St. Augustine (354-430) was the single greatest influence on the formation of the Christian faith, after the Apostle Paul. He was born in northern Africa, which was a remote region of the Empire; he studied in Carthage, and eventually moved to Milan, where he encountered Bishop Ambrose. His parents were of the administrative class but not wealthy. His mother Monica was a Christian, who endeavored to convert her son throughout his youth, while his father Patricius was a pagan who experienced a deathbed conversion. Augustine was educated in rhetoric, becoming a professor of rhetoric, which is somewhat like going to law school and becoming a law professor. His parents were happy to see their son succeed and enhance the status of the family. As a young man he followed the path that the vast majority of his contemporaries of the same class would follow. He became sexually active in his teens, settled down in a long-term relationship with a woman of a class lower than his own, and had a son. The pattern during this time was that young men would form such ties until they were ready for marriage to a girl of their own class or higher, something that occurred only when they were established in life. At that point they would be expected to end the earlier union. Augustine eventually sent his mistress back to Carthage when he became engaged to a girl who was too young at the time for marriage, but because he could not live without a woman he hooked up with a second mistress as he waited for his fiancee to mature. These particular events of his life are related in detail in his famous Confessions. The book is autobiographical, an account of how he came to be a Christian. At the same time he is involved in illicit love, he is also pursuing false gods in the form of the Manichean cult. We've already talked about this; it was a highly sophisticated belief system at this time, which had great appeal for an intellectual like Augustine. Christianity in comparison seemed simplistic and crude, even though his mother worked hard to convince him of its truth. It was his encounter with Ambrose in Milan that set him thinking that maybe Christianity was something he could respect. Reading Scripture was the key: to Augustine, trained in pagan literature, the language of Scripture seemed disappointing. Ambrose, whom he met in 384, taught him how to read it allegorically, which released the hidden meanings. At the same time Augustine was reading the Neo-Platonists, who impressed him more than any other philosophers. Otherworldliness appealed to him, but he also appreciated the Neoplatonic solution to the problem of evil as the absence of perfect good. Eventually Augustine would be converted and give up his marriage prospects to enter a monastery. He later became a Bishop in Hippo, and a major figure in forming church doctrine, in many cases in treatises such as the ones we're reading for today. On Christian Doctrine is Augustine's treatise on education. The essence of his treatise is a theory of interpretation. The key question at the outset is, how is meaning created and transmitted through a community? The only meaning that concerns Augustine is divine meaning; i.e., how God communicates to humankind. In light of this perspective, he systematically examines what studies are advantageous and what are not. Thus a key concern for him at the outset is the distinction between things that are to be used and those that are to be enjoyed. Augustine first of all gives us the negative examples of fallacious or even vicious systems of meaning, in which humans manipulate conventional symbols to determine divine meaning. At best this is harmless; at worst, demonic. Signs in this case are empty of the significance assigned to them (vanus, the root of vanity, means empty). Dialectic and rhetoric are, with grammar, the trivium, of the seven liberal arts. Augustine establishes in the cases of both dialectic and rhetoric that they are not conventional, or established by man, but rather are discovered by man. They can be put to false and erroneous purposes or used to establish and enhance the truth. Chapter 40 expresses the key provision, that whatever is of value in heathen learning is rightly appropriated by the Christian. He uses the allegory of despoiling the Egyptians, referring to the Hebrews' flight from Egypt. They took with them those things that could be of use to them, even though they were foreign. A Christian uses pagan knowledge in the same way. Most important of all is reading Scripture in the right spirit; charity and love are for Augustine a hermeneutical precept. The City of God was composed in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome in 410, when many Romans argued that the city was allowed to suffer because of its abandonment of its traditional gods for Christianity. Not so, says Augustine, and sets out to prove to such detractors that Christianity is truth, while paganism is falsehood and blasphemy. He sets up an opposition between the City of God (Jerusalem) and the Earthly City (Babylon), the one having as its goal eternal salvation, the other wanting earthly pleasures and satisfactions. Christians are sojourners in the Earthly City, and use some of its benefits for their own goal, but the two Cities are essentially at war with one another. One question that concerns him in this work is why bad things happen to good people. First, the effects of suffering are different for bad and good people; first of all, the good have faith in God's ultimate support and vindication. Second, even good people are guilty of small sins that require purging. Finally, if otherwise good people stand aside and do nothing when wicked people commit their crimes, then they are justly reprehended. The selections we are reading from Book XIX wiegh the benefits of the pagan, earthly city against those of the heavenly city. Augustine enumerates what in pagan philosophy are called the four cardinal virtues: temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude, all of which are unsatisfactory in the face of life's evils, temptations, and sufferings. In so doing, he counters the argument that human beings can somehow work out their own fate. In his discussion of what constitutes a republic, Augustine refutes Cicero's definition, claiming there can be no true justice without the true God. However, in chapter 24, he gives his own definition: a republic is a people united by what it loves. Taken in this sense, Rome is a republic, because what it loves is its earthly peace, which, as Augustine points out in chapter 26, is not to be entirely disparaged. Even Christians profit from it, which is why they pray for the well-being of kings. But the peace of the Lord is elsewhere. People do not experience it now except through faith in what is to come. What we ourselves need to understand, however, is that for Augustine there is eternal and absolute opposition between the two Cities, as the peace of the blessed is absolutely contrasted with the warfare of the damned. Homework questions
Laurel Carrington carringt@stolaf.edu
Most recent update: Feb 14, 2007