AUGUSTINE, SAINT (AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS) bishop of Hippo in Proconsular Africa, A.D. 396-430, was born at Tagaste, a small town in the eastern part of the cent province of Numidia, in the year 354. His father Patricius became Christian late in life; his mother Monica seems to have been Christian from her girlhood. Both were probably of pure Roman birth, but it is seldom possible to examine the racial ante cedants of provincials at that date, and there may well have been some Numidian or Punic blood in the family. In any case they were Africans, and the climatic influences of the country are per ceptible in the natural bent of Augustine's character. It may be noted that he wrote sympathetically of the last struggle of Carth age, and, addressing the Romans of his own day, called the con queror "ille Scipio vester." (Civ. Dei. i. 3o. iii. 18.) He was ac quainted with the Punic language, and aware of its affinity with Hebrew ; when a bishop, he insisted on the appointment of priests who could speak it. At barely i 2 years of age he was sent to a school of grammar at Ma daura, an ancient colony of veterans where all was traditionally Roman. Five years later, steeped in Latin literature, but imperfectly acquainted with Greek and actively disliking it, he passed to Carthage, partly at the cost of his wealthy townsman Romanianus, for a course of rhetoric. Formally made a catechumen in childhood, he was not a Christian. He still retained enough of his mother's teaching to feel dissatisfied with the Hortensius of Cicero, for the strange reason that it contained no refer ence to Jesus Christ, but this was prob ably an interest of nothing more than curiosity. The self-reproaches of his ma turity afforded no reason for attributing to him any plunge into gross licentious ness during his student days, and the con stant temptations to such conduct seem rather to have disgusted him, though he experienced their full force ; but his moral standards were those of the time and place, even if he were temperate in practice. Continence seemed to him out of the question ; he formed at once one of those engagements of concubinage which were reckoned tolerable even for Christians, and found himself before he was 20 years old the father of a boy to whom he gave the pious name Adeodatus. Shortly afterwards he came under the influence of Manichaean teachers, and for nine years was a hearer, critical but not scornful, looking forward to the remotely possible asceticism of the elect. The attitude is significant, showing what was already the bent of his spirit. Intellectual difficulties, he was told, would be solved when he had heard Faustus, the great master. Faustus came to Carthage ; Augustine thought him a poor, un scholarly creature, contemptuously cast aside the whole system, and fell back on the scepticism of the Academy.
(r) Monica was determined, in a way which seems curiously modern, to settle him in marriage, and a suitable bride was found who was not quite of marriageable age. The most unpleasant in cident of his life follows. As a preliminary, his faithful companion the mother of Adeodatus was dismissed and sent back to Africa, where she joined a religious community. In reminiscence Augus tine betrays some sympathy with her grief, but is much more occupied with his own loss. The result was a renewed conviction of the impossibility of continence, which he freely discussed with his pupil, the naturally chaste Alypius, doing the young man no little harm. To this period we may refer the ejaculatory prayer, branded on his memory, "Give me chastity, but not yet!" The struggle of flesh and spirit, which had driven him to Manichaeism, was again active. The issue was soon decided. He took another concubine for the time before his marriage, and was probably blamed by none but himself.
(a) Ponticianus, an officer of the palace, called on Augustine and Alypius one day, and, a Christian himself, was surprised to find a volume of St. Paul's Epistles lying on their table. The en ensuing conversation led him to speak of two officers of the im perial staff at Treveri who casually found in a house which they visited a copy of the Life of St. Anthony, the great Egyptian her mit; they read of his austerities, and were moved to embrace the same mode of life. Augustine was overwhelmed with shame. Those soldiers could make an act of renunciation which he, stud ent and philosopher pledged to contempt of the world, could not compass.
(3) The weakness of the spirit against the flesh was enhanced by the intellectual weakness of scepticism. From this Augustine passed at a bound to Neoplatonism. A man whom he unkindly describes as inflated with conceit introduced him to the works of Plotinus, translated into Latin by Marius Victorinus, the emi nent rhetorician practising at Rome. He read them with a personal interest when he heard from Simplicianus the story of the con version of Victorinus to Christianity in his old age. His memory of the immediate effect, as narrated in the Confessions, may be coloured by later studies, for he says that he found in them a contact with the doctrine of the Word as taught in the fourth gospel; but the effect was certainly great, and he was, in a sense, Platonist from that time onward.
(4) The scene in the garden is one of the great loci classici of religious psychology. He was sitting one day with Alypius, who knew most of the trouble, his soul torn by the bitter conflict go ing on within him. A sudden gust of tears drove him from the presence of his friend; he went into the garden, and flung himself down, sobbing "How long! to-morrow and tomorrow!" He then heard the voice of a child singing in the next garden "Tolle lege, toile lege." Curious, even at that moment, to know whether the words belonged to some childish game, he could remember noth ing of the kind. At once he applied them to himself as a divine command, calmly returned to the house, took up a volume of St. Paul's Epistles, opened it and read the words that first met his eyes : "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying : but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in the lusts thereof." He showed the passage to Alypius, who read further, pointed to the next words, "Him that is weak in the faith re ceive ye" and applied them to himself. Together they went to Monica and told her what had happened.
(5) This narrative, written by Augustine himself with extreme simplicity, and the whole story of his mental anguish, have been questioned as inconsistent with what followed. One of the few clear notes of chronology available shows that soon after these events Augustine, sick with the heat alike of summer and of his internal conflict, took a reading party to a pleasant country house at Cassiciacum, lent by his friend Verecundus. This can be dated Aug. 386. Here they read, and discussed what they had been reading with youthful high spirits and interludes of rustic labours. Monica, the only Christian of the party, occasionally inter vened with modesty and good sense. A shorthand writer took notes of everything, which Augustine reduced to connected nar ratives modelled on Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. These are the Dialogues Contra Academicos, De Beata Vita, and De Qrdine. They are purely philosophic, with occasional glances at Christian doctrines currently but imperfectly known in the world. Critics such as Gourdon and Alfaric ask what traces are here to be found of the stricken penitent soul which Augustine described in his Confessions 13 years afterwards. If that picture had been true, it is urged, he must at once have renounced his chair of rhetoric, seeking the ascetic life which so strongly attracted him ; nor in deed would his new friends within the Christian Church have tolerated the retention of so pagan a profession by a convert. The latter objection seems to imply that Christians in general shared the sentiments affected in open hostility by the emperor Julian; but Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus in recent years had not thought it necessary so to act. The former calls for examination. To understand the tone of the Dialogues we have to remember that not one of the young men of the party was an instructed Christian, and some had no thought of breaking with the old religion : Augustine the penitent would not wear his heart on his sleeve with them. It is even more important to bear in mind that from the moment of the incident in the garden he found him self, as frequently happens in such cases, wrapped in a profound peace. We have no reason to suppose that his gaiety at Cassicia cum was either forced or affected. When writing his Confessions he cared for nothing in that episode except his meditations on the Psalter in hours of solitude; the Dialogues he dismissed as mere academic exercises, which indeed they were, finished in the linger ing darkness of his unregenerate days. Many years afterwards he noted in his Retractations their inevitable faults.
From Cassiciacum he wrote to Ambrose asking to be received as a convert, and at Easter, 387, the bishop himself baptized him with Alypius and Adeodatus. He now resigned his chair, but lingered some months at Milan, editing the Dialogues, and also writing the two unfinished books of Soliloquia (a word which he seems to have invented) in which he rigorously cross-examined his consciousness. These he condemned in his old age as too Platonic, echoing the theory of anamnesis and Porphyry's con tempt for objects of sense. It was perhaps because he was al ready getting free from those Platonisms that he left them un finished. Another writing of this date De Immortalitate Animae, which got into circulation against his will, he found even more objectionable on the same score. He then resolved to return to Africa, with Monica and some intimate friends, planning a new mode of life. Nothing more is heard of the projected marriage. He did not yet, however, abandon his literary studies, and he finished the six books De Musica in Africa.
On the way thither. Monica died, waiting at Ostia for embark ation. In the Confessions Augustine unveiled his passionate grief, and the consolation that followed. Equally interesting is the story of his last conversation with her, in which he follows almost verbally the method of Plotinus (Ennead. V. 2) for enter ing on the Mystic Ascent. It may show what elements of Plotin ian theory had most affected him.
The rule forbidding translations of bishops was strictly ob served in Africa, and Augustine was therefore fixed for life, at 40 years of age, in that small seaport. He made it famous. Dur ing more than half his episcopate the most resounding voices in the Catholic Church were Latin voices. Chrysostom was gone. Cyril was not yet come to his own. Augustine and Jerome, the bishop of a provincial town in Africa and the monk at Bethlehem who would not minister in the priesthood which had been forced upon him, had the weight of a whole hierarchy. Both ruled by the peri. Augustine never went beyond the confines of Africa and Numidia ; his voice was heard occasionally in a provincial council at Carthage, constantly from his apostolic chair at Hippo ; his letters, weighty and powerful like those of St. Paul, went every where. The length of some was portentous; the number of them must have been immense. Two hundred and twenty, almost all dated during his episcopate, have been preserved and collected by the piety of subsequent ages to fill, with some 5o received by him, a large volume in folio. His sermons, usually brief, seem to have been preserved by shorthand writers; collected, they form running commentaries on considerable parts of the Bible, notably the Psalmi and the fourth gospel. Of all these, thrown off in the day's work, he took little further notice. Of formal tractates and larger works he calculated towards the end of his life (Ep. 224) that he had written more than 230, many of which he "retracted" or criticized in a chronological catalogue of great importance. Something is known of his manner of working. The greater trea tises were written at intervals, extending in the case of the 15 books De Trinitate over several years. Twelve of these were dragged from him and put into circulation before final revision, with consequences which made him hasten to complete the work. The 2 2 books De Civitate Dei, begun three years after the sack of Rome by Alaric in the year 410, were issued separately as written, and finished in 426. This mode of composition led to excessive digressions, and reflections on current events, many of which appear also in the epistles. Apart from these great works and the Confessions, almost all his writings bear the stamp of their occasion.
Theology.—In the space at our disposal it is impossible to give an adequate account of Augustine's contribution to theology.
It is the more difficult because he was not himself—except when writing De Trinitate, and then only at intervals—a systematic thinker. To find in his Civitas Dei an adumbration of the respub lica christiana of the middle ages, would be equivalent to putting it there. The book contained valuable materials for the exponents of that polity, but for Augustine himself the empire under Theo dosius, though it might by the advent of justice have ceased to be grande latrocinium, remained none the less civitas terrena. Though he could bring himself of ter long resistance to accept its aid against the African schismatics, and though he could twist a text of the gospel into a justification of that attempt to "compel them to come in," he remained unhappy in conscience. It was a hateful expedient, and one of the weak spots in his greatness was a tendency to fall back on expedients, alike in argument and in action. In consequence of all this, we have to seek most of his theology in occasional writings, and to sift it out of a mass of irrelevancies. It says much for the solidity of his habitual thought if we can arrive in this way at anything coherent. That can be done, but only in fragments. It may be said that Augustinianism is a close-knit system. It is; but Augustine was not an Augustin ian. The close-knit system was formed out of elements gathered from his writings and put together without regard to other elements no less proper to his thought. Almost from the time of his conversion he was entangled in one or another of three great controversies. As priest and bishop he found himself at grips with Donatists. He had already, bef ore leaving Rome for Africa, undertaken as a personal task the refutation of Manichaeism. The publication of his Confessions brought upon him a challenge from Pelagius which was not disposed of while he lived. Each dispute in which he engaged led him to certain theological con clusions.
Where then is evil? Augustine was not the sort of optimist to explain it away as a lesser good. He had the beginnings of the scientific mind, an insatiable curiosity about the most trifling facts of nature, which he sometimes deplored as a distraction from things of greater moment. Hence a firm adhesion to ascer tained fact was one of his characteristics. He knew evil as a fact of his own experience. But a positive fact? That would mean a return to dualism. Plotinus taught him that it was negative, a lack of something, a defect in that which is fundamentally good, due to remoteness from the Source. He accepted the description but not the explanation, for he had abandoned the emanation theory. He found the cause in natures which are nearest in the scale of being to the Creator; men, whom we know, and others perhaps higher, whose existence we assume. These have received the splendid gift of reason and a limited freedom, so that they are capable of resisting control. Such lack of conformity to creative will is evil, and the only evil that he can find in the world, all other natures being constrained to obedience. Mala voluntas is the only malum. But the creature whose will is thus depraved re mains naturally a good thing. Hence the affirmation which he unweariedly iterates : "Omnis natura, inquantum natura est, bo num est." Even evil actions, regarded merely as actions in ab straction from the directing will, are not in themselves evil. In a case of murder it is right to admire the strength and skill with which the fatal blow is delivered. The completeness of his mon ism is illustrated by his treatment of miracle. He took no account of "supernatural" causes. The word was not yet invented, and the idea was foreign to his mind. A miracle is simply an unusual event occurring in the course of nature, the immediate cause of which is unknown : it is done "non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura." Pelagianism.—It might seem impossible to accuse Augustine of reverting to Manichaean dualism, but the charge was made in his lifetime and has often been repeated. In his third great con troversy he was constantly on the defensive. Pelagius opened the attack at Rome, scandalized by the words "Da quod iubes et Tube quod vis," which he took to involve a denial of human freedom and responsibility. Augustine heard of the criticism, but for some time took no public notice of it, though it was being freely discussed in correspondence. At last he wrote in general defence of his teaching the three books "De peccatorum meritis et remissione," in which he avoided mention of Pelagius. Not until after the condemnation of Coelestius in 412 by a council at Carthage, from which he was wisely absent, did he come into the open with a book De Natura et Gratia in answer to one De Natura by Pelagius, whose zeal for human liberty and moral responsibility he warmly commended. The regions ecclesiastically dependent on Rome were the stronghold of the new teaching, and when Innocent I. in 417 confirmed the sentence on Coelestius, adding a milder censure of Pelagius, he thought the trouble was at an end. "Causa finita est," he announced in a sermon at Hippo. For him it was only beginning. Within a year Zosimus, Innocent's suc cessor, reversed the judgment. A very large African council pro tested, and the imperial power was once more unhappily invoked. Honorius compelled Zosimus to cancel the reversal, and to pub lish a more formal condemnation of the two leaders, which should be signed by all the bishops of the Roman province. Eighteen of them refused to sign, and were banished from Italy by imperial rescript.
From the broken ranks of the party a brilliant champion emerged. One of the banished bishops was Julian of Eclanum, a kinsman of Paulinus of Nola. Finding shelter in the East with Theodore of Mopsuestia, he opened a personal campaign against Augustine, who had beyond question laid himself open to criticism by his doctrine of sin. Maintaining always the essential goodness of every creature, inquantum natura est, he measured the effect of sin upon human nature by his own experience of impotence in the face of sinful habit, without considering how far that experience was exceptional. He found the same weakness con fessed by St. Paul in circumstances quite unlike his own. It amounted to a paralysis of the will, leaving him at the mercy of instincts, summed up comprehensively as concupiscence, which ought to be kept under control. A curious study of child psychology convinced Augustine that this weakness was congen ital, and here again he could lean on St. Paul, though with less assurance. It was therefore inherited. Still with St. Paul he turned to the myth of Eden, regarded as an adequate though symbolical account of human origins, and the source of trouble was found in the sin of the first parents, causing a weakening of the will to do good, transmitted to all their offspring. Augus tine attempted three explanations of this transmission, physiologi cal identity of parent and offspring, solidarity of race, and a foul ing of the act of generation by the presence of concupiscence. The result was that all humanity is a massy perditionis, in a state of moral death, out of which individuals are lifted to renewed life and liberty by a special favour or grace of God perfected in the sacrament of baptism. The massy perditionis must not be understood in the sense of the "total depravity" imagined by later Augustinians, for that was ruled out by his metaphysical re quirement of a remnant of good in every creature. The doctrine of original sin was not invented by Augustine. It was in St. Paul, and more or less in all Christian teaching before him. What he added was the forensic idea of reatus, of guilt attaching even to a new-born child by reason of the depravation of nature. He argued this against Pelagius from the practice of infant baptism, allowed and even encouraged by the Church, since baptism was for the remission of sin. The answer of the Pelagians seems to be complete; remission of sin is not the only gift of grace in baptism.
Julian began with a complaint that the part assigned to con cupiscence in this teaching involved a denial of the sanctity of marriage, which Augustine rebutted without much difficulty. He further alleged that it involved the Manichaean conception of the flesh as intrinsically evil, and that the massy perditionis was noth ing else but the Manichaean Kingdom of Darkness. If Augustine had been content to ignore these allegations, it is probable that no harm would have been done, but he insisted on answering at great length every question that was raised, with the result that he was engaged for the remaining 12 years of his life in a constantly de veloping controversy, obstinately defending every doubtful posi tion. It is generally agreed that he was dialectically no match for his opponent, who drove him from point to point, from exag geration to exaggeration. Thus in the difficult doctrine of predes tination the fact of God's apparently arbitrary election of indi viduals to receive the gift of grace was twisted into a conclusion that by similar election the gift is refused to many for whom it is desired : "tam multos volentibus hominibus sed Deo nolente salvos non fieri." (Ep. 217.) The proposition that fallen man can not without the help of grace fulfil the purpose of God was stretched to mean that he cannot do anything well-pleasing to God. This extension is found elsewhere than in expressly con troversial writings; in the earlier books De Civitate Dei Augustine could say that God gave the empire of the world to the Romans as a reward for their virtues ; in the later he did not indeed say, as he has been accused of saying, that the virtues of unbelievers are splendida vitia, but he came very near doing so. (C.D. v. 15 ; xix. 25.) It was during this time of stress that he emitted those extrav agances, inconsistent as he himself knew (Retract. ii. 1 ) with the saner thought of his maturity, which have been made the core of the system known as Augustinianism. Four years after his death Vincent of Lerin wrote in the Commonitorium a travesty of these, as an example of the novelty which is heresy; but he did not venture to put to it the name of Augustine.