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 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. 2
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 Manichaean 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. 3 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. 4
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. 5 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 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." 6
He was the first to give a clear and fixed definition of the sacrament, as a visible sign of invisible grace, resting on divine appointment; but he knows nothing of the number seven; this was a much later enactment. In the doctrine of baptism he is entirely Catholic, though in logical contradiction with his dogma of predestination; he maintained the necessity of baptism for salvation on the ground of John ii. 5 and Mark xvi. 16, and derived from it the horrible dogma of the eternal damnation of all unbaptized infants, though he reduced their condition to a mere absence of bliss, without actual suffering. 7 In the doctrine of the holy communion he stands, like his predecessors, Tertullian and Cyprian, nearer to the Calvinistic than any other theory of a spiritual presence and fruition of Christ's body and blood. He certainly can not be quoted in favor of transubstantiation. He was the chief authority of Ratramnus and Berengar in their opposition to this dogma.
He contributed to promote, at least in his later writings, the Catholic faith of miracles, 8 and the worship of Mary; 9 though he exempts the Virgin only from actual sin, not from original, and, with all his reverence for her, never calls her "mother of God." 10
At first an advocate of religious liberty and of purely spiritual methods of opposing error, he afterwards asserted the fatal principle of forcible coërcion, and lent the great weight of his authority to the system of civil persecution, at the bloody fruits of which in the middle age he himself would have shuddered; for he was always at heart a man of love and gentleness, and personally acted on the glorious principle: "Nothing conquers but truth, and the victory of truth is love." 11
Thus even truly great and good men have unintentionally, through mistaken zeal, become the authors of incalculable mischief.
organiser, à interpréter, à répandre le christianisme; et, après saint Paul, nul apparemment, non pas même le glorieux, l'invincible Athanase, n'a travaillé d'une manière aussi puissante à fonder l'unité
catholique."
Wigger's (Pragmat. Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelegianismus, i. p. 27) finds the most peculiar and remarkable point of Augustin's character in his singular union of intellect and imagination, scholasticism and mysticism, in which neither can be said to predominate. So also Huber, l. c. p. 313. ↩
Nourrisson, the able expounder of the philosophy of Augustin, says (l. c. tom. i. p. iv): "Je ne crois pas, qu'excepté saint Paul, aucun homme ait contribué davantage, par sa parole comme par ses écrits, Ã ↩
We recall his famous anti-Manichaean dictum: "Ego evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas." The Protestant would reverse this maxim, and ground his faith in the church on his faith in Christ and in the gospel. So with the well-known maxim of Irenaeus: "Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus Dei, et ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi ecclesia." According to the spirit of Protestantism it would be said conversely: "Where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is the Spirit of God." ↩
According to genuine Christian principles it would have been far more noble, if he had married the African woman with whom he had lived in illicit intercourse for thirteen years, who was always faithful to him, as he was to her, and had borne him his beloved and highly gifted Adeodatus; instead of casting her off, and, as he for a while intended, choosing another for the partner of his life, whose excellences were more numerous. The superiority of the evangelical Protestant morality over the Catholic asceticism is here palpable. But with the prevailing spirit of his age he would hardly have enjoyed so great regard, nor accomplished so much good if he had been married. Celibacy was the bridge from the heathen degradation of marriage to the evangelical Christian exaltation and sanctification of the family life. ↩
On Augustin's doctrine of the church, see Ch. Hist. III. §71, and especially the thorough account by R. Rothe: Anfänge der christl. Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, vol. i. (1837), pp. 679-711. "Augustin," says he, "decidely adopted Cyprian's conception [of the church] in all essential points. And once adopting it, he penetrated it in its whole depth with his wonderfully powerful and exuberant soul, and, by means of his own clear, logical mind, gave it the perfect and rigorous system which perhaps it still lacked" (p. 679 sqq.). "Augustin's conception of the doctrine of the church was about standard for succeeding times" (p. 685). See also an able article of Prof. Reuter, of Göttingen, on Augustin's views concerning episcopacy, tradition, infallibility, in Brieger's "Zeitschrift für Hist. Theol." for 1885 (Bk. VIII. pp. 126-187). ↩
Hence the famous word: "Roma locuta est, causa finita est," which is often quoted as an argument for the modern Vatican dogma of papal infallibility. But it is not found in this form, though we may admit that it is an epigrammatic condensation of sentences of Augustin. The nearest approach to it is in his Sermo CXXXI. cap. 10, §10 (Tom. VII. 645): "Iam enim de hac causa duo concilia missa sunt ad sedem apostolicam (Rome), inde etiam rescripta venerunt. Causa finita est, utinam aliquando error finiatur." Comp. Reuter, l. c. p. 157. ↩
Respecting Augustin's doctrine of baptism, see the thorough discussion in W. Wall's History of Infant Baptism, vol. i. p. 173 sqq. (Oxford ed. of 1862). His view of the slight condemnation of all unbaptized children contains the germ of the scholastic fancy of the limbus infantum and the paena damni, as distinct from the lower regions of hell and the paena sensus. ↩
In his former writings he expressed a truly philosophical view concerning miracles (De vera relig. c. 25, §47; c. 50, §98; De utilit. credendi, c. 16, §34; De peccat. meritis et remiss. l. ii. c. 32, §52, and De civit. Dei, xxii. c. 8); but in his Retract. l. i. c. 14, §5, he corrects or modifies a former remark in his book De utilit. credendi, stating that he did not mean to deny the continuance of miracles altogether, but only such great miracles as occurred at the time of Christ ("quia non tanta nec omnia, non quia nulla fiunt"). See Ch. Hist. III. §§87 and 88, and the instructive monograph of the younger Nitzsch: Augustinus' Lehre vom Wunder, Berlin, 1865 (97 pp.). ↩
See Ch. Hist. III. §§81 and 82. ↩
Comp. Tract. in Evang. Joannis, viii. c. 9, where he says: "Cur ergo ait matri filius; Quid mihi et tibi est, mulier? nondum venit hora mea (John ii. 4). Dominus noster Jesus Christus et Deus erat et homo: secundum quod Deus erat, matrem non habebat; secundum quod homo erat, habebat. Mater ergo [Maria] erat carnis, mater humanitatis, mater infirmitatis quam suscepit propter nos." This strict separation of the Godhead from the manhood of Jesus in his birth from the Virgin would have exposed Augustin in the East to the suspicion of Nestorianism. But he died a year before the council of Ephesus, at which Nestorius was condemned. ↩
See Ch. Hist. III. §27, p. 144 sq. He changed his view partly from his experience that the Donatists, in his own diocese, were converted to the catholic unity "timore legum imperialium," and were afterwards perfectly good Catholics. He adduces also a misinterpretation of Luke xiv. 23, and Prov. ix. 9: "Da sapienti occasionem et sapientior erit." Ep. 93, ad Vincentium Rogatistam, §17 (tom. ii. p. 237 sq. ed. Bened.). But he expressly discouraged the infliction of death on heretics, and adjured the proconsul Donatus, Ep. 100, by Jesus Christ, not to repay the Donatists in kind. "Corrigi eos cupimus, non necari." ↩
