The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (12 page)

For the rest of his life Augustine remained in Hippo, which he would make famous in the annals of Christendom. When Valerius died, Augustine became bishop of Hippo. “I feared the office of a bishop to such an extent,” he recalled, “that, as soon as my reputation came to matter among ‘servants of God,’ I would not go to any place where I knew there was no bishop. I was on my guard against this: I did what I could to seek salvation in a humble position rather than be in danger in high office. But … a slave may not contradict his Lord. I came to this city to see a friend, whom I thought I might gain for God, that he might live with us in the monastery. I felt secure, for the place already had a bishop. I was grabbed. I was made a
priest … and from there, I became your bishop.” The position of bishop made daily demands on Augustine as administrator, judge, teacher, and preacher.

Still, during these years in Hippo, Augustine’s literary output, with the aid of his staff of stenographers, was phenomenal. Four hundred sermons and two hundred letters (some amounting to treatises on great issues) have survived—also books on Christian Doctrine (c.397–428), on the Trinity (c.400–416) and countless other theological topics.

Augustine’s two masterworks expounding human destiny in two contrasting dimensions are very much alive today. His
Confessions
(c. 400), a saga of his inward life, and its successors and imitators over the centuries, would allow the world to share the spiritual travail and posturings of the most restless men and women. In this tradition of the internal Odyssey, Rousseau a millennium and a half later would stir poets, novelists, dramatists, and revolutionaries. The
City of God
(413–426), Augustine’s scheme of universal history, as we shall see, helped man off the “wheel” of again-and-again, toward a new view of the Creator. Providing a vocabulary for Christian thinking in the West for centuries, his work was occasioned by the trauma of his own lifetime.

At midnight on August 24, 410, as the gates of Rome were opened, and the city was awakened by Gothic battle trumpets sounding their victory, Alaric and his hordes poured in. “Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial City, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind,” Gibbon records, “was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.” Rome had fallen!

For the people of that age this event, which for us is only another episode in the long barbarian invasions, was apocalyptic. “When the brightest light on the whole earth was extinguished,” wrote Saint Jerome, who heard the news in Bethlehem, “when the Roman empire was deprived of its head and when, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, then ‘I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good, and my sorrow was stirred.’ ” “Who would believe,” he asked “that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, has collapsed, that the mother of nations has also become their tomb?”

There is no modern counterpart for that catastrophe, for no modern city has the mystique of Rome. Following Virgil’s prophecy in the
Aeneid
that Romans would have “dominion without end,” Rome had been known as the Eternal City. Obeying Jesus’ exhortation to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” and Saint Paul’s warning that “the powers that be are ordained of God,” good Christians saw no sacrilege in submitting to the secular authority of Rome. Some had actually seen the hand of Providence
in the rise of the Roman Empire. Augustus (27
B.C.
–
A.D
. 14) and Jesus were contemporaries, and the rising empire seemed a bulwark of the faith. So Tertullian (160?–230?) justified Christian prayers for the health of Roman emperors. “For we know that only the continued existence of the Roman Empire retarded the mighty power which threatens the whole earth, and postpones the very end of this world with its menace of horrible afflictions.” When the Romans tired of civil war, Ambrose recalled, they conferred the imperium on Augustus Caesar, “thus bringing to an end their intestine strife. But this also made it possible for the Apostles to travel throughout the whole world as the Lord Jesus had bidden them: ‘Go forth and teach all nations,’ ” “Let the Church march on!” intoned Augustine, “The Way is open; our road has been built for us by the emperor.”

For the strong pagan party the Fall of the City seemed proof that Christianity was destroying Rome. But Bishop Augustine in Hippo made it the point of departure for his Christian view of history. Now in his mid-fifties, having spent much of his life attacking heresies, he “did not wish to be accused of having merely contradicted the doctrine of others, without stating my own.” The thirteen years (413–426) he spent on his
City of God
created a new kind of defense of the new religion.

First he aimed to correct rumors about what really happened when Alaric entered Rome. A sign of divine Providence was Alaric’s respect for the treasure of the Church and the persons of Christians. When one of his men discovered the hiding place of the consecrated gold and silver vessels of Saint Peter, Alaric ordered their return to the church in the Vatican. Alaric was reported as saying that he waged war against the Romans but not against the Apostles. And, because of the Christians, Rome—unlike Sodom—was not totally destroyed. The first chapter of
The City of God
observed that “all their headlong fury curbed itself, and all their desire of conquest was conquered … this ought they to ascribe to these Christian times, to give God thanks for it, and to have true recourse by this means unto God’s name.…”

Even if the barbarians had not shown such mercy, their entry into Rome would not have been an argument against Christianity. “The truth is that the human race has always deserved ill at God’s hand …,” as Tertullian observed, “the very same God is angry now, as he always was, long before Christians were so much as spoken of.” The first half of
The City of God
sang this familiar exonerating litany of the catastrophes before Jesus Christ. To support his case against the pagans, Augustine would commission his disciple Orosius to catalog the misfortunes that came before there was a Christianity. Not lacking material, Orosius produced his
Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans
, which a thousand years later could still be distinguished by Petrarch as the classic summary of “the evils of the world.”

Having disposed of the gross libels on the role of Christianity in history, Augustine went on to create his own philosophy of history, which would dominate Western thought for the next millennium. And he provided the most potent weapon against historical pessimism and the classic cycles. His ideas would show an uncanny power to be transformed into a modern idea of progress.

Awed by man’s ingenuity, Augustine exclaimed:

Yet all these remarkables, he warned, were no proper measure of the advance of mankind, no promise of endless progress on earth. They only revealed “the nature of man’s soul in general as man is mortal, without any reference to the way of truth whereby he comes to the life eternal.”

Augustine did offer a promise of novelty and uniqueness in human experience. The coming of Jesus Christ, he declared, had disposed of the cyclical view once and for all. Redesigning the shape of history from the wheel to the line, Augustine gave man’s life direction. The familiar words of Ecclesiastes (I, 9, 10)—“there is no new thing under the sun, nor any thing whereof one may say, behold this is new: it hath been already in the time that was before us”—only described the recurrence of “successive generations, the sun’s motions, the torrents’ falls, or else generally all transitory creatures … trees and beasts.” “Far be it from the true faith that by these words of Solomon we should believe are meant these cycles by which … the same revolutions of time and of temporal things are repeated.… God forbid, I say, that we should swallow such nonsense! Christ died, once and for all, for our sins.” Christianity took man off the wheel, “which, if reason could not refute, faith could afford to laugh at.” The Christian God
opened the vistas of infinity, “whereas His wisdom being simply and uniformly manifold can comprehend all incomprehensibility by his incomprehensible comprehension.” Now history was revealed not as an “eternal return” but as an eternal movement, to fulfill the promise announced by the coming of Christ.

Classical thinkers had, one way or another, put the motive force of history outside the individual man. For Plato and Aristotle, we have seen, history reproduced eternal ideas or fulfilled preexisting natural forms. In the early Roman Empire the power of Fortune attained the dignity of a cult. Others assigned the decisive role to Chance or the Fates. But for Christians, in Ambrose’s phrase, the material world offered “not gods but gifts,” a catalog of opportunities for mankind. Euripides had accused bold inventors or grand discoverers of “imagining themselves wiser than the gods.” When the ancients deified benefactors into Promethean deities, they were refusing to see the creative powers in man himself. Man’s destiny, no longer wholesale, had become retail. The crucial questions now concerned the individual soul.

The City of God
offered its own way of measuring man’s fulfillment. Symmachus and his pagan party in Rome had defended the old religion by its proven usefulness and challenged Christianity as a novelty unproven by its uses. But Augustine’s test rose above the visibly useful.

All mankind he divided into two “cities”—two vast communities that encompass the whole earth of past, present, and future. “That which animates secular society (
civitas terrena;
the earthly city) is the love of self to the point of contempt for God; that which animates divine society (
civitas caelestis;
the heavenly city) is the love of God to the point of contempt for self. The one prides itself on itself; the pride of the other is in the Lord; the one seeks for glory from man, the other counts its consciousness of God as its greatest glory.”

The earthly city, Augustine the realist explained, was a world of conflict. “By devoting themselves to the things of this world, the Romans did not go without their reward” in victories, “deadly or at any rate deathly.” Yet victory did not go to the virtuous. “God grants earthly kingdoms both to the good and to the evil, yet not haphazard … nor yet by fortune, but in accordance with the order of times and seasons, an order which, though hidden from us, is fully known to Him.… Felicity, however, He does not grant except to the good.” “The greatness of the Roman empire is not therefore to be ascribed either to chance or fate. Human empires are constituted by the providence of God.” The foundation of the earthly city was laid “by a murderer of his own brother, whom he slew through envy, and who was a pilgrim upon earth of the heavenly city.” Just as Cain slew Abel, so Romulus murdered his brother Remus. “The strife therefore of Romulus
and Remus shows the division of the earthly city itself; and that of Cain and Abel shows the opposition of the city of men and the city of God.”

Augustine’s story begins with the Creation and will end with the Last Judgment. Every event is unique, and every soul follows its own destiny, to survive in Hell or in Heaven. History mysteriously marshals citizens of the City of God toward their reward of eternal life. “And I, John,” said he, “saw that holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.… And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.” No one could know when fulfillment would come, for History was a continuous unfolding of man’s mysterious capacities—for creation, for love of God, for joining the Eternal City. The climactic event for the world was the coming of Christ. But the climactic event for each man still lay in the promise of history, which had transported the classical Golden Age from the remote past into the remote but certain future. In a historic coup d’état men had seized the powers of their Creator.

T
HE
contrast between the Hebrew and Christian views of the Creator and the Muslim view appears wherever we look—in the creeds, the traditions, and the visions of Islam. This, as much as anything else, makes it hard for us in the West to feel at home with Islam. For Islam found the very notion of Creation unappealing. The first, decisive, yet unfamiliar evidence is the Muslim view of Holy Scripture. The Muslim counterpart to Jesus is not Mohammed. Christians believe in the Incarnation, the taking on of human form by Jesus, conceived as the Son of God. But Muslims believe in Inlibration, the embodiment of God in a Book. That book is the Koran. The reverence and mystery that Christians feel toward Jesus the Christ is what Muslims feel toward their Book.

Few notions are more difficult for a Westerner to grasp than the dogma of the
un
created Koran, which became a pillar of Muslim faith. Passages in the Koran itself suggest that the book had existed from eternity. But the dogma was firmly established only after it survived the attacks of reformers.
Some decades passed after the death of Mohammed in 632 before Muslims produced a school of theological speculation, a first abortive effort at a “reformation” in Islam. The Mu’tazilites (or the Separators, who refused to commit themselves to any one of the contenders for the caliphate) followed the Greek philosophers. Proposing reason as a confirmation and a test of Islam, they used the philosophers’ techniques to prove God’s justice and explain away the existence of evil. An eloquent critic Ash-Sharrastani (died 1153) later summarized the Mu’tazilite argument that the Koran (along with speech itself) must have been created: