The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (46 page)

Once again the state had come to the rescue of the orthodox church. In 405 Honorius issued an edict ordering the unity of both churches, branding the Donatists as heretics, partly on the grounds of their insistence on rebaptism, thus making them subject to the rigour of the law. Their property was to be confiscated, their services forbidden and their clergy exiled. Augustine ejected the Donatists from Hippo and, taking over their bare churches—they did not believe in decoration and whitewashed their church walls—he posted his own anti-Donatist texts on the walls. When persecution was relaxed, Augustine petitioned the emperor to summon a conference, and this, presided over as it was by an orthodox Christian, Marcellinus, could only end in a further condemnation of the Donatists, who were represented by nearly 300 bishops. Donatism in itself became a criminal offence (only just over a hundred years previously, of course, the last edicts of Diocletian treated Christianity as a whole in a similar way), and Donatists were now actively compelled to join the orthodox church.
³⁰

In his earlier works Augustine was reluctant to condone the compelling of outsiders into the church. “Words should be our instruments, arguments our weapons, reason our means of conquest [
sic
] and we should avoid making enforced Catholics out of those whom we had known as open heretics.” There was no support from New Testament texts for persecution (in fact, the Donatists were to taunt Augustine with Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake . . .”), and Christianity itself had its own recent memories of how destructive persecution could be. The saintly and highly orthodox Gregory of Nazianzus had specifically condemned coercion: “Whatever is done against one’s will, under the threat of force, is like an arrow artificially tied back, or a river dammed in on every side of its channel. Given the opportunity it rejects the restraining force. What is done willingly, on the other hand, is steadfast for all time. It is made fast by the unbreakable bonds of love.”
³¹
However, the works of Athanasius and the edicts of 380 and 381 enforcing Trinitarian orthodoxy were loaded with condemnation of “heretics.” It was Augustine who developed a rationale of persecution.

Augustine’s earlier, more tolerant, views were to change in the early fifth century. He began with the argument that Donatism intimidated many ordinary Christians and it was the duty of the “true” church to release them from such coercion. Furthermore, his experience of ordinary former Donatists was that most became excellent Christians when forced to do so. Therefore, compulsion was permissible. Just as God could punish in the exercise of his love, so too could the church, knowing as it did so that it was saving sinners from everlasting hell fire. “What then does brotherly love do? Does it, because it fears the short-lived fires of the furnace for the few, abandon all to the eternal fires of hell? And does it leave so many . . . to perish everlastingly . . . whom ‘others’ [i.e. the Donatists] will not permit to live in accordance with the teaching of Christ?”
³²
Not for the last time in Christian history, fantasies about hell fire were being used as a means of manipulating Christian behaviour on earth. As for coercion, God himself had shown the way. The conversion of Paul had been effected by God throwing him to the ground; Augustine finds comparable examples of forced conversions in the Old Testament. Yet Augustine’s views on the sinfulness of every individual left him with a problem. Since even orthodox Christians were still burdened with sin, how was it possible to be sure that persecution was not an exercise of sinfulness? Augustine fell back on assertions that the church was divinely inspired and that any action undertaken in “love” must have God’s support. While Augustine pleaded for restraint (he never condoned the death penalty, for instance, on the grounds that it deprived the sinner of the possibility of repentance), he had nevertheless provided a rationale for persecution, however circumscribed, which was to be exploited in the centuries to come. By the thirteenth century a papal legate reported on the extermination of the Cathars, a sect which preached a return to the ascetic ideals of early Christianity: “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword regardless of age and sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.”
³³

The Donatist dispute challenged Augustine to develop another line of thinking. The Donatists, drawing on the teachings of Cyprian, argued that baptism at the hands of a priest or bishop who had apostatized could not be valid. Those who ministered the sacraments must be worthy men, in fact the church itself must be a community of saints. So long as the orthodox church, whose bishops had their succession from those who had lapsed, was, so far as the Donatists were concerned, in schism, their ministers could not be worthy. Augustine was forced to argue in reply that the quality of the minister was not essential to the sacrament. It was a direct expression of the grace of God and passed from God to the recipient without losing its purity (as water passed down a stone channel). So long as the sacrament was administered in the name of Christ and the correct form was used, it was valid (although as already seen, baptism did not necessarily free the recipient of original sin, so that Augustine raised the possibility of a “valid” sacrament that brought no benefit to its recipient!). The church could be made up of sinners without losing its unique role as the conduit of God’s grace. However badly its members, even those in the hierarchy, behave, the church can never lose its true role as guardian of orthodoxy. The role of the church was further elaborated in Augustine’s last and perhaps greatest work,
The City of
God,
finally completed just four years before he died, in 426.

Augustine lived in a disintegrating world; the first sack of Rome by (Homoean Christian) Gothic invaders in 410 sent a shock wave through the empire. Refugees scattered even as far as Africa. Many Christians had claimed that the empire had been instituted by God so that Christianity could flourish; now, in the west at least, it was collapsing around them. Other Christians saw the fall of Rome as the beginning of the last times so vividly forecast in the Book of Revelation. Pagans claimed that it was precisely because their gods had been abandoned through the coming of Christianity that the city had fallen. Augustine’s position, by contrast, was detached, as if such disasters meant little in God’s great scheme of things; this was the attitude that he spelled out at length in
The City of God.
His elaboration of two cities, one of the world and one of God, drew on earlier ideas of his own as well as echoing the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans (and later theologians who talked in terms of the “saved” versus the “unsaved”). But
The City of God
set these ideas into a specific historical context, spending many pages on the failure of the pagan gods to support Rome in its past history.
³⁴
Augustine rejected Eusebius’ claim that Constantine had inaugurated a Christian state. The state, however Christian it may appear, can only be a community in which saints and sinners are mingled. The work of a providential God can be discerned in human history through studying the Bible and enters a new, final stage with the coming of Christ, but the true “City of God” can only be in heaven after death, when the unsaved have been segregated and sent to hell. We cannot identify those who will be saved in advance; while they are on earth they are like pilgrims, wandering in exile in the hope of finding their promised land in heaven. So “the city of the world” must be by definition flawed; in
The City of God
Augustine dwelled on the imperfections of human societies with their continual wars and corruption, so far from “the peace of the Heavenly City . . . a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and a mutual fellowship in God.”
³⁵
Here Augustine consciously rejected the classical ideal, espoused by both Plato and Aristotle, that it was within the city that an individual reaches his higher state. As J. S. McClelland puts it, Augustine “signals the definitive end of the ancient idea that the state is the school of the virtues and the stage on which the virtues are to be seen at their best advantage.”
³⁶
However, Augustine also discussed the nature of the ideal state on earth. It is worth working towards good order, he argued, because although absolute peace and justice cannot be reached on earth, a state that works towards them can relieve the burdens of earthly life. Nor can the church survive except in conditions of good order.

The Christian can, and should, participate in the state’s activities, as a soldier or administrator, and Augustine expected the Christian to uphold the authority of the state and play an active part in supporting its values. (“What is more horrible than the public executioner? Yet he has a necessary place in the legal system, and he is part of the order of a well governed society.”) War was to be avoided if possible, but Augustine accepted it as part of life: Christians should not shrink from it if their state was threatened or if it would secure peace and safety for human society. Once Christians were in the army, it was not wrong to kill in the obedience of orders, even if they were unjust. Hierarchy, where those below have the duty to obey those above them, is the natural way of things, whether in church, state or family. Even at its best, however, the state can only be an echo of the “City of God.” The greatest happiness on earth is as utter misery compared to the joys of heaven. Augustine had little faith in the possibility of progress. As we have seen, he accepted slavery, claiming that it was God’s punishment of the slave. In short, Augustine was a social conservative: he saw human beings as inevitably flawed, reforms as bringing illusory benefits and the maintenance of good order as a priority. The Christian could only act within the world as it existed, never change it for the better.
The City of God
proved to be the foundation document of Christian political thought, though it presents a view of society which seems radically different from that of the Gospels.

Even the briefest familiarity with Augustine’s writings convinces one that he is an intellectual giant in the range of issues he tackles, in the creative way in which he approaches each one and in his sensitivity to human psychology; he has,
pace
Freud, been credited with the discovery of the unconscious. He deals with issues independently and often creatively so long as established orthodoxy is not challenged. When one compares the obsessively vindictive attitude to the Jews of Ambrose or John Chrysostom, for instance, with the more thoughtful, even tolerant, attitude of Augustine, the latter’s greater intellectual and personal maturity is clear. Augustine recognized that Jews and Christians have a common father in Abraham and share in man’s fallen nature, and that the Jews (even if they proved blind to Christ’s presence among them) had been given a providential role by God as witness to the prophecies of his coming. They should not be totally cast out. The Catholic Church, anxious to reject charges of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century, has felt able to use Augustine’s writings in its cause.
³⁷
In Book 2 of De Doctrina
Christiana,
he considers the value of secular learning with some objectivity, even if only as an aid to understanding the scriptures more profoundly. Yet Augustine’s achievements are flawed by the underlying pessimism and guilt that permeate his theology. His personal tragedy was that he could never bring himself to trust that his “loving” God would save all those who committed themselves freely to him in the hope of receiving his love—becoming Christian, in other words, did not bring with it the assurance of salvation. Perhaps somewhere deep in his psyche there was irreparable damage that distorted his perspective so that, at least in the second half of his life, he could see human existence on earth only at its very bleakest, without even any certain hope of divine rescue. Whatever its sources, the theology that emerged was to Augustine the truth for all time; as his role in the Pelagian controversy showed, he expected his views to prevail in the church as a whole. “One of Augustine’s failings,” writes Christopher Stead, “was that he was apt to read off lessons from his own experiences and erect them into principles equally applicable to all mankind.” Unlike Paul, who, as we have seen, had no reason to expect his writings to last, Augustine expected his to become the orthodoxy.
³⁸
In the words of John Rist:

Part of the tragic side of Augustinianism is that his work was received uncritically for so long . . . He would be the authority; his views would be canonized as authoritative proof-texts rather than as starting points for more impartial investigations. A nearly inevitable side effect of such reverence . . . was the likelihood that Augustine himself would be misread, even tendentiously, so that he might be harmonised with someone else’s convictions.
³⁹

Augustine’s intellectual stature has earned him an unassailable place in Christian theology. But while his writings had an understandable relevance to the troubled times within which he lived, and in other contexts in which mankind needs to be reminded of the evil of which it is capable, they give little room for hope or optimism. For Augustine the reality of life on earth cannot be transformed by human effort as it will always be mired in sin. Augustine’s rationale for persecution was to be used to justify slaughter (as of the Cathars or the native people of America). In the seventeenth century the French saint John Eudes could even argue that “it is a subject of humiliation of all the mothers of the children of Adam to know that while they are with child they carry within them an infant . . . who is the enemy of God, the object of his hatred and malediction and the shrine of the demon.”
⁴⁰

In 430 the Vandals, one of the Gothic tribes, swept across north Africa. Hippo itself was besieged, but Augustine died on August 28, before the city fell. Even though Hippo was partially burnt, Augustine’s library miraculously survived. Both orthodox and Donatist Christians were overwhelmed by that old heresy, Homoean Christianity, which the Goths had adopted with some fervour before it had been outlawed by Theodosius.