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The greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church
Augustine of Hippo was an Algerian-Roman philosopher and theologian of the late Roman period and early Middle Ages. To this day he is exalted as the greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church (along with Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, and Saint Gregory). More than any other writer, he developed what would become known as systematic theology, or an explanation of how Christianity fits into views of the universe, creation, and humankind's relationship with God.
Unlike later Scholastics who took Aristotle as the classical model to be integrated into Christian thought, Augustine developed a philosophical and theological system that employed elements of Plato and Neoplatonism in support of Christian orthodoxy.
The hedonistic life of Augustine
Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a while. Hedonism was a moral and philosophical doctrine of Ancient Greece that preaches the idea of extreme pleasure, the incessant pursuit of pleasure and the denial of pain to find happiness. Seeing the path, he was starting to take, his parents decided to transfer him to the mythical Carthage, a city on the coast of North Africa, close to the current city of Tunis.
In Milan, his mother negotiated a marriage contract with a girl from a better family. Augustine, in turn, assiduously frequented the brothels of Carthage. Before he chose her to reach puberty, he had a relationship with a young woman named Floria Aemilia.
He later said that this only happened because, at the time, he was a slave to lust. In book 8.7 of his famous work Confessions, he wrote: give me chastity and continence, but not yet. Floria was his concubine for more than fifteen years and bore him a son named Adeodato (gift from God).
Manichaeism, the continual struggle between good and evil
Despite his predilection for leisure, Augustine was still a man blessed with a brilliant mind. His interest in philosophy was sparked by reading Hortensius, a dialogue by the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero.
Maní, a Persian Christian prophet, who claimed to be the last of the prophets sent by God, emphasized the polarity of good and evil along Zoroastrian and Gnostic philosophical principles. Although officially declared a heresy, manichaeism remained a popular sect in the Roman Empire and in the East along the Silk Road.
Manichaeism advocated a double vision of existence: the world is in a continual struggle between good and evil. A struggle to which human life is no stranger. The soul represents light, good; while the body, which is subject to the passions, represents evil. To achieve the liberation of the first over the second, the manicheans opted for different ascetic practices of renouncing everything that is material.
They considered their religion the ultimate and true belief, above all other confessions. Augustine encountered the wise Faust of Milevo, one of the great figures of manichaeism. Against all odds, Faust deeply disappointed him and caused his manichaean beliefs to crumble.
Conversion to Christianity
In 383 (aged 29), Augustine moved to Rome to teach rhetoric. However, he was disappointed by the apathetic and crooked Roman schools. The following year he accepted an appointment as professor of rhetoric at the imperial court in Milan, a highly visible and influential academic chair.
During his time in Rome and Milan, he moved away from manichaeism, initially embracing the skepticism of the New Academy movement. A combination of his own studies in neoplatonism, his reading of an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert, and the combined influence of his mother and, particularly, the influential Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose (338 - 397), inclined Augustine towards the christianity. Augustine was intellectually interested in the sermons of Bishop Ambrose. Later, he would adapt much of this teaching into his ideas.
One day, Augustine heard what he thought was a child playing with a sung song: Pick it up and read it. As he did not see anyone, he realized it was a supernatural call. He said he found a New Testament and opened it to Paul's letter to the Romans and that changed his life, and he became a Christian. Augustine was a perfectionist. If he was going to be a christian, then he would be a celibate christian.
For him, his mother's death was traumatic and perhaps contributed to what became his metaphysics of guilt (reatus), whose basic idea was that God made everything out of nothing, and every created thing is good, with natural faculties. Everyone owes a debt to God for his creation. When they abuse their powers (sin), that misuse results in guilt because of the debt.
In the summer of 386, he officially converted to catholic christianity, abandoned his career in rhetoric, left his teaching position in Milan, and gave up any ideas of the society marriage that had been arranged for him. He devoted himself entirely to the service of God, the priesthood and celibacy. He detailed this spiritual journey in his Confessions, which has become a classic of both christian theology and world literature.
Augustine's conversion to christianity was famous because he wrote about it in detail in Later Confessions (397), a psychological retrospective of his life. Older, Augustine analyzed the decisions he made over time. Modern scholars tend to describe his search for the meaning of life as an intellectual rather than an emotional one. However, Confessions embody a personal and spiritual struggle that is familiar to all humans.
What is God, for Augustine?
God must transcend space and time, his essence must be goodness, wisdom (omniscience) and power (omnipotence). Augustine conceives of God as necessarily simple, in the sense of not consisting of parts. The reasons for created things remain unchanged in him, because in his mind is the plan for the world, the execution of which describes the distinct stages of universal history.
All things have ontological truth as far as they embody or exemplify the pattern rooted in the divine mind. Ontology is the part of philosophy that considers being, in its essence, regardless of the way in which it manifests itself.
The soul is created by God and is united to the body, but not by punishment as in Plato. Divine creation is the fruit of goodness, for such is the essence of God. Augustine was interested in the question of whether God created each individual soul separately or all in Adam.
This would imply that all souls descend from the first man by inheritance. Augustine chose the second explanation because, while it allows him to confirm the existence of a divine plan, it serves to justify the transmission of original sin as described in Scripture.
Rivalry between faith and reason
Reason always leads humans to faith. Once you have it, reason must be used to deepen faith. This is how we must understand the Augustinian phrase to understand to believe, to believe to understand. Therefore, reason and faith complement each other. Knowledge of the truth must be sought because of an intimate need, as it brings true happiness.
Only the wise can be happy, and wisdom requires knowledge of the truth. The skeptical assertion that there is no truth is contradicted by pointing out the truth of said judgment. So even skeptics must assert the principle of non-contradiction that Parmenides enunciated. The question is not whether there is truth, but how to obtain certainties.
The answer must be sought in self-knowledge: if I doubt, there is a subject who doubts and, consequently, I can say that this subject exists: if he fails, he is gone.
In both his philosophical and theological reasoning, he was influenced by stoicism, platonism, and neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus's Enneads.
He was also influenced by the works of the Roman poet Virgil (for his teaching on language), Cicero (for his teaching on argument) and Aristotle (particularly his Rhetoric and Poetics).
In his theological works, Augustine expounded the concept of original sin (Adam's guilt that all human beings inherit) in his works against the pelagian heretics, exerting an important influence on St. Thomas Aquinas. He helped formulate just war theory and advocated the use of force against donatist heretics.
He also developed the doctrines of predestination (God's predestination of all that will happen) and efficacious grace (the idea that God's salvation is bestowed on a fixed number of those He has already determined to save), which later found eloquent expression in the works of reformation theologians such as Martin Luther (1483 - 1546), John Calvin (1509 - 1564) and Cornelius Jansen (1585 - 1638) during the Counter-Reformation.
Free Will and Original Sin
Pelagius (354-418), a British monk, taught that when God created the first humans, he gave them free will (possibility to decide, choose according to their own will, free from any conditioning, motive or determining cause) because God did not want slaves.
Humans are free to choose good and evil because of free will, not because of their inherent evil nature from conception. Augustine argued that God gave the first couple free will but, like immortality, it too was lost in Eden. Humans are only free to choose evil; concerning the good, God by grace chooses them.
Augustine struggled to reconcile his beliefs about free will and his conviction that humans are morally responsible for their actions, with his conviction that one's life is predestined in his belief in original sin (which seems to make the almost impossible human moral behavior).
Human beings start with original sin and are therefore inherently evil (evil was nothing real, it was just the absence of good), so classical attempts to achieve virtue through discipline, training, and reason are all doomed to failure. Only the redemptive action of God's grace offers hope. For him, we are too weak to discover the truth through reason alone.
As a biblical scholar, he turned to Genesis, the beginning of all creation, to analyze how evil entered the world and why humans sin. Second-century Church Fathers interpreted the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to mean that Eve was seduced by the serpent (the Devil in christian theology), who then seduced Adam into disobedience. Seduction introduced the passion of lust (and shame) into human relationships. However, the sin of lust was unavoidable, to populate the world and make the Church grow.
Augustine extended the concept through an idea we call genetics. God created human genitals, and the first commandment was to be fruitful and multiply. Augustine claimed that this human activity was originally supposed to be a natural function of humans, like walking or eating.
Augustine's concept of Original Sin was an incredibly fatalistic view of humanity. He referred to humans as the condemned masses because we are conceived in sin and therefore condemned from the moment of conception. Baptism was required as the initiation ritual that admitted the newborn into the Church to wash away this Original Sin, but it did not eliminate the human propensity for evil. As he knew, baptized christians, like him, continued to sin in both body and mind.
Quoting the apostle Paul, he stated that the only thing that can save human beings is the Grace of God when God sent Christ into the world. This was truly a gift because being condemned, the humans could never achieve salvation on their own merits. Without grace, humans remain without reconciliation. Grace can only come from God, for the world is totally corrupted by evil.
Evil arose from human weakness in both physical and mental aspects: temptation is the desire to satisfy bodily instincts and the desire to disobey for its own sake. Matter itself is not evil, but overindulgence, being too forgiving, in matter and one's attitude towards matter can be evil.
Humans are held accountable for evil and will be judged by God. Because God is omniscient (he has infinite knowledge about all things). He knows in advance who will be saved and who will be condemned. Other bishops and christian intellectuals contested this idea.
Doctrine of double predestination
Augustine was accused of holding to the doctrine of double predestination, which is the idea that people are condemned to heaven or hell by the will of God before they are even born. In the present day, there are still some christians, particularly in the calvinist denomination, who hold this view.
Predestination would seem to make God a very cruel being, as he would be punishing people in hell for actions that were not freely undertaken but were always part of God's plan. Many christians are known as compatibilists and try to argue in strange and complex ways that we have free will despite God's foreknowledge of all events.
Perhaps there is a clear logical contradiction in trying to hold that both God's foreknowledge and human free will are true, but there is certainly an argument that can be made that both positions are defended in the Bible. This is a significant problem with the Christian worldview, and it is a problem Christians struggle with constantly. The solution to this situation, that God is in control of all things and therefore we have no free will is logically coherent, but it necessarily weakens the case for Christianity.
Bishop of Hippo
In 391, Augustine was ordained a priest and then bishop of Hippo. He built his own monastery and became a famous preacher, particularly for opposing Manichaeism and heresies such as Donatism and Pelagianism. He often presented public debates at town hall meetings, where he addressed the continuing heresies in the province. He worked tirelessly to convert the diverse local racial and religious groups to the Catholic faith. He remained bishop in Hippo until his death in 430.
Augustine's commitment to celibacy never bothered him in a physical sense. He now had his own body under control. But as a perfectionist, he continued to be bothered by the fact that he even thought about sex. He supposed such thoughts would disappear with old age, but his struggles with why he could not control his thoughts on this, and other matters led to a more puzzling question: why do people continue to sin when they know they are sinning? (At least intellectually).
The Barbarian Invasions and the City of God
For Augustine, christianity did not cause the sack of Rome in 390, it was the consequence of the victory of the Gauls Senons led by Brennus over the Roman troops during the battle of Allia. Military success allowed them to invest in the city and demand a heavy ransom from the defeated Romans.
Pagan gods often failed to protect Rome from disaster and military defeat. Despite its gods, Roman society had descended into sexual immorality, corruption, and violence. Rather, God, in his foreknowledge, was responsible for Rome's successes. He knew that Roman military expansion and victories, with those imperial roads and the conversion of Constantine, would provide a coherent system for the conversion and salvation of the empire.
In the fifth century, however, the Roman Empire was beset by continual invasions by Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals. The trauma of the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric I motivated the remaining non-christians to claim that it was the christians' fault for angering the gods.
Augustine's second magnificent work, On the City of God Against the Pagans (413-426) was considered another classic of Western thought, Augustine perfected his earlier writings on the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and divine omniscience and the concept of Original Sin.
His value is found in his arguments for the superiority of christian philosophy over other schools and his skill in summarizing and narrating earlier philosophical treatises.
The book presents human history as a universal conflict between God and the devil. The earthly city is defined as a city of corruption and evil, where people wallow in the cares and pleasures of the present world, while the City of God, a new Jerusalem, contains those dedicated to God's eternal truth and the eventual heavenly kingdom for all believers.
Just war theory
City of God contains what became known as just war theory. In deciding whether a war was morally justifiable, Augustine applied the criteria of the right to go to war and the right conduct in war. He reviewed ancient traditions and philosophical writings about warfare as he developed his views. He concluded that individuals should not commit violence on their own. God has given the sword to governments, validated by Paul in his Letter to the Romans 13:4.
He who has authority is God's servant for his good. But if you do something wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not accept the sword without reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to punish the evildoer.
The City of God was instrumental with the scholastics and later humanists of the Middle Ages. Both Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) applied Augustinian arguments to their ideas of merging faith with reason.
Works of Saint Augustine
Augustine wrote over 100 works in Latin, many of them texts on Christian doctrine and apologetic works against various heresies. He is best known for the Confessions (a personal account of his youth, completed around 397), De Civitate Dei (The City of God), comprising 22 books, beginning in 413 and ending in 426, dealing with God, martyrdom, Jewish and other Christian philosophies and De Trinitate (On the Trinity), comprising 15 books written over the last 30 years of his life, in which he developed the psychological analogy.
Augustine left a catalog containing 113 books, 218 letters and 500 sermons. His writings are among the most complicated of the Church Fathers because, throughout his life, he returned to a theological concept to update it as his thoughts evolved and he matured.
This intellectual and spiritual journey from classical thought to Catholicism is masterfully described in Confessions, his most personal and significant work. Augustine wrote it at the age of forty-three, when he was already Bishop of Hippo. It is an authentic intellectual autobiography, very different from the previous ones we know, of surprising psychological depth.
As Peter Brown has pointed out in his splendid biography, the Confessions are a manifesto of the inner world that Augustine writes to settle accounts with himself. “Writing the Confessions was a therapeutic action; the many attempts that have been made to explain the book only as an external provocation, or as a fixed philosophical idea, ignore all the life that runs through it” (Brown 2001: 175). In its pages, Augustine shows how the study of Plotinus' works meant for him the discovery of the answers he sought as a Catholic.
Final years
In 388, his mother died on the way back to Africa. His son Adeodato died soon after, leaving him alone in the world with no family. He sold his estate and gave the money to the poor. He converted the family home into a monastic foundation for himself and a group of friends.
Augustine died on August 28, 430, aged 75, during the siege of Hippo by the Germanic Vandals, who destroyed the entire city, except the cathedral and its library, which was transferred to Europe. Augustine lamented not the invasion itself but that the Vandals were heretics. He was canonized as a saint by popular acclaim and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298.
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