3] Special Treatises on the System of Augustin
III. special treatises on the system of augustin.
(1) The Theology of Augustin. The Church Histories of Neander, Baur, Hase (his large work, 1885, vol. I. 514 sqq.), and the Doctrine Histories of Neander, Gieseler, Baur, Hagenbach, Shedd, Nitzsch, Schwane, Bach, Harnack (in preparation, first vol., 1886).
The voluminous literature on the Pelagian controversy embraces works of G. J. Voss, Garnier, Jansen (died 1638; Augustinus, 1640, 3 vols.; he read Aug. twenty times and revived his system in the R. Cath. Church, but was condemned by the Pope), Cardinal Noris (Historia Pelagiana, Florence, 1673), Walch (Ketzergeschichte, vols. IV. and V., 1768 and 1770), Wiggers (Augustinismus und Pelagianismus, 1821 and 1833), Bersot (Doctr. de St. Aug. sur la liberté et la Providence, Paris, 1843), Jacobi (Lehre des Pelagius, 1842), Jul. Müller (Lehre von der Sünde, 5th ed. 1866, Engl. transl. by Urwick, 1868), Mozley (Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, London, 1855, very able), W. Bright (Introduction to his ed. of the Anti-Pelag. writings of Aug. Oxford 1880), and others. See Schaff, vol III. 783-785.
Van Goens: De Aur. August. apologeta, sec. 1 de Civitate Dei. Amstel. 1838.
Nirschl (Rom. Cath.). Ursprung und Wesen des Bösen nach der Lehre des heil. Augustin. 1854.
F. Ribbeck: Donatus und Augustinus, oder der erste entscheidende Kampf zwischen Separatismus und Kirche. Elberfeld, 1858, 2 vols.
Fr. Nitzsch: Augustin’s Lehre vom Wunder. Berlin, 1865.
Gangauf: Des heil. August. Lehre von Gott dem dreieinigen. Augsburg, 1866. Emil Feuerlein: Ueber die Stellung Augustin’s in der Kirchen=und Kulturgeschichte, in Sybel’s “Histor. Zeitschrift” for 1869, vol. XI. 270-313. Naville: Saint Augustin, Etude sur le développement de sa pensée. Genève, 1872. Ernst: Die Werke und Tugenden der Ungläubigen nach Augustin. Freiburg, 1872. Aug. Dorner (son of Is. A. D.): Augustinus, sein theol. System und seine religionsphilosophische Anschauung. Berlin, 1873 (comp. his art. in Herzog’s “Encycl.” 2d ed. I. 781-795, abridged in Schaff-Herzog I. 174 sqq.). Ch. H. Collett: St. Aug., a Sketch of his Life and Writings as affecting the controversy with Rome. London, 1883. H. Reuter (Prof. of Church <pb n="3" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0011=3.htm" />History in Göttingen): Augustinische Studien, in Brieger’s “Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte,” for 1880-’86 (several articles on Aug.’s doctrine of the church, of predestination, the kingdom of God, etc.,—very valuable).
(2) The Philosophy of Augustin is discussed in the larger Histories of Philosophy by Brucker, Tennemann, Rixner, H. Ritter (vol. vi. pp. 153-443), Erdmann (Grundriss der Gesch. der Philos. I. 231 sqq.), Ueberweg (Hist. of Philos., transl. by Morris, New York, vol. I. 333-346); Prantl (Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Leipzig, 1853, I. 665-672); Huber (Philosophie der Kirchenväter, München, 1859), and in the following special works:
Theod. Gangauf: Metaphysische Psychologie des heil. Augustinus. 1ste Abtheilung, Augsburg, 1852. T. Théry: Le génie philosophique et littéraire de saint Augustin. Par. 1861. Abbé Flottes: Études sur saint Aug., son génie, son âme, sa philosophie. Montpèllier, 1861. Nourrisson: La philosophie de saint Augustin (ouvrage couronné par l’Institut de France), deuxiéme éd. Par. 1866, 2 vols. Reinkens: Geschichtsphilosophie des Aug. Schaffhausen, 1866. Ferraz: De la psychologie de S. Augustin, 2d ed. Paris, 1869. Schütz: Augustinum non esse ontologum. Monast. 1867. A. F. Hewitt: The Problems of the Age, with Studies in St. Augustin. New York, 1868. G. Loesche: De Augustino Plotinizante. Jenae, 1880 (68 pages).
(3) On Aug. as a Latin author see Bähr: Geschichte der röm Literatur, Suppl. II. Ebert: Geschichte der latein. Literatur (Leipzig, 1874, I. 203 sqq.). Villemain: Tableau de l’éloquence chrétienne au IVe siècle (Paris, 1849).
[div2] A Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin
CHAPTER II.—A Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin.
It is a venturesome and delicate undertaking to write one’s own life, even though that life be a masterpiece of nature and the grace of God, and therefore most worthy to be described. Of all autobiographies none has so happily avoided the reef of vanity and self-praise, and none has won so much esteem and love through its honesty and humility as that of St. Augustin.
The “Confessions,” which he wrote in the forty-fourth year of his life, still burning in the ardor of his first love, are full of the fire and unction of the Holy Spirit. They are a sublime composition, in which Augustin, like David in the fifty-first Psalm, confesses to God, in view of his own and of succeeding generations, without reserve the sins of his youth; and they are at the same time a hymn of praise to the grace of God, which led him out of darkness into light, and called him to service in the kingdom of Christ.[1] Here we see the great church teacher of all times “prostrate in the dust, conversing with God, basking in his love; his readers hovering before him only as a shadow.” He puts away from himself all honor, all greatness, all merit, and lays them gratefully at the feet of the All-merciful. The reader feels on every hand that Christianity is no dream nor illusion, but truth and life, and he is carried along in adoration of the wonderful grace of God.
Aurelius Augustinus, born on the 13th of November, 354,[1] at Tagaste, an unimportant village of the fertile province of Numidia in North Africa, not far from Hippo Regius, inherited from his heathen father, Patricius,[1] a passionate sensibility, from his Christian mother, Monnica (one of the noblest women in the history of Christianity, of a highly intellectual and spiritual cast, of fervent piety, most tender affection, and all-conquering love), the deep yearning towards God so grandly expressed in his sentence: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”[1] This yearning, and his reverence for the sweet and holy name of Jesus, though crowded into the background, attended him in his studies at the schools of Madaura and Carthage, on his journeys to Rome and Milan, and on his tedious wanderings through the labyrinth of carnal pleasures, Manichæan mock-wisdom, Academic skepticism, and Platonic idealism; till at last the prayers of his mother, the sermons of Ambrose, the biography <pb n="4" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0012=4.htm" />of St. Anthony, and above all, the Epistles of Paul, as so many instruments in the hand of the Holy Spirit, wrought in the man of three and thirty years that wonderful change which made him an incalculable blessing to the whole Christian world, and brought even the sins and errors of his youth into the service of the truth.[1]
A son of so many prayers and tears could not be lost, and the faithful mother who travailed with him in spirit with greater pain than her body had in bringing him into the world,[1] was permitted, for the encouragement of future mothers, to receive shortly before her death an answer to her prayers and expectations, and was able to leave this world with joy without revisiting her earthly home. For Monnica died on a homeward journey, in Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, in her fifty-sixth year, in the arms of her son, after enjoying with him a glorious conversation that soared above the confines of space and time, and was a foretaste of the eternal Sabbath-rest of the saints. If those moments, he says, could be prolonged for ever, they would more than suffice for his happiness in heaven. She regretted not to die in a foreign land, because she was not far from God, who would raise her up at the last day. “Bury my body anywhere, “was her last request, “and trouble not yourselves for it; only this one thing I ask, that you remember me at the altar of my God, wherever you may be.”[1] Augustin, in his Confessions, has erected to Monnica a noble monument that can never perish.
If ever there was a thorough and fruitful
conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was
that of Augustin, when, in a garden of the Villa Cassiciacum, not
far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most
violent struggles of mind and heart—the birth-throes of the new
life—he heard that divine voice of a child: “Take, read!” and
he “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (
He received baptism from Ambrose in Milan on Easter Sunday, 387, in company with his friend and fellow-convert Alypius, and his natural son Adeodatus (given by God). It impressed the divine seal upon the inward transformation. He broke radically with the world; abandoned the brilliant and lucrative vocation of a teacher of rhetoric, which he had followed in Rome and Milan; sold his goods for the benefit of the poor; and thenceforth devoted his rare gifts exclusively to the service of Christ, and to that service he continued faithful to his latest breath. After the death of his mother, whom he revered and loved with the most tender affection, he went a second time to Rome for several months, and wrote books in defence of true Christianity against false philosophy and against the Manichæan heresy. Returning to Africa, he spent three years, with his friends Alypius and Evodius, on an estate in his native Tagaste, in contemplative and literary retirement.
Then, in 391, he was chosen presbyter against his will, by the voice of the people, which, as <pb n="5" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0013=5.htm" />in the similar cases of Cyprian and Ambrose, proved to be the voice of God, in the Numidian maritime city of Hippo Regius (now Bona); and in 395 he was elected bishop in the same city. For eight and thirty years, until his death, he labored in this place, and made it the intellectual centre of Western Christendom.[1]
His outward mode of life was extremely simple, and mildly ascetic. He lived with his clergy in one house in an apostolic community of goods, and made this house a seminary of theology, out of which ten bishops and many lower clergy went forth. Females, even his sister, were excluded from his house, and could see him only in the presence of others. But he founded religious societies of women; and over one of these his sister, a saintly widow, presided.[1] He once said in a sermon, that he had nowhere found better men, and he had nowhere found worse, than in monasteries. Combining, as he did, the clerical life with the monastic, he became unwittingly the founder of the Augustinian order, which gave the reformer Luther to the world. He wore the black dress of the Easter cœnobites, with a cowl and a leathern girdle. He lived almost entirely on vegetables, and seasoned the common meal with reading or free conversation, in which it was a rule that the character of an absent person should never be touched. He had this couplet engraved on the table:
“Quisquis amat dictis absentum rodere vitam,
Hanc mensam vetitam noverit esse sibi.”
He often preached five days in succession, sometimes twice a day, and set it as the object of his preaching, that all might live with him, and he with all, in Christ. Wherever he went in Africa, he was begged to preach the world of salvation.[1] He faithfully administered the external affairs connected with his office, though he found his chief delight in contemplation. He was specially devoted to the poor, and, like Ambrose, upon exigency, caused the church vessels to be melted down to redeem prisoners. But he refused legacies by which injustice was done to natural heirs, and commended the bishop Aurelius of Carthage for giving back unasked some property which a man has bequeathed to the church, when his wife unexpectedly bore him children.
Augustin’s labors extended far beyond his little diocese. He was the intellectual head of the North African and the entire Western church of his time. He took active interest in all theological and ecclesiastical questions. He was the champion of the orthodox doctrine against Manichæan, Donatist, and Pelagian. In him was concentrated the whole polemic power of the catholic church of the time against heresy and schism; and in him it won the victory over them.
In his last years he took a critical review of his literary productions, and gave them a thorough sifting in his Retractations. His latest controversial works, against the Semi-Pelagians, written in a gentle spirit, date from the same period. He bore the duties of his office alone till his seventy-second year, when his people unanimously elected his friend Heraclius to be his assistant.
The evening of his life was troubled by increasing infirmities of body and by the unspeakable wretchedness which the barbarian Vandals spread over his country in their victorious invasion, <pb n="6" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0014=6.htm" />destroying cities, villages, and churches, without mercy, and even besieging the fortified city of Hippo.[1] Yet he faithfully persevered in his work. The last ten days of his life he spent in close retirement, in prayers and tears and repeated reading of the penitential Psalms, which he can caused to be written on the wall over his bed, that he might have them always before his eyes. Thus with an act of penitence he closed his life. In the midst of the terrors of the siege and the despair of his people he could not suspect what abundant seed he had sown for the future.
In the third month of the siege of Hippo, on the 28th of August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, in full possession of his faculties, and in the presence of many friends and pupils, he past gently and peacefully into that eternity to which he had so long aspired. “O how wonderful,” wrote he in his Meditations,[1] “how beautiful and lovely are the dwellings of Thy house, Almighty God! I burn with longing to behold Thy beauty in Thy bridal-chamber.…O Jerusalem, holy city of God, dear bride of Christ, my heart loves thee, my soul has already long sighed for thy beauty!…The King of kings Himself is in the midst of thee, and His children are within thy walls. There are the hymning choirs of angels, the fellowship of heavenly citizens. There is the wedding-feast of all who from this sad earthly pilgrimage have reached thy joys. There is the far-seeing choir of the prophets; there the company of the twelve apostles; there the triumphant army of innumerable martyrs and holy confessors. Full and perfect love there reigns, for God is all in all. They love and praise, they praise and love Him evermore.…Blessed, perfectly and forever blessed, shall I too be, if, when my poor body shall be dissolved,… I may stand before my King and God, and see Him in His glory, as He Himself hath deigned to promise: ‘Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory which I had with Thee before the world was.’” This aspiration after the heavenly Jerusalem found grand expression in the hymn De gloria et gaudiis Paradisi:
“Ad perennis vitæ fontem mens sativit arida.”
It is incorporated in the Meditations of Augustin, and the ideas originated in part with him, but were not brought into poetical form till long afterwards by Peter Damiani.[1]
He left no will, for in his voluntary poverty he had no earthly property to dispose of, except his library; this he bequeathed to the church, and it was fortunately preserved from the depredations of the Arian barbarians.[1]
Soon after his death Hippo was taken and destroyed by the Vandals.[1] Africa was lost to the Romans. A few decades later the whole West-Roman empire fell in ruins. The culmination of the African church was the beginning of its decline. But the work of Augustin could not perish. His ideas fell like living seed into the soil of Europe, and produced abundant fruits in nations and countries of which he had never heard.[1]
[div2] Estimate of St. Augustin
<pb n="7" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0015=7.htm" />
CHAPTER III.—Estimate of St. Augustin.
Augustin, the man with upturned eye, with pen
in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is
usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of
the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking
down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind
uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is
better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of
right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of
modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the
narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful
depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him
or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile
princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or
reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing,
which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He
combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit
of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the
practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a
philosophical theologian to the full. It was his need and his
delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of
thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely revealed
matter of the faith.[1]
He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his
maxim: Fides præcedit intellectum; appealing, with
theologians before him, to the well known passage of
He has enriched Latin literature with a greater store of beautiful, original, and pregnant proverbial sayings, than any classic author, or any other teacher of the church.[1]
<pb n="8" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0016=8.htm" />He had a creative and decisive hand in almost every dogma of the Latin church, completing some, and advancing others. The centre of his system is the free redeeming grace of God in Christ, operating through the actual, historical church. He is evangelical or Pauline in his doctrine of sin and grace, but catholic (that is, old-catholic, not Roman Catholic) in his doctrine of the church. The Pauline element comes forward mainly in the Pelagian controversy, the catholic-churchly in the Donatist; but each is modified by the other.
Dr. Baur incorrectly makes freedom the fundamental idea of the Augustinian system. But this much better suits the Pelagian; while Augustin started (like Calvin and Schleiermacher) from the idea of the absolute dependence of man upon God. He changed his idea of freedom during the Pelagian controversy. Baur draws an ingenious and suggestive comparison between Augustin and Origen, the two greatest intellects among the church fathers. “There is no church teacher of the ancient period,” says he,[1]“who, in intellect and in grandeur and consistency of view, can more justly be placed by the side of Origen than Augustin; none who, with all the difference in individuality and in mode of thought, so closely resembles him. How far both towered above their times, is most clearly manifest in the very fact that they alone, of all the theologians of the first six centuries, became the creators of distinct systems, each proceeding from a definite idea, and each completely carried out; and this fact proves also how much the one system has that is analogous to the other. The one system, like the other, is founded upon the idea of freedom; in both there is a specific act, by which the entire development of human life is determined; and in both this is an act which lies far outside of the temporal consciousness of the individual; with this difference alone, that in one system the act belongs to each separate individual himself, and only falls outside of his temporal life and consciousness; in the other, it lies within the sphere of the temporal history of man, but is only the act of one individual. If in the system of Origen nothing gives greater offence than the idea of the pre-existence and fall of souls, which seems to adopt heathen ideas into the Christian faith, there is in the system of Augustin the same overleaping of individual life and consciousness, in order to explain from an act in the past the present sinful condition of man; but the pagan Platonic point of view is exchanged for one taken from the Old Testament.…What therefore essentially distinguishes the system of Augustin from that of Origen, is only this: the fall of Adam is substituted for the pre-temporal fall of souls, and what in Origen still wears a heathen garb, puts on in Augustin a purely Old Testament form.”
The learning of Augustin was not equal to his genius, nor as extensive as that of Origen and Eusebius, but still considerable for his time, and superior to that of any of the Latin fathers, with the single exception of Jerome. He had received in the schools of Madaura and Carthage the usual philosophical and rhetorical preparation for the forum, which stood him in good stead also in theology. He was familiar with Latin literature, and was by no means blind to the excellencies of the classics, though he placed them far below the higher beauty of the Holy Scriptures. The Hortensius of Cicero (a lost work) inspired him during his university course with enthusiasm for philosophy and for the knowledge of truth for its own sake; the study of Platonic and Neo-Platonic works (in the Latin version of the rhetorician Victorinus) kindled in him an incredible fire[1]; though in both he missed the holy name of Jesus and the cardinal virtues of love and humility, and found in them only beautiful ideals without power to conform <pb n="9" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0017=9.htm" />him to them. His City of God, his book on heresies, and other writings, show an extensive knowledge of ancient philosophy, poetry, and history, sacred and secular. He refers to the most distinguished persons of Greece and Rome; he often alludes to Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotin, Porphyry, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, Vergil, to the earlier Greek and Latin fathers, to Eastern and Western heretics. But his knowledge of Greek literature was mostly derived from Latin translations. With the Greek language, as he himself frankly and modestly confesses, he had, in comparison with Jerome, but a superficial acquaintance.[1] Hebrew he did not understand at all. Hence, with all his extraordinary familiarity with the Latin Bible, he made many mistakes in exposition. He was rather a thinker than a scholar, and depended mainly on his own resources, which were always abundant.
Notes.—We note some of the most intelligent and appreciative estimates of Augustin. Erasmus (Ep. dedicat. ad Alfons. archiep. Tolet. 1529) says, with an ingenious play upon the name Aurelius Augustinus: “Quid habet orbis christianus hoc scriptore magis aureum vel augustius? ut ipsa vocabula nequaquam fortuito, sed numinis providentia videantur indita viro. Auro sapientiæ nihil pretiosius: fulgore eloquentiæ cum sapientia conjunctæ nihil mirabilius.…Non arbitror alium esse doctorem, in quem opulentus ille ac benignus Spiritus dotes suas omnes largius effuderit, quam in Augustinum.” The great philosopher Leibnitz (Præfat. ad Theodic. §34) calls him “virum sane magnum et ingenii stupendi,” and “vastissimo ingenio præditum.” Dr. Baur, without sympathy with his views, speaks enthusiastically of the man and his genius. Among other things he says (Vorlesungen über Dogmengeschichte, i. i. p. 61): “There is scarcely another theological author so fertile and withal so able as Augustin. His scholarship was not equal to his intellect; yet even that is sometimes set too low, when it is asserted that he had no acquaintance at all with the Greek language; for this is incorrect, though he had attained no great proficiency in Greek.” C. Bindemann (a Lutheran divine) begins his thorough monograph (vol. i. preface) with the well-deserved eulogium: “St. Augustin is one of the greatest personages in the church. He is second in importance to none of the teachers who have wrought most in the church since the apostolic times; and it can well be said that among the church fathers the first place is due to him, and in the time of the Reformation a Luther alone, for fulness and depth of thought and grandeur of character, may stand by his side. He is the summit of the development of the mediæval Western church; from him descended the mysticism, no less than the scholasticism, of the middle age; he was one of the strongest pillars of the Roman Catholicism, and from his works, next to the Holy Scriptures, especially the Epistles of Paul, the leader of the Reformation drew most of that conviction by which a new age was introduced.” Staudenmaier, a Roman Catholic theologian, counts Augustin among those minds in which an hundred others dwell (Scotus Erigena, i. p. 274). The Roman Catholic philosophers A. Günther and Th. Gangauf, put him on an equality with the greatest philosophers, and discern in him a providential personage endowed by the Spirit of God for the instruction of all ages. A striking characterization is that of the Old Catholic Dr. Huber (in his instructive work: Die Philosophie der Kirchenväter, Munich, 1859, p. 312 sq.): “Augustin is a unique phenomenon in Christian history. No one of the other fathers has left so luminous traces of his existence. Though we find among them many rich and powerful minds, yet we find in none the forces of personal character, <pb n="10" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0018=10.htm" />mind, heart, and will, so largely developed and so harmoniously working. No one surpasses him in wealth of perceptions and dialectical sharpness of thoughts, in depth and fervour of religious sensibility, in greatness of aims and energy of action. He therefore also marks the culmination of the patristic age, and has been elevated by the acknowledgment of succeeding times as the first and the universal church father.—His whole character reminds us in many respects of Paul, with whom he has also in common the experience of being called from manifold errors to the service of the gospel, and like whom he could boast that he had laboured in it more abundantly than all the others. And as Paul among the Apostles pre-eminently determined the development of Christianity, and became, more than all the others, the expression of the Christian mind, to which men ever afterwards return, as often as in the life of the church that mind becomes turbid, to draw from him, as the purest fountain, a fresh understanding of the gospel doctrine,—so has Augustin turned the Christian nations since his time for the most part into his paths, and become pre-eminently their trainer and teacher, in the study of whom they always gain a renewal and deepening of their Christian consciousness. Not the middle age alone, but the Reformation also, was ruled by him, and whatever to this day boasts of the Christian spirit, is connected at least in part with Augustin.” Villemain, in his able and eloquent, “Tableau de l’éloquence Chrétienne au IVe siècle” (Paris, 1849, p. 373), commences his sketch of Augustin as follows: “Nous arrivons a l’homme le plus êtonnant de l’Eglise latine, à celui qui portat le plus d’imagination dans la théologie, le plus d’éloquence et même sensibilité dans la scholastique; ce fut saint Augustin. Donnez-lui un autre siècle, placez-le dans meillêure civilisation; et jamais homme n’aura paru doué d’un génie plus vaste et plus facile. Métaphysique, histoire, antiquités, science des moers, connaissance des arts, Augustin avait tout embrassé. Il écrit sur la musique comme sur le libre arbitre; il explique le phénomène intellectual la de mémoire, comme il raisonne sur la décadence de l’empire romain. Son esprit subtil et vigoureux a souvent consumé dans des problèmes mystiques une force de sagacité qui suffirait aux plus sublimes conceptions.” Frédéric Ozanam, in his “La civilisation au cinquième siècle” (translated by A. C. Glyn, 1868, Vol. I. p. 272), counts Augustin among the three or four great metaphysicians of modern times, and says that his task was “to clear the two roads open to Christian philosophy and to inaugurate its two methods of mysticism and dogmatism.” Nourrisson, whose work on Augustin is clothed with the authority of the Institute of France, assigns to him the first rank among the masters of human thought, alongside of Plato and Leibnitz, Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet. “Si une critique toujours respectueuse, mais d’une inviolable sincérité, est une des formes les plus hautes de l’admiration, j’estime, au contraire, n’avoir fait qu’exalter ce grand coeur, ce psychologue consolant et ému, ce métaphysicien subtil et sublime, en un mot, cet attachant et poétique génie, dont la place reste marquée, au premier rang, parmi les maîtres de la pensée humaine, á côté de Platon et de Descartes, d’Aristote et de saint Thomas, de Leibnitz et de Bossuet.” (La philosophie de saint Augustin, Par. 1866, tom. i. p. vii.) Pressensé (in art. Aug., in Smith & Wace, Dict. of Christ. Biography, I. 222): “Aug. still claims the honour of having brought out in all its light the fundamental doctrine of Christianity; despite the errors of his system, he has opened to the church the path of every progress and of every reform, by stating with the utmost vigour the scheme of free salvation which he had learnt in the school of St. Paul.” Among English and American writers, Dr. Shedd, in the Introduction to his edition of the Confessions (1860), has furnished a truthful and forcible description of the mind and heart of St. Augustin. I add the striking judgment of the octogenarian historian Dr. Karl Hase (Kirschengeschichte auf der Grundlage akademischer Vorlesungen, Leipzig 1885, vol. I. 522): “The full significance of Augustin as an author can be measured only from the consideration of the fact that in the middle ages both scholasticism and mysticism lived of his riches, and that afterwards Luther and Calvin drew out of his fulness. We find in him both the sharp understanding which makes salvation depend on the clearly defined dogma of the church, and the loving absorption of the heart in God which scarcely needs any more the aid of the church. His writings reflect all kinds of Christian thoughts, which lie a thousand years apart and appear to be contradictions. How were they possible in so systematic a thinker? Just as much as they were possible in Christianity, of which he was a microcosmus. From the dogmatic abyss of his hardest and most illiberal doctrines arise such liberal sentences as these: ‘Him I shall not condemn in whom I find any thing of Christ;’ ‘Let us not forget that in the very enemies are concealed the future citizens.’”
[div2] The Writings of St. Augustin
CHAPTER IV.—The Writings of St. Augustin.
The numerous writings of Augustin, the composition of which extended through four and forty years, are a mine of Christian knowledge, and experience. They abound in lofty ideas, noble sentiments, devout effusions, clear statements of truth, strong arguments against error, and passages of fervid eloquence and undying beauty, but also in innumerable repetitions, fanciful opinions, and playful conjectures of his uncommonly fertile brain.[1]
<pb n="11" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0019=11.htm" />His style is full of life and vigour and ingenious plays on words, but deficient in simplicity, purity and elegance, and by no means free from the vices of a degenerate rhetoric, wearisome prolixity, and from that vagabunda loquacitas, with which his adroit opponent, Julian of Eclanum, charged him. He would rather, as he said, be blamed by grammarians, than not understood by the people; and he bestowed little care upon his style, though he many a time rises in lofty poetic flight. He made no point of literary renown, but, impelled by love to God and to the church, he wrote from the fulness of his mind and heart.[1] The writings before his conversion, a treatise on the Beautiful (De Pulchro et Apto), the orations and eulogies which he delivered as rhetorician at Carthage, Rome, and Milan, are lost. The professor of eloquence, the heathen philosopher, the Manichæan heretic, the sceptic and free thinker, are known to us only from his regrets and recantations in the Confessions and other works. His literary career for us commences in his pious retreat at Cassiciacum where he prepared himself for a public profession of his faith. He appears first, in the works composed at Cassiciacum, Rome, and near Tagaste, as a Christian philosopher, after his ordination to the priesthood as a theologian. Yet even in his theological works he everywhere manifests the metaphysical and speculative bent of his mind. He never abandoned or depreciated reason, he only subordinated it to faith and made it subservient to the defence of revealed truth. Faith is the pioneer of reason, and discovers the territory which reason explores.
The following is a classified view of his most important works.[1]
I. Autobiographical works. To these belong the Confessions and the Retractations; the former acknowledging his sins, the latter retracting his theoretical errors. In the one he subjects his life, in the other his writings, to close criticism; and these productions therefore furnish the best standard for judging of his entire labours.[1]
The Confessions are the most profitable, at least the most edifying, product of his pen; indeed, we may say, the most edifying book in all the patristic literature. They were accordingly the most read even during his lifetime,[1] and they have been the most frequently published since.[1] A more sincere and more earnest book was never written. The historical part, to the tenth book, is one of the devotional classics of all creeds, and second in popularity only to the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Certainly no autobiography is superior to it in true humility, spiritual depth, and universal interest. Augustin records his own experience, as a heathen sensualist, a Manichæan heretic, an anxious inquirer, a sincere penitent, and a grateful convert. He finds a response in every human soul that struggles through the temptations of nature and the labyrinth of error to the knowledge of <pb n="12" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0020=12.htm" />truth and the beauty of holiness, and after many sighs and tears finds rest and peace in the arms of a merciful Saviour. The style is not free from the faults of an artificial rhetoric, involved periods and far-fetched paronomasias; but these defects are more than atoned for by passages of unfading beauty, the devout spirit and psalm-like tone of the book. It is the incense of a sacred mysticism of the heart which rises to the throne on high. The wisdom of some parts of the Confessions may be doubted.[1] The world would never have known Augustin’s sins, if he had not told them; nor were they of such a nature as to destroy his respectability in the best heathen society of his age; but we must all the more admire his honesty and humility.
Rousseau’s “Confessions,” and Goethe’s “Truth and Fiction,” may be compared with Augustin’s Confessions as works of rare genius and of absorbing psychological interest, but they are written in a radically different spirit, and by attempting to exalt human nature in its unsanctified state, they tend as much to expose its vanity and weakness, as the work of the bishop of Hippo, being written with a single eye to the glory of God, raises man from the dust of repentance to a new and imperishable life of the Spirit.[1]
Augustin composed the Confessions about the year 397, ten years after his conversion. The first nine books contain, in the form of a continuos prayer and confession before God, a general sketch of his earlier life, of his conversion, and of his return to Africa in the thirty-fourth year of his age. The salient points in these books are the engaging history of his conversion in Milan, and the story of the last days of his noble mother in Ostia, spent as it were at the very gate of heaven and in full assurance of a blessed reunion at the throne of glory. The last three books and a part of the tenth are devoted to speculative philosophy; they treat, partly in tacit opposition to Manichæism, of the metaphysical questions of the possibility of knowing God, and the nature of time and space; and they give an interpretation of the Mosaic cosmogony in the style of the typical allegorical exegesis usual with the fathers, but foreign to our age; they are therefore of little value to the general reader, except as showing that even abstract metaphysical subjects may be devotionally treated.
The Retractations were produced in the evening of his life (427 and 428), when, mindful of the proverb: “In the multitude of words there wanteth not transgression,”[1] and remembering that we must give account for every idle word, he judged himself,[1] that he might not be judged.[1] He revised in chronological order the numerous works he had written before and during his episcopate, and retracted or corrected whatever in them seemed to his riper knowledge false or obscure, or not fully agreed with the orthodox catholic faith. Some of his changes were reactionary and no improvements, especially those on the freedom of the will, and on religious toleration. In all essential points, nevertheless, his theological system remained the same from his conversion to this time. The Retractations give beautiful evidence of his love of truth, his conscientiousness, and his humility.[1]
To this same class should be added the Letters of Augustin, of which the Benedictine editors, in their second volume, give two hundred and seventy (including letters to Augustin) in chronological order from A.D. 386 to A.D. 429. These letters treat, sometimes very minutely, <pb n="13" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0021=13.htm" />of all the important questions of his time, and give us an insight of his cares, his official fidelity, his large heart, and his effort to become, like Paul, all things to all men.
When the questions of friends and pupils accumulated, he answered them in special works; and in this way he produced various collections of Quæstiones and Responsiones, dogmatical, exegetical, and miscellaneous (A.D. 390, 397, &c.).
II. Philosophical treatises, in dialogue; almost all composed in his earlier life; either during his residence on the country-seat Cassiciacum in the vicinity of Milan, where he spent half a year before his baptism in instructive and stimulating conversation, in a sort of academy or Christian Platonic banquet with Monnica, his son Adeodatus, his brother Navigius, his friend Alypius, and some cousins and pupils; or during his second residence in Rome; or soon after his return to Africa.[1]
To this class belong the works; Contra Academicos libri très (386), in which he combats the skepticism and probabilism of the New Academy,—the doctrine that man can never reach the truth, but can at best attain only probability; De vita beata (386), in which he makes true blessedness to consist in the perfect knowledge of God; De ordine,—on the relation of evil to the divine order of the world[1] (386); Soliloquia (387), communings with his own soul concerning God, the highest good, the knowledge of truth, and immortality; De immortalitate animæ (387), a continuation of the Soliloquies; De quantitate animæ (387), discussing sundry questions of the size, the origin, the incorporeity of the soul; De musica libri vi (387-389); De magistro (389), in which, in a dialogue with his son Adeodatus, a pious and promising, but precocious youth, who died soon after his return to Africa (389), he treats on the importance and virtue of the word of God, and on Christ as the infallible Master.[1] To these may be added the later work, De anima et ejus origine (419). Other philosophical works on grammar, dialectics (or ars bene disputandi), rhetoric, geometry, and arithmetic, are lost.[1]
These works exhibit as yet little that is specifically Christian and churchly; but they show a Platonism seized and consecrated by the spirit of Christianity, full of high thoughts, ideal views, and discriminating argument. They were designed to present the different stages of human thought by which he himself had reached the knowledge of the truth, and to serve others as steps to the sanctuary. They form an elementary introduction to his theology. He afterwards, in his Retractations, withdrew many things contained in them, like the Platonic view of the pre-<pb n="14" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0022=14.htm" />existence of the soul, and the Platonic idea that the acquisition of knowledge is a recollection or excavation of the knowledge hidden in the mind.[1] The philosopher in him afterwards yielded more and more to the theologian, and his views became more positive and empirical, though in some cases narrower also and more exclusive. Yet he could never cease to philosophise, and even his later works, especially De Trinitate, and De Civitate Dei, are full of profound speculations. Before his conversion he followed a particular system of philosophy, first the Manichæan, then the Platonic; after his conversion he embraced the Christian philosophy, which is based on the divine revelation of the Scriptures, and is the handmaid of theology and religion; but at the same time he prepared the way for the catholic ecclesiastical philosophy, which rests on the authority of the church, and became complete in the scholasticism of the middle age.
In the history of philosophy he deserves a place in the highest rank, and has done greater service to the science of sciences than any other father, Clement of Alexandria and Origen not excepted. He attacked and refuted the pagan philosophy as pantheistic or dualistic at heart; he shook the superstitions of astrology and magic; he expelled from philosophy the doctrine of emanation, and the idea that God is the soul of the world; he substantially advanced psychology; he solved the question of the origin and the nature of evil more nearly than any of his predecessors, and as nearly as most of his successors; he was the first to investigate thoroughly the relation of divine omnipotence and omniscience to human freedom, and to construct a theodicy; in short, he is properly the founder of a Christian philosophy, and not only divided with Aristotle the empire of the mediæval scholasticism, but furnished also living germs for new systems of philosophy, and will always be consulted in the speculative discussions of Christian doctrines.
The philosophical opinions of Augustin are ably and clearly summed up by Ueberweg as follows:[1]
“Against the skepticism of the Academics Augustin urges that man needs the knowledge of truth for his happiness, that it is not enough merely to inquire and to doubt, and he finds a foundation for all our knowledge, a foundation invulnerable against every doubt, in the consciousness we have of our sensations, feelings, our willing, and thinking, in short, of all our psychical processes. From the undeniable existence and possession by man of some truth, he concludes to the existence of God as the truth per se; but our conviction of the existence of the material world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustin defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platoniste, whom he rates most highly among all the 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; that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the earth; that the soul begins to exist at the same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are eternal.—Against the dualism of the Manichæans, who regarded good and evil as equally primitive, and represented a portion of the divine substance as having entered into the region of evil, in order to war against and conquer it, Augustin defends the monism of the good principle, or of the purely spiritual God, explaining evil as a mere negation or privation, and seeking to show from the finiteness of the things in the world, and from the differing degrees of perfection, that the evils in the world are necessary, and not in contradiction with the idea of creation; he also defends in opposition to Manichæism, and Gnosticism in general, the Catholic doctrine of the essential harmony between the Old and New Testaments. Against the Donatists, Augustin maintains the unity of the church. In opposition to Pelagius and the Pelagians, he asserts that divine grace is not conditioned on human worthiness, and maintains the doctrine of absolute predestination, or, that from the mass of men who, through the disobedience of Adam (in whom all mankind were present potentially), have sunk into corruption and sin, some are chosen by the free election of God to be monuments of his grace, and are brought to believe and be saved, while the greater number, as monuments of his justice, are left to eternal damnation.”
III. Apologetic works against Pagans and Jews. Among these the twenty-two books, De Civitate Dei, are still well worth reading. They form the deepest and richest apologetic work of antiquity; begun in 413, after the occupation of Rome by the Gothic king Alaric, finished in 426, and often separately published. They condense his entire theory of the world and of man, and are the first attempt at a comprehensive philosophy of universal history under the dualistic view of two antagonistic currents or organized forces, a kingdom of this world which is doomed to final destruction, and a kingdom of God which will last forever.[1]
This work has controlled catholic historiography ever since, and received the official approval of Pope Leo XIII., who, in his famous Encyclical Immortale Dei (Nov. 1, 1885), incidentally alludes to it in these worlds: “Augustin, in his work, De Civitate Dei, set forth so clearly the efficacy of Christian wisdom and the way in which it is bound up with the well-being of civil society, that he seems not only to have pleaded the cause of the Christians at his own time, but to have triumphantly refuted the calumnies against Christianity for all time.”
From the Protestant point of view Augustin erred in identifying the kingdom of God with the visible Catholic Church, which is only a part of it.
IV. Religious-Theological works of a general nature (in part anti-Manichæan): De utilitate credendi, against the Gnostic exaltation of knowledge (392); De fide et symbolo, a discourse which, though only presbyter, he delivered on the Apostles’ Creed before the council at Hippo at the request of the bishops in 393; De doctrina Christiana iv libri (397; the fourth book added in 426), a compend of exegetical theology for instruction in the interpretation of the Scriptures according to the analogy of the faith; De catchizandis rudibus likewise for catechetical purposes (400); Enchiridon, or De fide, spe et caritate, a brief compend of the doctrine of faith and morals, which he wrote in 421, or later, at the request of Laurentius; hence also called Manuale ad Laurentium.[1]
V. Polemic-Theological works. These are the most copious sources of the history of Christian doctrine in the patristic age. The heresies collectively are reviewed in the book De hæresibus ad Quodvultdeum, written between 428 and 430 to a friend and deacon in Carthage, and give a survey of eighty-eight heresies, from the Simonians to the Pelagians.[1] In the work De vera religione (390), Augustin proposed to show that the true religion is to be found not with the heretics and schismatics, but only in the catholic church of that time.
The other controversial works are directed against the particular heresies of Manichæism, Donatism, Arianism, Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism. Augustin, with all the firmness of his convictions, was free from personal antipathy, and used the pen of controversy in the genuine Christian spirit, fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. He understood Paul’s ἀληθεύειν ἐν ἀγάπῃ, and forms in this respect a pleasing contrast to Jerome, who had by nature no more fiery temperament than he, but was less able to control it. “Let those,” he very beautifully says to the Manichæans, “burn with hatred against you, who do not know how much pains it costs to find the truth, how hard it is to guard against error;—but I, who after so great and long wavering came to know the truth, must bear myself towards you with the same patience which my fellow-believers showed towards me while I was wandering in blind madness in your opinions.”[1]
<pb n="16" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0024=16.htm" />1. The anti-Manichæan works date mostly from his earlier life, and in time and matter follow immediately upon his philosophical writings.[1] In them he afterwards found most to retract, because he advocated the freedom of the will against the Manichæan fatalism. The most important are: De moribus ecclesiæ catholicæ, et de moribus Manichæorum, two books (written during his second residence in Rome, 388); De vera religione (390); Unde malum, et de libero arbitrio, usually simply De libero arbitrio, in three books, against the Manichæan doctrine of evil as a substance, and as having its seat in matter instead of free will (begun in 388, finished in 395); De Genesi contra Manichæos, a defence of the biblical doctrine of creation (389); De duabus animabus, against the psychological dualism of the Manichæans (392); Disputatio contra Fortunatum (a triumphant refutation of this Manichæan priest of Hippo in August, 392); Contra Epistolam Manichæi quam vocant fundamenti (397); Contra Faustum Manichæum, in thirty-three books (400-404); De natura boni (404), &c.
These works treat of the origin of evil; of free will; of the harmony of the Old and New Testaments, and of revelation and nature; of creation out of nothing, in opposition to dualism and hylozoism; of the supremacy of faith over knowledge; of the authority of the Scriptures and the Church; of the true and the false asceticism, and other disputed points; and they are the chief source of our knowledge of the Manichæan Gnosticism and of the arguments against it.
Having himself belonged for nine years to this sect, Augustin was the better fitted for the task of refuting it, as Paul was peculiarly prepared for the confutation of the Pharisaic Judaism. His doctrine of the nature of evil is particularly valuable. He has triumphantly demonstrated for all time, that evil is not a corporeal thing, nor in any way substantial, but a product of the free will of the creature, a perversion of substance in itself good, a corruption of the nature created by God.
2. Against the
Priscillianists, a sect in Spain built on Manichæan
principles, are directed the book Ad Paulum Orosium contra
Priscillianistas et Origenistas (411);[1] the book Contra mendacium,
addressed to Consentius (420); and in part the 190th Epistle (alias
3. The anti-Donatistic works, composed between the years 393 and 420, argue against separatism, and contain Augustin’s doctrine of the church and church-discipline, and of the sacraments. To these belong: Psalmus contra partem Donati (A.D. 393), a polemic popular song without regular metre, intended to offset the songs of the Donatists; Contra epistolam Parmeniani, written in 400 against the Carthaginian bishop of the Donatists, the successor of Donatus; De baptismo contra Donastistas, in favor of the validity of heretical baptism (400); Contra literas Petiliani (about 400), against the view of Cyprian and the Donatists, that the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the personal worthiness and the ecclesiastical status of the officiating priest; Ad Catholicos Epistola contra Donatistas, or De unitate ecclesiæ (402); Contra Cresconium grammaticum Donastistam (406); Breviculus Collationis cum Donatistis, a short account of the three days’ religious conference with the Donatists (411); De correctione Donatistarum (417); Contra Gaudentium, Donat. Episcopum, the last anti-Donatistic work (420).[1]
These works are the chief patristic authority of the
Roman Catholic doctrine of the church and against the sects. They
are thoroughly Romanizing in spirit and aim, and least satisfactory
to Protestant readers. Augustin defended in his later years even
the principle of forcible <pb n="17" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0025=17.htm" />coërcion and persecution against heretics and
schismatics by a false exegesis of the words in the parable
“Compel them to come in” (
4. The anti-Arian works have to do with the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, and with the Holy Trinity. By far the most important of these are the fifteen books De Trinitate (400-416);—the most profound and discriminating production of the ancient church on the Trinity, in no respect inferior to the kindred works of Athanasius and the two Gregories, and for centuries final to the dogma.[1] This may also be counted among the positive didactic works, for it is not directly controversial. The Collatio cum Maximino Ariano, an obscure babbler, belongs to the year 428.
5. The numerous anti-Pelagian works of Augustin are his most influential and most valuable, at least for Protestants. They were written between the years 412 and 429. In them Augustin, in his intellectual and spiritual prime, develops his system of anthropology and soteriology, and most nearly approaches the position of Evangelical Protestantism: On the Guilt and the Remission of Sins, and Infant Baptism (412); On the Spirit and the Letter (413); On Nature and Grace (415); On the Acts of Pelagius (417); On the Grace of Christ, and Original Sin (418); On Marriage and Concupiscence (419); On Grace and Free Will (426); On Discipline and Grace (427); Against Julian of Eclanum (two large works, written between 421 and 429, the second unfinished, and hence called Opus imperfectum); On the Predestination of the Saints (428); On the Gift of Perseverance (429); &c.[1]
These anti-Pelagian writings contain what is technically called the Augustinian system of theology, which was substantially adopted by the Lutheran Church, yet without the decree of reprobation, and in a more rigorous logical form by the Calvinistic Confessions. The system gives all glory to God, does full justice to the sovereignty of divine grace, effectually humbles and yet elevates and fortifies man, and furnishes the strongest stimulus to gratitude and the firmest foundation of comfort. It makes all bright and lovely in the circle of the elect. But it is gloomy and repulsive in its negative aspect towards the non-elect. It teaches a universal damnation and only a partial redemption, and confines the offer of salvation to the minority of the elect; it ignores the general benevolence of God to all his creatures; it weakens or perverts the passages which clearly teach that “God would have all men to be saved”; it suspends their eternal fate upon one single act of disobedience; it assumes an unconscious, and yet responsible pre-existence of Adam’s posterity and their participation in his sin and guilt; it reflects upon the wisdom of God in creating countless millions of beings with the eternal foreknowledge of their everlasting misery; and it does violence to the sense of individual responsibility for accepting or rejecting the gospel-offer of salvation. And yet this Augustinian system, especially in its severest Calvinistic form, has promoted civil and religious liberty, and trained the most virtuous, independent, and heroic types of Christians, as the Huguenots, the Puritans, the Covenanters, and the Pilgrim Fathers. It is still a mighty moral power, and will not lose its hold upon earnest characters until some great theological genius produces from the inexhaustible mine of the Scriptures a more satisfactory solution of the awful problem which the universal reign of sin and death presents to the thinking mind.
In Augustin the anti-Pelagian system was checked and moderated by his churchly and sacramental views, and we cannot understand him without keeping both in view. The same apparent contradiction we find in Luther, but he broke entirely with the sacerdotal system <pb n="18" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0026=18.htm" />of Rome, and made the doctrine of justification by faith the chief article of his creed, which Augustin never could have done. Calvin was more logical than either, and went back beyond justification and Adam’s fall, yea, beyond time itself, to the eternal counsel of God which pre-ordains, directs and controls the whole history of mankind to a certain end, the triumph of his mercy and justice.
VI. Exegetical works. The best of these are: De Genesi ad literam (The Genesis word for word), in twelve books, an extended exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis, particularly the history of the creation literally interpreted, though with many mystical and allegorical interpretations also (written between 401 and 415);[1] Enarrationes in Psalmos (mostly sermons);[1] hundred and twenty-four Homilies on the Gospel of John (416 and 417);[1] ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John (417); the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (393); the Harmony of the Gospels (De consensu evangelistarum, 400); the Epistle to the Galatians (394); and an unfinished commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.[1]
Augustin deals more in lively, profound, and edifying thoughts on the Scriptures than in proper grammatical and historical exposition, for which neither he nor his readers had the necessary linguistic knowledge, disposition, or taste. He grounded his theology less upon exegesis than upon his Christian and churchly mind saturated with Scriptural truths. He excels in spiritual insight, and is suggestive even when he misses the natural meaning.
VII. Ethical and
Ascetic works. Among these belong three hundred and
ninety-six Sermones (mostly very short) de Scripturis
(on texts of Scripture), de tempore (festival sermons),
de sanctis (in memory of apostles, martyrs, and saints), and
de diversis (on various occasions), some of them dictated by
Augustin, some taken down by hearers.[1] Also various moral treatises: De
continentia (395); De mendaico (395), against deception
(not to be confounded with the similar work already mentioned
Contra mendacium, against the fraud-theory of the
Priscillianists, written in 420); De agone Christiano (396);
De opere monachorum, against monastic idleness (400); De
bono conjugali adv. Jovinianum (400); De virginitate
(401); De fide et operibus (413); De adulterinis
conjugiis, on
As we survey this enormous literary labor, augmented by many other treatises and letters now lost, and as we consider his episcopal labors, his many journeys, and his adjudications of controversies among the faithful, which often robbed him of whole days, we must be really astounded at the fidelity, exuberance, energy, and perseverance of this father of the church. Surely, such a life was worth the living.
[div2] The Influence of St. Augustin on Posterity, and His Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism
<pb n="19" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0027=19.htm" />
CHAPTER V.—The Influence of St. Augustin upon Posterity, and his Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism.
In conclusion we must add some observations respecting the influence of Augustin on the Church and the world since his time, and his position with reference to the great antagonism of Catholicism and Protestantism. All the church fathers are, indeed, the common inheritance of both parties; but no other of them has produced so permanent effects on both, and no other stands in so high regard with both, as Augustin. Upon the Greek Church alone has he exercised little or no influence; for this Church stopped with the undeveloped synergistic anthropology of the previous age, and rejects most decidedly, as a Latin heresy, the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit (the Filioque) for which Augustin is chiefly responsible.[1]
1. Augustin, in the first place, contributed much to the development of the doctrinal basis which Catholicism and Protestantism hold in common against such radical heresies of antiquity as Manichæism, Arianism, and Pelagianism. In all these great intellectual conflicts he was in general the champion of the cause of Christian truth against dangerous errors. Through his influence the canon of Holy Scripture (including, indeed, the Old Testament Apocrypha) was fixed in its present form by the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). He conquered the Manichæan dualism, hylozoism, and fatalism, and saved the biblical idea of God and of creation, and the biblical doctrine of the nature of sin and its origin in the free will of man. He developed the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, in opposition to tritheism on the one hand, and Sabellianism on the other, but also with the doubtful addition of the Filioque, and in opposition to the Greek, gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West. In this form the dogma received classical expression from his school in the falsely so called Athanasian Creed, which is not recognized by the Greek Church, and which better deserves the name of the Augustinian Creed.
In Christology, on the contrary, he added nothing new, and he died shortly before the great Christological conflicts opened, which reached their œcumenical settlement at the council of Chalcedon, twenty years after his death. Yet he anticipated Leo in giving currency in the West to the important formula: “Two natures in one person.”[1]
2. Augustin is also the principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic system as distinct from the Greek Catholicism on the one hand, and from evangelical protestantism on the other. He ruled the entire theology of the middle age, and became the father of scholasticism in virtue of his dialectic mind, and the father of mysticism in virtue of his devout heart, without being responsible for the excesses of either system. For scholasticism thought to comprehend the divine with the understanding, and lost itself at last in empty dialectics; and mysticism <pb n="20" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0028=20.htm" />endeavoured to grasp the divine with feeling, and easily strayed into misty sentimentalism; Augustin sought to apprehend the divine with the united power of mind and heart, of bold thought and humble faith.[1] Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, are his nearest of kin in this respect. Even now, since the Catholic Church has become a Roman Church, he enjoys greater consideration in it than Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, or Gregory the Great. All this cannot possibly be explained without an interior affinity.[1]
His very conversion, in which, besides the Scriptures, the personal intercourse of the hierarchical Ambrose and the life of the ascetic Anthony had great influence, was a transition not from heathenism to Christianity (for he was already a Manichæan Christian), but from heresy to the historical, orthodox, episcopally organized church, as, for the time, the sole authorized vehicle of the apostolic Christianity in conflict with those sects and parties which more or less assailed the foundations of the Gospel. It was, indeed, a full and unconditional surrender of his mind and heart to God, but it was at the same time a submission of his private judgment to the authority of the church which led him to the faith of the gospel.[1] In the same spirit he embraced the ascetic life, without which, according to the Catholic principle, no high religion is possible. He did not indeed enter a cloister, like Luther, whose conversion in Erfurt was likewise essentially catholic, but he lived in his house in the simplicity of a monk, and made and kept the vow of voluntary poverty and celibacy.[1]
He adopted Cyprian’s doctrine of the church, and completed it in the conflict with Donatism by transferring the predicates of unity, holiness, universality, exclusiveness, and maternity, directly to the actual church of the time, which, with a firm episcopal organization, an unbroken succession, and the Apostles’ Creed, triumphantly withstood the eighty or the hundred opposing sects in the heretical catalogue of the day, and had its visible centre in Rome. In this church he had found rescue from the shipwreck of his life, the home of true Christianity, firm ground for his thinking, satisfaction for his heart, and a commensurate field for the wide range of his powers.[1] The predicate of infallibility alone he does not plainly bring forward; he assumes a progressive correction of earlier councils by later; and in the Pelagian controversy he asserts the same independence towards pope Zosimus, which Cyprian before him had shown towards pope Stephen in the controversy on heretical baptism, with the advantage of having the right on his side, so that Zosimus found himself compelled to yield to the African church. But after <pb n="21" href="/ccel/schaff/npnf101/png/0029=21.htm" />the condemnation of the Pelagian errors by the Roman see (418), he declared that “the case is finished, if only the error were also finished.”[1]
He was the first to give a clear and fixed definition of the sacram