CHAPTER THREE
Augustine's
Mistake
Constantine laid the institutional foundation for unifying church
and state, while Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa provided the
philosophical justification. Augustine was a great man and a great Christian.
He was the father of Christian theology and the father of the monastic
movement. His precise and relentless intellect enabled orthodox Christianity to
withstand formidable and savage assaults by the Manichaean, Arian, and Pelagian
heresies. His classic Confessions is one of the most moving accounts ever
written of a sinner dedicating his life to Christ.
Strangely, however, it was this great saint whose thought paved
the way for the medieval church compelling the uncon-verted to believe. Seeing
the awful destruction wrought by dangerous heresy and heathen practices in the
waning days of the Roman empire, Augustine became obsessed with preserving
church unity. He saw the church as the last bulwark against the savagery of the
encroaching barbaric hordes. The political ap-paratus of the state during his
day was in disarray, divided, al-most non-existent, with one despot succeeding
another. The only hope for civilization, in Augustine's mind, as he peered over
the abyss around the year 429 into the long night of the Dark Ages, was to
bring administrative conformity to a universal church. To survive the onslaught
of the barbarians and heresy, he thought, the church could not be defined as
merely the body of believers, but had to be a specific all-encompassing
institutional structure.
At this juncture, it is worth making a brief digression into the
background of this brilliant but tortured church father because he is such a
pivotal figure in the history of the West, and because the story of his
conversion provides insight into his thinking on matters of church and state.
As detailed in his Confessions, Augustine's youth was a tale of debauchery. His
mother Monica tried to raise him as a Christian. But Augustine, his mental
agility obvious from childhood, scoffed at the Scriptures and took delight in
pointing out apparent contradictions. He recounts his exploits in the brothels
of that infamous city of sin, Carthage, with his friend Licentius. He took part
in the orgiastic feasts of Bacchus in which no depravity was considered too
perverse. He took delight in the bloody spectacles of the circus. He had
mistresses and an illegitimate son named Adeodatus. His mother Monica wept and
prayed for her lost son.
But young Augustine was troubled. He found the tem- porary
pleasures of the senses unsatisfying. He longed for true joy, but did not know
where to find it. He was a consumer of pagan philosophy, and he sought
frantically to find an answer to the problem of evil. He rejected Christianity
at first because he did not see how a good and compassionate God could preside
over a creation where there was so much obvious pain and suffering. For nine
years, Augustine took refuge in Manichaeism, a philosophy of dualism.
According to the Manichaeans, the material world was under the
dominion of evil; the spiritual world, including the soul, was under the
dominion of good. The evil material world and the good spiritual world were in
constant war with each other. Evil, according to the Manichaean view, would
continue to triumph over the material body until the soul was liberated from
the flesh by death. Manichaeism permitted Augustine to continue in his
licentious ways because, according to this doctrine, man was powerless to
overcome evil so long as he was held captive by the evil body. To Augustine, it
seemed to explain why he was incapable of controlling his sexual appetites.
Manichaeism contradicted the Book of Genesis, in which God pronounces that his
creation is good.
But Augustine eventually rejected Manichaeism because the
Manichaean intellectuals could not answer Augustine's main objection. To him,
there appeared to be too much beauty in the material world for it really to be
inherently evil. The world seemed good, yet tainted. He turned to the writings
of Plato and Plotinus (a neoplatonist) for answers. He thought there was some
truth in Plato's notion that the material world is an imperfect representation
of the true reality which is spiritual, but which we can perceive through our
minds. According to Plato, abstract ideas are superior to physical objects.
Thus, our conception of a table is the perfect table, while the material table,
though good, is flawed; moreover, the idea, according to Plato, actually exists
in some spiritual sphere. Though these notions would later strike Augustine as
absurd, Plato induced him to begin thinking more about the transcendent, and
helped shed light on the mysterious passage at the beginning of the Book of
John. Augustine wrote:
I read,
not indeed, in these words but much the same thought, enforced by many varied
arguments, that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made
by Him, and without Him nothing was made.
To Augustine, it became obvious that Plato was inade- quate, that
he had taken man as far as unaided human reason could go. Meanwhile, Augustine
had started taking an interest in the preaching of the great Ambrose, Bishop of
Milan. He admired Ambrose's intellect, abandoned his bias against Christianity
as a religion for the ignorant, and began studying the Scriptures. The problem
of evil, though, continued to bother Augustine. What makes us sin? Why can't we
make ourselves stop?
Over time, Augustine came to the conclusion that it was not
argument that prevented him from believing. It was sin. "Oh Lord," he
once exclaimed, "make me chaste, but not yet." He wanted to turn his
back on the pleasures of the flesh, but every time he tried, he heard the same
tyrannical voice of ephemeral joy: "Do not cast us off" - "you
cannot live without us." For many years he believed what those ephemeral
joys continued to tell him.
But then one day, late in the summer of the year 386, the troubled
Augustine was strolling through a garden in Milan. As recounted in the eighth
book of the Confessions, suddenly he collapsed under a fig tree, wept, and
began to pray: "And you, O Lord, how long? Will you be angry forever?
Remember not our past iniquities. How long, how long? ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow?'
Why not now? Why not this very hour an end to my uncleanness?"
He then heard the voice of a little girl singing wistfully in the
distance: "Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege [Take up and read. Take up and
read]," she seemed to say with her melodious voice. Augustine reached for
the New Testament, opened the book to Paul's letter to the Romans, and read the
first lines upon which his eyes fixed:
"Let us behave properly as in the
day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and
sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and
make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts" (Romans 13:13-14).
At that moment Augustine renounced everything-worldly ambition,
sensual delights, intellectual pride - and he "put on the Lord Jesus
Christ." He had been born again. He would subject his life to rigorous
discipline and prayer. He threw off his ornate african garb, and put on a black
robe, a leather belt and sandals, a uniform that for him would never change.
All his life, however, Augustine would take precautions against his major
weakness-promiscuity. He would never permit a woman in his residence, not even
his sister; when he spoke with a member of the opposite sex, he made sure a
witness was present; and, when he went to bed at night, he always kept the door
open. He had known evil firsthand; he knew that if extreme precautions were not
taken in regulating his personal life, sin would swallow him again.
In the light of this background, we can see the source of
Augustine's bias in favor of compulsion. The human will was extremely weak, in
his experience, and subject to all sorts of temptation. Without external
support the individual seemed almost helpless in his battle against Satan.
Moreover, he saw that orthodox Christianity was on the brink of extinction. He
lashed out furiously at the Arian heresy, which said Jesus was not divine but
only an instrument of God; and the Pelagian error, which said that we are not
condemned by original sin, but that each individual has the opportunity to live
without the stain of Adam's fall from grace. Augustine said no, Jesus is
divine, and He came to earth to pay for our sins with His death, because
"all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).
Meanwhile, the state had completely abdicated its responsibility
to protect the people from disorder. Christian-hating bands of robbers, often
marching under the banner of Arius, constantly burned and pillaged farms owned
by Catholics. Christians were routinely kidnapped and tortured, and their
bodies desecrated in the most foul ways. Augustine saw priests' eyes burned out
with chalk and vinegar, married women and nuns being violated, and blood
flowing daily in the gutters of the streets. He himself was beaten severely by
a rampaging band of fanatical heretics. At first, he believed that to force people
to become Catholics would only lead non-believers to lie about their
conversion. But the horrors he witnessed around him suggested that compulsory
measures on behalf of Christian ideals were called for: "Why should not
earthly kings who serve Christ," he wrote, "not make laws in favor of
Christ?"
Alaric's hordes sacked Rome on August 24, 410, raping, slaying,
and burning. Fortunes were lost, priceless art destroyed. There was massacre
and carnage as the Goths reveled in their rampage. after news of this event
reached frica, Augustine sat down at his table in Hippo and wrote at the top of
a blank page the title of his greatest book: Concerning the City of God
Against the Pagans.
Augustine would have liked nothing more than to write in isolation
and meditate on God. He envied the solitary life of Anthony in the desert. But
circumstances demanded that he become an administrator, that he take a part in
saving civilization. The world, as he saw it, was in crisis, and stern measures
were called for, a view that was reinforced by the fact that he was a convert,
a man who knew darkness, as he himself recognized:
"Within the soul of a convert who has been an unbeliever and
a sinner there develops a sort of fanatical anxiety. Remembrance of past errors
exasperates him," he wrote.
Augustine's darkest moment as a Christian was in his treatment of
the Donatists in Northern Africa. The Donatists rejected the Roman political
order, and lambasted the official church for its corrupt and ungodly alliance
with the state: "What has the emperor to do with the church?" they
often asked. They attacked idols, the special powers of the priesthood, held
church services in the vernacular, and may have even possessed copies of
Scripture translated into their native tongues. They also denounced the
institution of slavery, and many slaves abandoned their masters and became
influential in the Donatist church.
In a sense, the Donatist's were the first
Separatist Protestants, similar to those who fled Europe on the Mayflower in
1620 to establish in the New World Christian communities undefiled by a worldly
lust for power. Donatist-style dissent against worldly church power and
extravagance would become a major force within Christianity: St. Francis of
Assisi, John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and Martin Luther are examples of men
leading movements agitating for a return to the pure Christianity of the
Apostle's. Donatists outnumbered the Catholics in many North african region's.
The center of their movement was Hippo. Augustine, according to a letter he
wrote to a friend, was commissioned by the emperor Honorius to help bring the
Donatists "over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial
edicts."
In 411, a church tribunal was held at Carthage and presided over
by Marcellinus, a functionary of the emperor. Two hundred seventy-eight
Donatist bishops arrived to make the case that they represented the true
Catholic Church. Augustine did not like the role into which he was thrust. But
he also saw the unity of both church and empire as crucial: "The eyes of
the Christian world," he said, "are fixed on this assemblage in
Carthage. The people have forgotten the origin of the schism. We have seen the
contemptible chicanery of individual's substituted for the great issue of
Christian solidarity. When the barbarians are in Rome, when all mankind is
eager to learn of the things of God, we are here engaged in miserable
litigation."
The Donatist schism was then condemned by the emperor's man
Marcellinus. In reality, the decision had been made before the tribunal had
assembled. Augustine wrote the minutes of what had transpired. The emperor
Honorius levied heavy fines on all members of the Donatist church, ordered them
to return to the Catholic fold, and had their places of worship turned over to
the Catholic authorities. Those who refused were either executed or imprisoned;
some fled to the desert; others committed suicide rather than submit to the
imperial decision.
Augustine did not enjoy his role as inquisitor, but all Catholics
looked to him as a lighthouse in the midst of a turbulent sea. He took it upon
himself to repair the cracks in the foundation of civilization and guide
disabled Christian ships into tranquil waters. If persuasion did not work,
force might be necessary. "Compel them to come in," he sometimes said
during these years of distress. Always looking at his own experience, he
recalled: "I was treated as I deserved, since instead of being given the
bread of instruction, I was made to feel the lash of the whip." "Ah,
how quickly you will be disabused of these ideas if you will but seek out in
the Catholic Church those best instructed in sacred doctrine." For the
Catholic Church "knows how to form men by instructions and exercises
proportioned to the strength and age of each one, which in its salutary
teachings has foreseen and understood everything."
Augustine did not want to use force. But his extremely dark
(probably correct) view of human nature drove him to do so. "What else is
the message of the evils of humanity?" he asked. ". . . quarrels,
disputes, wars, treacheries, hatreds, enmities, deceits, flattery, fraud,
theft, rapine, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, murder, patricide, cruelty,
savagery, villainy, lust, promiscuity, indecency, fornication, adultery,
incest, unnatural vice in men and women (disgusting acts too filthy to be
named), sacrilege, collusion, false witness, unjust judgment, violence,
robbery, and all other such evils which do not immediately come to mind,
although they never cease to beset this life of man ..." Leave people to
their own devices and "men's brazen capacity to do harm, their urge to
self-indulgence, would rage to the full. No king in his kingdom, no general with
his troops, no husband with his wife, no father with his son, could attempt to
put a stop, by any threats or punishments, to the freedom and sheer, sweet
taste of sinning."
But Augustine failed to transfer this bleak view of the human
heart to human institutions. His City of God Against the Pagans portrays Rome
as a holy citadel, as having made possible the rise of Christianity, and as a
mighty fortress that protected civilization from the savagery that awaited man
without the protection of Caesar's armies. In his view, the state played an
important role in man's ‘salvation; a position that would dominate Christian
thinking until the 17th century. Though he opposed the death penalty for
heresy, he provided the rationale for the Spanish Inquisition of the 13th century,
as historian Paul Johnson has pointed out. Near the end of his life, we find
this great saint corresponding with the fanatical Spanish heretic hunter Paul
Orosius.
It is easy, of course, to sympathize with Augustine, given the age
in which he lived. For in his last days a Vandal army, estimated at 80,000 men
who were following the doctrines of Arius, moved from Spain into africa,
everywhere destroying churches and monasteries. Catholic priests and virgins
were disemboweled; bishops burned alive. There was desolation from Tangier to
Tripoli. "Who could have believed such a thing!" Augustine wrote.
"They ravage and pillage, change into a desert this prosperous and
populous land. Not even a single fruit tree remains standing." Errors were
not merely errors, as Augustine saw them, but often led to the most brutal
butchery. In this light, we can understand Augustine's reasons for allying the
kingdom of God with the kingdom of Caesar. For mankind was about to enter into
the long night of barbarism.
Nevertheless, Augustine's marriage of church and state was counter
to the entire spirit of the New Testament, and ultimately failed. It led to a
savagery of its own. Augustine cited the parable of the great banquet, which
contains the line "cornpel them to come in" (Luke 14:23), to justify
using force to bring the unconverted into the church. In this parable people
were giving weak excuses for why they could not attend the great feast planned
by the householder. Try harder, the host told his servants; "compel them
to come in." This was certainly strong language, but it was not a mandate
to employ the coercive powers of the state. The host, who represents God, was
invoking His servants (Christians) to make their arguments for coming to the
feast (Heaven) more compelling. People failed to respond to God's invitation to
the banquet because the case made by His evangelists was so feeble that many
did not think the offer worthwhile. Augustine's misuse of the parable is a good
illustration of the danger of pulling an isolated phrase out of the context of
the Scriptural whole. The true meaning of that parable is this: if presented
properly, and with urgency, by evangelists, Christ's message should
"compel them to come in." This was by no means a call for yoking
church and state together.
Augustine's "unity" was a political unity, dependent
upon human structures - whereas the unity of which Paul speaks is a spiritual
fellowship: "[Be] diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond
of peace" (Eph. 4:3). Jesus explicitly commands his followers not to use
force in the conversion process: "[The] rulers of the Gentiles lord it
over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. But it is not so
among you . . . " (Mark 10:42-43, italics mine). Peter, the Apostle, in
his letter, exhorts the elders of the church to "shepherd the flock of God
among you, not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according the will of
God" (1 Peter 5:2). And Paul's call to universalism is not an invocation
to the church to conquer more territory: "There is . . . one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all
and in all" (Eph. 4:4-6). The Christian unity suggested here is spiritual,
not material. God is not tied down by an alliance with a particular government,
geographical location or race of people; nor does Caesar have anything to say
about man's salvation: "No one comes to the Father, but through Me,"
Jesus says (John 14:6). The Augustinian vertical church structure, and its
integration with Caesar's political reach, in fact, made the universal church
impossible, a's the political realm will always be limited. Augustine's fatal
twist on Christ's view of Christian unity would later lead to the Protestant
Reformation, and fuel the dissenting spirit that brought the Mayflower Pilgrims
from the Old World to the New.
SOURCE:
FAITH AND FREEDOM BY Benjamin Hart.
