The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (45 page)

Augustine believed that every other form of learning had to be subordinated to the scriptures, so in
De Doctrina Christiana,
his major work on the exegesis of scripture, worked on throughout his later life, secular knowledge, whether provided by mathematicians, scientists or philosophers, is said to be valid only in so far as it leads to an understanding of scripture. However, in this respect Augustine was more broad-minded than those scholars who would have nothing to do with secular learning at all; witness John Chrysostom’s exhortations to Christians to empty their minds of secular knowledge. The result was that Augustine thought less critically about the scriptures, believing that they could be interpreted only in such a way as supported orthodoxy. Augustine’s uncritical reliance on the inadequate Latin translations of the original Greek and Hebrew versions made things worse. For instance, he interpreted the Latin of verse 12 of chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to mean that all individuals sinned through Adam, hence to support the doctrine of an original sin, whereas if he had gone back to the original Greek he would have found that sin, which entered the world as a result of Adam’s transgression, was a “cosmic” force burdening all humanity in general rather than being born uniquely in each individual. No wonder the concept of original sin never travelled to the Greek world.

In so far as he came to take refuge in scriptures, Augustine was particularly influenced by Paul, and, as noted above, it was from a misreading of Paul that Augustine developed his doctrine of original sin.
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He was tackling a major theological and philosophical problem, perhaps the most profound and challenging of all, the cause of evil. There are various ways of approaching the problem of evil. Clearly human beings can act, knowingly or unknowingly, so as to produce evil consequences for those around them. In the Platonic tradition evil was the result of the withdrawal of the soul from God/the Good and its increasing subjection to the material body with its emotions, passions and desires. The focus here was on the individual soul, which in the interpretation offered by Origen could move “upwards” or “downwards” of its own free will, closer to God, or away from him, away from the demands of the body, or more deeply into its snares—even to the point of becoming a demon. However, all was not lost if one could posit that God was benevolent and ready to reach out to the soul, which might have its own innate desire to reach back. Here was the basis of a coherent theology incorporating free will, giving God a role that was providential and offering the hope and possibility of reward for all. It also accepted the reality of human evil, making it the responsibility of its perpetrators. There remained unresolved issues. In so far as there were those souls that refused or failed to begin the return to God and sank themselves into the lower reaches of the material world and thus into commission of evil, there was the implication either that God lacked the power to prevent them from doing so or that he was willing to allow the continuation of evil in the world. One response has been to argue that free will is God’s gift and that he considers that it is better to be used even for evil purposes than to be constrained; in other words, he condones evil.
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In Augustine’s writings in the 380s there are indications that he accepts the existence of free will. In the opening of
On Free Will,
begun in 388, he argues that “what each one chooses to pursue and embrace is within the power of his will to determine.” Man must take responsibility for the evil he commits. This was in line with established thinking on the issue. Earlier Christian commentators had stressed how Jesus’ exhortations to his followers (in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance) seem to take for granted that they could act freely in making the choice to care or not to care for those around them. The essence of Jesus’ message appears to be that human beings have choice, and he, in his teachings, is pointing out the way in which that choice should be exercised.
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As he continued to write
On Free Will
over the next eight or nine years, however, Augustine’s position changed. The later parts of the book accept only one true instance of the exercise of free will: Adam’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit. (There remains a significant issue. If Adam was the perfect man, created as such by God, why did he give in to temptation so easily?) As a result of the Fall, Adam becomes imbued with sin, “original sin,” as it came to be known, which he then passed down to the human race. The power of this sin is so debilitating that it even limits the extent to which human beings can enjoy free will. Mankind is now, Augustine writes in his
Letter to Simplicianus
(397), no more than “a lump,” infused with the guilt of Adam. As a result of this corruption all are deprived of the power to save themselves. Here Augustine follows in the tradition of human sinfulness stressed by Athanasius, although it is possible that he may still have been influenced by Manicheism, with its own stress on the power of evil. The effect of being burdened by sin is profound; it not only makes our lives on earth ones of certain wrongdoing that our own efforts can do little to avoid, it makes damnation (which Augustine, drawing on Jesus’ words in Matthew, believes to be eternal) very likely.

While Augustine retained the idea that human beings had a sense of the truth of God and yearned for it—in
De Trinitate
he argued that God had provided the soul with the means of recognizing him when grace was offered—the truth could not be gained except through God’s grace. Grace was possible through the sacraments, but even baptism did not necessarily relieve (fallen) man of sin, nor could good works. Augustine rejected the idea that those who are in the church are more likely to be saved than those who are not. “Many who seemed to be without are within, many who seem to be within are without.” Good and bad, saved and unsaved, are mingled together on earth, until the last judgment divides them. God alone knows who will be saved; as one of Augustine’s critics remarked, “God does not desire all men to be saved, but only the fixed number of the predestined.” Sin is passed on through sexual intercourse; so once again sexual desire is woven into evil, this time through its very transmission.
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This is the doctrine of a deeply pessimistic, isolated and guilt-ridden mind, although there were precedents for Augustine in the north African theological tradition. Augustine had moved far from an optimistic assessment of human nature. “The consoling, confidence-inspiring certainties of a rationally ordered universe, controlled and subject to man’s free will, which Augustine had enjoyed in his earlier works, were now taken from under his feet,” as Carol Harrison puts it. By the late 390s Augustine’s rejection of reason and the wider philosophical tradition of the classical world had led him to a philosophical dead end. The scriptural backing for original sin was flimsy; only five texts from the whole of scripture can be claimed to support it, and it has been argued that three of those, including the crucial verse from Romans, rest on mistranslations into Latin from the original Greek. To accept original sin is to accept that one generation can be held responsible for the guilt of another, an assumption alien to most ethical systems. As guilt is independent of any action, good or bad, by the individual, even a baby can be damned to eternal fire. Augustine’s God, for all his apparent “love,” is credited with little in the way of compassion. Later Augustine even argued that we should be grateful that God is prepared to save even a minority, so terrible was the sinfulness of mankind as a result of the Fall.
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Augustine expects human beings to fail.

Augustine’s theology was, of course, challenged. His first major opponent was Pelagius. Pelagius, who originally came from Britain, is first recorded as living in Rome in the 390s and subsequently in Jerusalem. He knew Jovinian and Rufinus and was sympathetic to their views, hence giving Jerome the opportunity to condemn him—in his usual robust way—as “that fathead bloated with Scotch porridge.” Pelagius stressed the possibility that human beings might conduct their own salvation through the power of reason and the exercise of free will. “By our reason, we are superior to those who live by their senses.” The Fall had had no effect on the natural abilities of human beings. “It is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory [sic] of the rational mind is based.”
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Given free will, the individual was not dependent for salvation on the grace of God, although Pelagius argued that those who had set out to find God would be helped to do so. He provided the analogy of a man who sets out of his own accord to row across a lake but who is helped by God, symbolised as a following wind. For Pelagius the sacrament of baptism was crucial in that it ensured forgiveness of prior sins and released the power of reason, enabling the individual to turn to God. Essentially he offered optimism as a contrast to the pessimism of his adversary. The path Pelagius offered was not, however, an easy one. Despite his connections with Jovinian, Pelagius was profoundly ascetic, critical of corruption and social injustice, and he expected his followers to be as well. According to him, we have free will to be perfect and therefore perfection is obligatory. The weakness of Pelagianism was that it was designed for an ascetic elite who, in the tradition of Christian asceticism, declared themselves in opposition to contemporary society. It was always an unsettling movement, and it has been noted that Pelagianism attracted more supporters in areas where invasion and social breakdown had been prevalent than it did in the more settled areas of the empire.

In 415 the debate over free will and original sin burst into open conflict. It seems that Pelagius cited Augustine to defend his own position, thus demanding a response from Augustine and his supporters. It was soon apparent that the church was divided. One synod, at Jerusalem, condemned Pelagius; another endorsed his views. Two councils in north Africa (where both the tradition of original sin and Augustine’s own influence were strongest) condemned the Pelagians in 416. They were supported by the bishop of Rome, Innocent, after Augustine wrote to him suggesting that too great a stress on the free will of an individual threatened to undermine the authority of the bishops. However, Innocent’s successor, Zosimus, a Greek with no loyalties to Augustine or the African tradition, proved sympathetic to Pelagius, who had come to Rome to plead his case personally. The emperor Honorius, apparently disturbed by news of rioting in Rome that was blamed on Pelagius’ supporters, but that the Pelagians themselves attributed to the supporters of Augustine, condemned the Pelagians in an imperial edict of April 418 and ordered them to leave Rome. Honorius’ motives are unclear, but it appears that he took exception to Pelagius’ forceful condemnation of corruption. It was also said that a colleague of Augustine’s, the bishop of his home town, Thagaste, employed bribery at the court in his cause. The imperial condemnation was then endorsed by a synod of north African bishops held in Carthage. At this juncture Zosimus changed sides and himself condemned Pelagianism; there was further disarray when eighteen of the Italian bishops refused to support him. Few issues of doctrine have been settled less satisfactorily. Pelagius, forbidding though his strictures were, was entirely sincere in his commitment to Christianity. He was certainly no heretic. Once again it was the emperor, whose primary concern was good order, who settled the issue.

One of the eighteen dissenting Italian bishops, Julian of Eclanum, who was forced into exile by the debate, set out the clearest and most powerful objection to Augustine’s position in a letter addressed to Augustine himself.

Babies, you say, carry the burden of another’s sin, not any of their own . . . Explain to me, then, who this person is who sends the innocent to punishment. You answer, God . . . God, you say, the very one who commends his love to us, who has loved us and not spared his son but handed him over to us, he judges us in this way; he persecutes new born children; he hands over babies to eternal flames because of their bad wills, when he knows that they have not so much formed a will, good or bad . . . It would show a just and reasonable sense of propriety to treat you as beneath argument: you have come so far from religious feeling, from civilized standards, so far indeed from common sense, that you think your Lord capable of committing kinds of crime which are hardly found among barbarian tribes.
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Augustine’s confusing concept of God, a loving but punitive deity, was exposed with great clarity. Augustine nevertheless stood firm and was preaching to worried and perplexed enquirers on the issue until his death.

Running alongside Augustine’s battles with the Pelagians were disagreements with the Donatists, the largest Christian community in north Africa; Augustine’s orthodox Christian church was much smaller. The battles arose, of course, because the state had decreed that there could only be one orthodox church, which would have undisputed access to state patronage. It was a particularly difficult issue in that, quite apart from their size, the Donatists had a compelling case for representing the Christian church in north Africa. Their bishops were the leaders of those communities who had refused to bow to persecution and surrender their scriptures. Their pedigree was unchallengeable. Their bishops and clergy held their offices in direct descent from the original Apostles, and they argued that they drew on a purer tradition than the orthodox church in that they had never compromised with the Roman state, the state that had, after all, been responsible for the execution of Jesus. They had adopted orthodox doctrine and so could not be classed as heretics (who by now were beyond the law), and they preached austerity in the tradition of Tertullian. They would welcome back those whose faith had lapsed under persecution so long as a rebaptism took place (any orthodox Christian converting to Donatism needed to be baptized because the original baptism was not valid). Here again they represented tradition, in that rebaptism had been required by Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage martyred in the third century, whose own prestige and authority was immense. While Cyprian had stressed the need for unity in the church, the Donatists argued that unity had been undermined by those Christians who surrendered the sacred scriptures to the authorities. Crucial to the Donatists was their sense of being a national African church, representing African traditions against those of the more cosmopolitan orthodox church, with its ties to the imperial government. Although many Donatist bishops were sophisticated men, presiding over wealthy city sees, Donatism reached far into the rural areas in a way orthodox Christianity did not. Yet Donatism should not be idealized. The Donatists were also prone to internal dissensions and schism, and outside the cities Donatists, perhaps as much imbued with anti-imperialist as with anti-orthodox feeling, often used violence against orthodox Christians, even though their bishops tried to discourage them. Constantine had isolated the Donatists by refusing them state patronage. Now, ninety years on, it was increasingly difficult for a state that had taken the radical and unprecedented step of insisting on religious uniformity to allow them to persist, yet one could hardly deny that they were committed Christians. Any attempt to persecute them would only confirm their belief in themselves as the true church, that of the martyrs. It was a matter of some embarrassment to orthodox Christians that the Donatists could claim the backing of the influential Cyprian, whom the orthodox themselves wanted to use as champion of episcopal authority. Augustine found himself in the difficult position of having to distinguish the Donatists from the minority orthodox church in such a way as to allow the former to be condemned. And yet this could be done only by declaring them to be heretics, which they were clearly not. Augustine was reduced to inadequate statements such as “Anyone separated from the church would end by saying false things” and “A characteristic of heretical sects is to be incapable of seeing what is obvious to everyone else.”
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