The New Criterion

In late August of A.D. 430, as the Vandals massed outside the city walls, the bishop of the provincial North African town of Hippo lay dying. His last instruction to his monastic companions, we are told, was to “see that the church library and all the books are carefully preserved for posterity.” At least since the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, he had labored under a presentiment that the classical world that he had known was “growing old and waning as an earthly kingdom.”

During the intervening years, he began to write consciously for future generations, although even he did not foresee how imminent was the utter collapse of Roman society. That collapse gave his writings a place equally unforeseen by their creator. For, against all odds, the brethren successfully carried out Augustine’s final command; almost all of his works survived the barbarian onslaught. In the ensuing chaos, Augustine’s writings became a life raft to which the Church clung—they became so central to the reconstruction of the European mind that it is almost impossible to conceive of Western culture without him.

It is only one of the many joys of this illuminating short biography by the late English church historian Henry Chadwick that he observes that Augustine himself would have “deplored” being transformed into this “towering authority,” followed uncritically by succeeding generations—and drily supports the point with Augustine’s own “I have not followed myself in everything.” While writing Augustine, Chadwick drew on his distinguished years as a scholar of the late classical world at both Oxford and Cambridge, an Anglican minister deeply involved in interfaith dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church, and a translator of, among other works, Augustine’s Confessions. He creates a vivid picture of Augustine as both a transcendent intellectual and a man of his time—as Augustine might have it, finding the universal in the experience of the particular. At once effortlessly learned and accessible, this is a book which, as Peter Brown, himself no mean scholar of late antiquity, states in his excellent foreword, carries the “tang of life.”

What emerges is an Augustine with a surprising strain of ironic humor, especially in his letters and sermons. It is also an Augustine whose day-to-day work as a bishop engaged in the lives of the poor and rivalrous turned him into the great man he never would have been had he remained a professor of rhetoric—or become the contemplative he wished to be. In Chadwick’s account, Augustine’s asceticism was always dogged by suspicions of lingering Manichaeism; his attachment to Neo-Platonism continued throughout his life; and, even as a bishop, he was hard put to set aside his admiration for Cicero’s Hortensius. Against all stereotypes, it is also an Augustine who left a place in the scheme of salvation for those, like Cicero, who could not have heard the gospel. Above all, it is a picture of a man who, in his own words, wrote as he learned and learned as he wrote.

The bare facts of Augustine’s biography are well known: He was born in A.D. 354 to a Roman father and a Berber mother in the small town of Thagaste in the North African province of Numidia (present-day Algeria). With the help of a wealthy patron, he gravitated to the educational center of Carthage, where he pursued the academic life and was drawn into the orbit of Manichaeism, a theosophical cult that practiced asceticism and believed in a radical dualism of good and evil. Despite these Manichee leanings, Augustine later remembered those years as a time of unbridled sensuality, when he “was in love with being in love”; eventually, he took a mistress of servile status and together they had a son, Adeodatus.

Like many young men of talent from the provinces, Augustine moved first to Rome itself and then to Milan, where he became a professor of rhetoric. There, he gathered a circle of North African expatriates, eventually including his mother, Monnica, a devout Christian. Influenced by that redoubtable woman and by Milan’s bishop, Ambrose, Augustine enrolled as a candidate for baptism and studied Plato and the neo-Platonists with a group of Christian intellectuals.

In the summer of 386, Augustine famously experienced a powerful conversion and withdrew from public life to become a celibate religious. His first stop was a retreat at Cassiciacum, about twenty miles north of Milan, where he was joined by his North African companions. The surviving members of the group returned to Numidia in 388, where Augustine established a monastic community in his hometown of Thagaste. He never left Africa again. Involuntarily ordained a presbyter while on a visit to the seaside city of Hippo Regius in 391, Augustine accepted his burden and moved to Hippo along with members of the Thagaste community. When the town’s bishop died a few years later, Augustine succeeded him. During the next thirty years, filled with the cure of ordinary souls and the leadership of his cathedral community, Augustine wrote the great works for which he is primarily remembered.

With an eye to telling detail, Chadwick brilliantly captures the ferment of North African Christianity as Augustine knew it. From binge drinking at martyrs’ graves on their feast days to the forced ordination of the unwary rich in order to hijack their wealth for the congregation, Numidian Christianity was a bare-knuckled faith. Chadwick is most vivid in his treatment of the Donatists, a schismatic group that long boasted a majority of Hippo’s Christians and occasioned some of Augustine’s strongest polemics. Although effectively identical to Catholics in both liturgy and christology, Donatists refused communion with any in the line of apostolic succession to clergy who had surrendered church property to the Roman government during the Diocletianic persecution of 303—which included all Catholic clergy. In essence, Donatists believed that the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the moral purity of the celebrant, but the schism was also redolent of class and nationalist concerns, with the Catholics thought to enjoy imperial protection.

Donatism attracted the local Berber peasants, a particularly tough lot who took their religion seriously. At first content to organize themselves in nomadic groups of celibate men who courted martyrdom by attacking pagan festivals, these “Circumcellions” reacted to an imperial crackdown with a wave of suicides, many throwing themselves from cliffs. Blaming their nearest rivals for inciting the persecution, the Circumcellions next turned their energies against the Catholics. Armed with cudgels called “Israels” and a war cry of “Deo Laudes,” they turned much of Numidia into a no-go zone for travelling Catholic clergy.

Even home ground was not especially safe. In one vividly recounted incident, in 404, Donatists assaulted a Catholic bishop in his church after he won a lawsuit to recover the building from a Donatist congregation. The attackers smashed the altar over his head, slashed him in the groin with a machete, dragged him through the dust (which stanched the wound and kept him from bleeding to death), carried him to the top of a tower, and, for good measure, threw him onto an ash heap. There, much the worse for wear, the bishop was discovered by a peasant who had gone to urinate against the wall while his wife waited. Expecting a reward, the two carried the bishop back to the town’s Catholics. Following his recovery, the bishop promptly travelled to Rome to invoke the emperor’s aid against his adversaries, thereby fulfilling the Donatists’ worst fears about imperial favor.

This background gives life to Augustine’s passionate anti-Donatism. Yet, the story of Numidia was not all strife and violence. Perceptively enough, Chadwick first raises Augustine’s treatment of grace and God’s love during his discussion of the African church (rather than in the much later Pelagian controversy, where it usually appears), as the bishop muses about the capacity of his unruly congregation to be touched by the divine and to experience a conversion every bit as striking as his own.

As this indicates, more than most biographers, Chadwick situates Augustine’s works along the continuum of his life. To take the most obvious example, Chadwick waits until midway through the book to explore the theological implications of The Confessions, by which point he has prepared the way with the “ascending foothills and soaring ridges” of Augustine’s earlier writings. Even the autobiographical details of The Confessions are treated with a condign skepticism. Although there is no question of a personal turning point, the famous “tolle, lege” of the garden conversion scene is also viewed as a literary conceit with “a subtle blending of symbolic overtones, some Platonic, some Biblical, some allusions to classical Latin literature,” all of which Chadwick graciously provides. The notorious stolen pears do not even merit a mention until the end of Augustine’s life when, during the Pelagian controversy, Bishop Julian of Eclanum mocks Augustine’s “Punic logic,” prattling away to God about adolescent peccadilloes.

Chadwick’s historical perspective is, naturally enough, most evident in his treatment of the writings and controversies from Augustine’s later years. For example, Chadwick treats The City of God, written between 413 and 427 while Rome staggered under repeated barbarian invasions, as an extended apologia devoted to answering the complaint that “the old polytheism brought peace, Christianity has meant catastrophe.” Thus, he sees Augustine’s sharp division between the spheres of church and state as arising out of a desire to reassure the educated pagan elite that, in rejecting polytheism, Christianity did not spell the end of imperial government. The state’s role is to maintain order—and hopefully provide a simulacrum of justice—in this fallen world; the church focuses on a world out of time. In this, Augustine and fellow ascet- ics are pioneers in what Chadwick calls “secularity,” removing religion from worldly pursuits such as commerce, military affairs, and government. But, as Chadwick also contends, in severely circumscribing the realms of the two cities—overlapping only in their desire for peace—Augustine moved close to the dualism of his old Donatist adversaries and away from the position he had held when invoking imperial aid against them.

Chadwick also argues that Augustine was pressed to increasingly extreme positions by his adversaries in the defining dispute of his last years—against the British monk Pelagius and his followers (most notably Julian of Eclanum) over the degree to which human beings participate in their own salvation. It was a debate that implicated doctrines of divine sovereignty, free will, and original sin. (Here, it should be noted, Chadwick’s own theological leanings cast a long shadow over the proceedings, with his thumb firmly on the scale in favor of Augustine’s opponents.) Initially, Pelagians emphasized the New Testament warnings about the dangers of faith without works of love, concerned that their flocks would fall into moral lethargy if they waited for grace to act on the gospel’s commands. Augustine, for his part, in works such as The Confessions, stressed the enormous gap between the divine commands and the unaided human ability to obey.

As the sides slowly joined issue, the combatants divided most obviously over whether Adam passed on his sin to his posterity. But Augustine’s deeply somber view of human nature led him to argue not only that men enter this world in a profoundly damaged condition—Pelagius believed that infants are born innocent of sin—but to contend that such is man’s sorry state that he can do nothing to bring about his own salvation. While the Pelagians considered salvation to be the result of God’s foreknowledge of human merit resulting from man’s free will assisted by divine grace, Augustine believed in unmerited predestination to salvation. Following the direction of his own logic, Augustine equated divine foreknowledge with causation; divine grace was the operative factor in salvation from start to finish.

The issues here are among the most difficult in the faith. The relationship between predestination and foreknowledge has resisted definitive resolution to this day. It is, therefore, perhaps unfortunate that Chadwick should end his account on a sour note, with a discussion of Augustine’s claim that Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity through sexual union and the historical repercussions of this view. In this cause, Chadwick is not beyond the donnish ad hominem, gently suggesting that Augustine’s position is understandable—if unfortunate—for a celibate and drawing a contrast with the views of the urbane widower Julian. This lends a certain twist to Chadwick’s concluding remarks on Augustine’s humility in recognizing his own limitations, implying, presumably, that we need not follow the saint in all things to admire him.

Professor Chadwick died in 2008. The manuscript of this book, written in 1981, was discovered among his papers. Because it has been published posthumously, there are the occasional rough patches that would have been smoothed out by the author himself had he lived to see it through publication. It also does not take account, except in the limited bibliography by Professor Gillian Clark, of the explosion of Augustine studies in recent decades. Indeed, in 1981, who could have imagined that the saint would have his own home page on the internet? Perhaps more significantly, in the intervening years, scholars have discovered a number of Augustine’s previously unknown sermons and letters in European archives. Yet, as Brown points out, Chadwick’s penetration into Augustine’s character is such that at least one sermon unknown when the manuscript was drafted catches Augustine exactly as Chadwick prepared us to see him. In his insight and elegant scholarship, it is almost as if Chadwick himself qualified to be a member of that long-ago house party at Cassiciacum.