AUGUSTINE

1. INTRODUCTION.
   As Christianity spread throughout the Roman world, the Biblical view of reality came in conflict with the Greek view of reality. Attempts were made to resolve this conflict by trying to synthesize these two view of reality. There were two major attempts at this synthesis: by Aurelius Augustine (354-430 A.D.) in the 5th century A.D. and by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) in the 13th century A.D. Augustinianism is the name given to the synthesis attempted by Augustine. But before we consider it, let us first look at the Greek view of reality.

2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.
   
   1. The Eleatics.
      The Eleatics is the school of early Greek thinkers who lived during the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. at Elea in southern Italy. The oldest of the Eleatics was Xenophanes, a wandering rhapsodist, who was born about 570 B.C. at Colophon in western Asia Minor, on the Aegean Sea, and migrated to Elea in southern Italy probably because of the Persian invasions in about 546 B.C. He died about 470 B.C.

      Little is known of his philosophy; he wrote several poems of which only 108 lines have survived. He rejected the Greek polytheism, attacking the anthropomorphism of the Greek gods. He set forth the doctrine that there is only one ultimate reality, "One god, supreme among the gods and men, and not like mortals in body and mind". This being does not have sense organs like men's, but "the whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears". He sets in motion all things by the power of his mind; he always remains in the same place, moving not at all; he is omnipresent, not needing to move.

      The true founder of the Eleatic school is not Xenophanes, but Parmenides of Elea (c.515 B.C.-c.450 B.C.). He is probably the most important philosopher before Socrates, being the first to focus on the central problem of metaphysics, the problem of being. He held that "thought and being are the same thing", and that "being is and it is impossible for it not to be; it is impossible that non-being is". That is, being exists and non-being does not exist. Being is ungenerated and indestructible. It cannot come into being out of what does not exist. Neither can it cease to be, since being is not non-being. Hence being is eternal. Change is impossible; for if anything changes, it ceases to be what it is and becomes what it is not; and since being cannot cease to be and non-being does not exist, change is impossible. And also movement is impossible; for if anything moves, it must occupy empty space where it was not; and since empty space is non-being and does not exist, movement is not possible. And there can be only one being. For if there were more than one being, these beings would have to be separated by empty space; since empty space is non-being and does not exist, they cannot be separated and thus they must occupy the same space; thus the many are one and being is one. Finally being is homogeneous, not having parts; for if it has parts, then it would be many; but since being is one, it has no parts and thus is it homogenous. From this Parmenides argued that being is finite, like the surface of a sphere it is "perfected on every side", equally distance from its center at every point. Parmenides' student, Mellisus of Samos (5th cent. B.C.), rejected his teacher's conclusion that being is finite; being must be spatially and temporally infinite. For if being is finite, then beyond it there would be empty space; but since empty space is nothing, non being, it does not exist and thus being occupies all space. Thus being is spatially infinite. Mellisus, like Parmenides, rejected a void or vacuum, empty space, as impossible and non-existent, "for what is empty is nothing. What is nothing cannot be". Zeno of Elea (c. 490-430 B.C.) was a firm adherent to Parmenides' ideas and tried to show that they are true by showing their opposites are impossible and absurd (reductiones ad absurdum). By this form of argument he attempted to show that pluralism (that being is many, not one), empty space, and motion are impossible.

   2. Platonism.
      Plato (428-348 B.C.) in his dialogue named Parmenides describes a meeting in Athens of Parmenides, Zeno, and Socrates. Though the meeting is probably fictitious there is no reason why the issues discussed should be ignored. In this dialogue Plato discussed the concept of the One, ostensibly without conclusion. In one passage he asserts hypothetically that if the One existed, it would be ineffable and unknowable. Whether this assertion was supposed to reveal the contradictory and, therefore, unacceptable character of the One, or to express Plato's acceptance of this assertion about the character of the One, is debatable. In the dialogue the Sophist the problem of negative judgments is handled in such a way that it is not possible to make Parmenides' mistake of supposing that what is not does not exist. In his dialogues Plato divides all reality into the realm of forms or ideas (intelligibles) and the realm of sensibles, treating the intelligibles alone as that which really is (Greek, ousia, being) and implying that they are eternal and unchanging. One of these ideas, the idea of the Good, Plato elevated above the others, calling it beyond being (Greek, epekeina ousias). He compares it to the sun as the source of being and knowledge of all beings. In a lecture (or course of lectures) Plato seems to have identified the Good with the One. As to the realm of the sensibles, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus explains the origin of the cosmos in the form of a myth. According to this myth the cosmos is the work of a divine artisan or demiurge (Greek, demiourgos, craftsman), who using the realm of Ideas, forms out of them something, which Plato calls the "receptacle", which is void of any qualities. Then the ideas in some way enter this void and by so doing form the rudiments of the four elements. In addition to the formation of the physical world, the demiurge also forms a cosmic soul and the immortal part of individual souls. Both of these consist of a mixture of the same ingredients, on which mixture the demiurge imposes a numerical and geometrical structure.

   3. Neo-Platonism.
      Neo-Platonism, as the name suggests, begins with the teachings of Plato and develops it in distinctive manner. It holds that Being is God, the One, the eternal principle of unity. The One is completely separated from all things, the many, but is the source of all things as being. This transcendent being is related to all things by a series of intermediaries, which are derived from the One by the principle of emanation. In this view reality is a graded series from the divine One being to material world and man, who has in him some part of the divine and thus longs for union with the eternal source of things. The Egyptian-Roman philosopher Plotinus (205-270 A.D.) interpreted these emanations as logical, not temporal, progressions from the divine One into non-being and occurs by the refulgence of the original principle. According to him there are three levels of emanation:
      1. the Nous (Mind or Intelligence), which is Plato's realm of Ideas or forms, is the reflection of the One into multiplicity;
      2. the Psyche or Soul, which, like Plato's divine artisan, the demiurge, who is the principle of life and active intelligence, uses the forms as the patterns on the formation of the world; and
      3. the Hyle or Matter itself, which, when devoid of form, is next to nothing or non-being. The evil in world and in man is due to this material principle.
      Man, combining in himself the material and spiritual principles, is in an uncomfortable position. He longs for the eternal forms and for the One, but is imprisoned in a body. He looks for liberation in contemplation, both intellectual and spiritual. So the human soul, fired by the heavenly Eros of which Plato spoke of in his Symposium, is challenged to undertake ascent to the One. The first stage is one of purification; the soul must free itself from the body and the beguilements of the senses. At the second stage the soul rises to the level the Mind and concerns itself with philosophy and science, retraining itself. At the third and final stage the soul enters into a mystical union with the One in an ecstatic experience in which the soul loses all consciousness of the distinction between subject and object. In the present life this state of ecstasy is rarely attained and is short-lived; Plotinus, we are told by his biographer Porphyry, was himself granted this experience only four times in five years.

      Plotinus was born in Egypt and studied in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. After accompanying the emperior Gordian on a campaign in the East, he settled in Rome about 244, opening his own school. He wrote essays for his students about their philosophical discussions. His pupil, Porphyry, collected these and arranged them systematically into six Enneads [groups of nine], that are the major source of Plotinus' philosophy. Porphyry published the Enneads after A.D. 300 with an accompanying Life of Plotinus. Prophyry reports that Plotinus had a mystical experience of union with the divine on four occasions, which union is described in the Enneads and is one of classics of mysticism.

      In the fourth and fifth Christian centuries, Neoplatonism provided the philosophical basis for pagan opposition to Christianity. Prophyry in addition to his numerious philosophical treatises, wrote a massive fifteen volume work, now lost, Against the Christians. The Roman emperor, Julian, in addition to decrees against Christians, wrote Against the Galileans, which can be reconstructed from Cyril of Alexandria's refutation of it. In addition to providing the philosophical opposition, Neoplatonism provided the philosophical framework for the thought of several Christian theologians: Gregory of Nyssa, Victorius, Ambrose, Augustine, and later Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. The influence of Neoplatonism continued in both the Western and Eastern churches. Even in the twentieth century elements of it has appeared in the thought of Paul Tillich.

3. AUGUSTINIANISM.
   This is the philosophy and theology of Aurelius Augustinus, better known as Saint Augustine, and of his followers. Augustine was born at Tagaste in the Province of Numidia of North Africa on November 13th, A.D. 354; his father, Patricius, was a pagan and his mother, Monica, was a Christian; she brought him up as a Christian but his baptism was deferred, as was the practice of the time. He learned the rudiments of Latin and arithmetic and a little Greek. In A.D. 370, the year his father died after becoming a Christian, Augustine at the age of 16 years began the study of rhetoric at Carthage and broke with Christian teaching and morals, taking a mistress, with whom he lived for ten years and by whom he had a son in his second year at Carthage. He became a follower of the teaching of the Manicheans. The Manichaeans, founded by a Persian named Mani, who was born in Babylonia about A.D. 216. and suffered martyrdom under Baharam I in about A.D. 277, taught a radical dualism of two ultimate principles, a principle of good that is the Light, God or Ormuzd, and a principle of evil that is the Darkness, Ahriman. These principles are eternal and are engaged in an eternal strife, which is reflected in the world and in man. Man's soul is composed of light, the principle of the good, while the body, composed of grosser matter, is the work of the principle of evil, darkness. This religio-philosophic system commended itself to Augustine because it seemed to explain the problem of evil and because of its materialism, since he could not yet conceive how there could be an immaterial reality. Although the Manicheans condemned sexual intercourse and the eating animal flesh and prescribed various ascetic practices, such as fasting, for the "elect", but not for the "hearers", Augustine did not follow them, being only a "hearer". Eventually Augustine became dissatisfied with Manichean when it was not able to answer his questions and the difficulties he had with its teachings. After returning to Tagaste in A.D. 374, at the age of 20 years he taught rhetoric and Latin Literature for a year. At the age of 21 he returned to Carthage to open a school of rhetoric; but becoming frustrated with his students, he went to Rome in A.D. 383 at the age of 29 years and started another school of rhetoric. Although giving up belief in the teachings of Manicheans, being attracted to Academic skepticism, he retained an outward adherence to Manicheanism, still accepting its materialism. Having obtained a position at Milan of municipal professor of rhetoric in A.D. 384, at the age of 30 years he moved to Milan and finally broke with the Manicheans through the influence of his new friends in Milan, the Bishop Ambrose and the circle of Christian Neo-Platonist around him. He got the answers to his questions about Manichean doctrine, and encountered a more satisfying interpretation of Christianity than he had previously found in the simple, unintellectual faith of his mother. The Neo-Platonic teaching of evil as privation, non-being, rather than as second kind of being, showed him how the problem of evil could be solved without recourse to the Manichean dualism. In this Christianized Neo-Platonism he believed he found the truth and he began to read the New Testament, particularly Paul's letter to the Romans. After an intense moral struggle, in the summer of A.D. 386 at the age of 32 years, while he was sitting in the garden of his friend Alypius' house, weeping, he heard a child's voice outside singing the words, "Tolle lege! Tolle lege!" ["Take up and read! Take up and read!"]. He picked up the New Testament and, opening it at random, his eyes lighted on Romans 13:13b-14: "not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof." He wrote later, "No further would I read, nor had I any need; instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away". On Holy Saturday of A.D. 387 at the age of 33 years Augustine was baptized by Bishop Ambrose and then returned to North Africa in A.D. 388 after the death of his mother at Ostia. On his return to Tagaste, he formed a fellowship of "servants of God", who were committed to contemplative philosophy (see True Religion, 389-391 A.D.). He had already started writing against Manichaeism. While visiting Hippo on monastic business, in A.D. 391 at the age of 37 he was ordained a priest. He founded a monastery there, and on succeeding Bishop Valerius in A.D. 396, he was consecrated Bishop of Hippo at the age of 42. He became deeply involved in the usual liturgical, pastoral, disciplinary, administrative, and judicial duties of a bishop. He preached diligently, with long series on the Psalms and the Gospel of John, in a appealing and profound style. He traveled often, around his diocese, to Carthage and elsewhere, especially for synods, consultations, and disputations, but never outside of Africa. He propagated the monastic life and in league with Aurelius of Carthage he rejuvenated African Catholicism. He also wrote extensively against the Manicheans, the Neo-Platonist, the Donatists and the Pelagians. He wrote an extensive and elaborate explanation, and perhaps his greatest work, on the Trinity. Probably his most famous work is his City of God. He died on August 28th, A.D. 430 at the age of 76 years. Augustine died as Roman Africa was conquered by the Vandals who were besieging Hippo as he died. His friend Possidius, bishop of Calama, compiled a Life and a catalogue of his works. One of the last was the Revisions (Retractationes, 426-427 A.D.), in which Augustine listed his writings, correcting and defending himself at points. His Christian Instruction (396-426 A.D.) became an influential manual of Christian culture and hermeneutics. In addition to numerous contributions to controversies, there survive extensive exegetical works, hundreds of letters, including the monastic Rule and sermons.
   1. The Manichaeans.
      Against the Manichaeans Augustine defended the goodness of the being of the creation, defining evil as absence of good and ascribing sin to abuse of free will, and he developed a rationale of faith, based on the authority of the universal church and leading to understanding. Manichaeism is not Christian heresy, but a completely independent religion embodying elements of Zorastrianism, Christianity, and Buddhism. It claimed to be a universal religion, giving in its fulness the revelation which prophets prior to Mani had only communicated fragmentarily. This revelation was clothed in elaborate, dramatic myths. In its essence Manichaeism was a gnosis, akin in some respects to the earlier Gnosticism, and as such offered men salvation by knowledge. It was founded on a radical dualism, and taught that reality consists of two great forces eternally opposed to each other, Good (that is, God, Truth, Light) and Evil, or Darkess, the latter being identified with matter. Man, as he exists, is tragically involved in this realm of matter; he is fallen and lost. But actually man is a particle of Light, belonging to, though exiled from, the transcendent realm of Light. He is of the same essence as God, and human souls are fragments of the divine being. His salvation lies in grasping this truth by an interior illumination which may be spontaneous, but usually comes in response to initiation into the Manichaean fellowship, and in the process of salvation, paradoxically, God is at once redeemer and redeemed. This salvation was fundamentally a withdrawal of oneself from the contamination of the flesh, matter being the fundamental evil. Manichaeanism with its highly organized church, its graded hierarchy of adherents ("hearers", "elect", "priests", "bishops", "apostles" or "masters") and its corresponding degrees of ascetism, swept over Europe, Africa and Asia at the end of the third century.

   2. The Christian Neo-Platonists.
      Although Augustine wrote against pagan philosophy, he still showed a strong predilection for Neo-Platonism. There is a depreciation of sense-objects in comparison with eternal and immaterial realities; a grudging admission of practical knowledge as a necessity of life; the insistence on "theoretic" contemplation and purification of the soul and liberation from the slavery of the senses. Philosophically this predilection is shown in the Platonic and Neo-Platonic view that the objects of the senses, corporeal things, are inferior to the human intellect, which judges them with reference to objective standard as falling short. These standards are the immutable and eternal universal ideas or forms. The standards of goodness and beauty, for example, correspond to Plato's first principles or archai, the exemplary ideas, and the ideal geometrical figures correspond to Plato's mathematical objects, ta mathematika, the objects of the dianoia. To the question, which was asked of the Platonic Ideas, "Where are these ideas?" Augustine answers that they are in the mind, the Nous, of God, they are the thoughts of God. The Neo-Platonics made this suggestion and Augustine apparently accepted it as the answer to the question: Where are they? Augustine does not accept the emanation theory of Neo-Platonism, where the Nous emanates from the One as the first hypostasis. But Augustine held that the exemplar ideas and eternal, immutable truths are in God. This theory must be accepted, Augustine argues, if one wishes to avoid having to say that God created the world unintelligently. Thus creation is like Plato's formation of the sense-world by the divine artisan, the demiurge, except that there is no pre-existent matter; God created it out of nothing. Thus the world of creatures reflects and manifests God, even if it does in a very inadequate way. The order and unity of creatures, their positive reality, reveals the goodness of God and the order and stability of the universe manifest the wisdom of God. But God, as the self-existent, eternal and immutable Being, is infinite and, as infinite, is incomprehensible. God is His own Perfection and is "simple", without parts, so that His wisdom and knowledge, His goodness and power, are His own essence, which is without accidents. God, therefore, transcends space in virtue of His spiritually and simplicity, as He transcends time in virtue of His eternity. "...He is above all things. So too He is in no interval nor extension in time, but in His immutable eternity is older than all things because He is before all things and younger than all things because He is after all things." From all eternity God knew all things, which He was to make. He does not know them, because He has made them, but rather the other way around. God first knew the things of creation though they came into being in time. The species of created things have their ideas or rationes seminales in the things themselves and also in the Divine Mind as rationes aeternae. God from all eternity saw in Himself, as possible reflections of Himself, the things that He could create and would create. He knew them before creation as they are in Him, as Exemplar, but He made them as they exist, that is, as external and finite reflections of His divine essence. Since God did nothing without knowledge, He foresaw all that He would make, but His knowledge is not distinct acts of knowledge, but "one eternal, immutable and ineffable vision". In virtue of this eternal act of knowledge, of vision, to which nothing is past or future, that God sees, "foresees", even the free acts of men, knowing them "beforehand". This exemplarist doctrine passed into the Middle Ages and was taken as characteristic of Augustinianism.

   3. The Donatists.
      Against the Donatists, his tireless historical and theological refutation, popularized in rhyme, slogan, and poster, attempted to heal the schism caused by the Donatist, the African separatist church. After Caecilian became bishop of Carthage in A.D. 313, objectors alleged (falsely, according to the Catholics) that one of his consecrators, Felix of Aptunga, had committed traditio, the "surrender, betrayal" of copies of the Scriptures in the recent Great Diocletian Persecution (A.D. 303). This opposition, including the Numidian bishops (not all guiltless of traditio), affronted at their primate's exclusion from the irregular and precipitate consecration of Caecilian, elected as bishop Majorinus, whose successor was Donatus (A.D. 313). The Donatists followed rigorism; they taught that the validity of the sacraments depended on the worthiness of the minister, and the Church ceased to be holy and forfeited its claim to be the body of Christ when it tolerated unworthy bishops and other officers, particularly people who had been traditores, among it members. In this case the resulting contamination, they held, infected not only the Caecilian and his successors, but everyone in Africa and throughout the whole world who maintained communion with them. This attitude presupposed a puritan conception of the Church as a society which is de facto holy, consisting exclusively of actually good men and women. With this as their premise the Donatists argued that they alone could be the ecclesia catholica, which Scripture called the immaculate bride of Christ, without spot or wrinkle, since they required positive holiness from both laity and clergy. The so-called Catholics could not, they argued, justify their claim to be the true Church.

      The Catholic reaction to this form of puritanism is illustrated in the six (later expanded to seven) book which Optatus, bishop of Milevum, wrote in A.D. 366 or 367 to refute the Donatist leader and publicist, Parmenianus.

      1. First, Optatus pointed out that the sacraments derive their validity from God, not from the priest who administers them. In baptism, for example, it is the Triune Godhead invoked in the trinitarian formula Who bestows the gift.
      2. Secondly, Optatus criticizes the Donatists' definition of the Church's holiness and their insistence that membership must be confined to people who are in a de facto state of goodness. The Church is holy, he argues, not because of the character of those who belong to it, but because it possesses the symbol of the Trinity, the chair of Peter, the faith of believers, Christ's saving precepts, and above all, the sacraments themselves.
      3. Thirdly, Optatus suggests that catholicity and unity are at least as decisive tokens of the true Church as holiness. The catholicity of the Church means its world-wide extension, in accordance with the Lord's promise, so that the Donatists are excluded as a sect confined to "a fragment of Africa, a mere corner of a minute region" of the world. The unity of the Church was willed by the Lord, and its visible manifestation consists in communion with the see of Peter. In Optatus' view, as in Cyprian's, schism is tantamount to apostasy, being a negation of the spirit of love. Since the Church is indivisibly one, schismatics like the Donatists do not so much rend it asunder as sever themselves from it, like branches which are broken off from the parent tree. Like Cyprian, Optatus also condemns them in Jeremiah's words for leaving the fountains of living water and digging cisterns for themselves which cannot hold water.

      Augustine echoes and deepens these thoughts of Optatus' in his prolonged controversy with the Donatists. According to Augustine, the Church is the kingdom of Christ, His mystical body and His bride, the mother of Christians. There is no salvation apart from it; schismatics can have the faith and sacraments, but cannot put them to a profitable use since the Holy Spirit is only bestowed in the Church; in this he differed from his admired master, Cyprian, preferring the traditional Western doctrine that the sacraments are valid even if administered outside the Church. Augustine identified the Church with the church of his day, with its hierarchy and sacraments, and with its center at Rome. Its catholicity consists partly in its claim to teach the whole truth and not selected fragments of it, but evenmore, in its world-wide extension. This latter characteristic marks it off from the sects, each of which flourishes in a particular locality. Not that the Church, on Augustine's view, is to be confined to the universal, empirical society visible at an one time. It includes in its ranks not only present-day Christians, but all who have believed in Christ in the past and will do so in the future. This consisted in drawing a careful distinction between the essential Church, composed of those who genuinely belong to Christ, and the outward or empirical Church. With his Platonic background of thought this distinction came easily to him, for the contrast between the perfect essence, eternal and transcending sensation, and its imperfect phenomenal embodiment was always hovering before his mind. From this point of view, within the visible church there are those who belong to the essential Church, and the rest, that is to say, sinners, may seem to be within the Church, but they have no part in "the invisible union of love". They are inside the house, but remain alien to its intimate fabric. They belong to the catholicae ecclesiae communio and enjoy the communio sacramentorum, but it is the righteous who constitute "the congregation and society of saints", the "holy Church" in the strict sense of the word. Thus Augustine's solution of this persistent problem was to argue that the authentic bride of Christ really does consist, as the Donatists claimed, exclusively of good and pious men, but that this "invisible fellowship of love" is only to be found in the historical Catholic Church, within whose boundaries saints and sinners meanwhile gather together in a "mixed communion". Augustine then stressed that the church's purity was eschatological, incapable of present realization. The error of the Donatists was to make a crude institutional division between them, whereas the precedent of Israel showed that the division was a spiritual one and that God intended the two types of men to exist side by side in the world. Later as he worked out his doctrine of predestination, he was led to introduce a refinement on this distinction between the visible and invisible Church. He came to see that the true members of the Church could only be "the fixed number of the elect" known to God alone.

   4. The Pelagians.
      Against Pelagius and his followers, Augustine set forth the conception of original sin, as the inherited guilt and corruption from the sin of Adam, and taught the necessity of inward grace to enable man to obey God. Pelagius was a Christian moralist, a well-educated Briton, trained in the law, who was active in Rome about A.D. 383 until A.D. 409 or 410. He taught Christian perfection to aristocratic circles associated with Rufinus of Aquileia and Paulinus of Nola. He attacked Jerome's denigration of marriage, without accepting the Jovinian's notion that, provided that persons did not differ in other respects, marriage is equal in esteem to virginity, which struck at the heart of monasticism. He objected to the implications of Augustine's prayer (Confessions 10:29:40), "Give what you command, and command what you will." Pelagius sought to be a catholic teacher, opposed especially to Manichaeism, which encouraged moral pessimism and fatalism, like Jerome's extremism, discredited asceticism. He rejected the idea that man's will has any intrinsic bias towards sin as a result of the Fall. Since each soul is created immediately by God, it cannot come into the world soiled by original sin transmitted from Adam. To suppose that it does so sounds like the traducian theory that souls, like bodies, are generated from the parents, and is tantamount to Manichaeism. And if traducian theory were true, would not the theory imply that the offspring of baptized parents are not only free from the taint of Adam's sin which baptism removes but also inherit their sanctification? In any case God, Who forgives human beings of their own sins, surely cannot blame them for someone else's. Adam's trespass certainly had disastrous consequences; it introduced death, physical and spiritual, and set going an example of disobedience. Sin is propagated, not by physical descent, but by custom and example. Hence man is not born with any congenital fault: "before he begins exercising his will, there is only in him what God has created". He viewed the Church as the community of the (adult) baptized persons committed to perfectionist ideals; he magnified man's incorruptible created capacity for freedom from sin. Grace consisted of this God given ability, the illumination of instruction and example, and the forgiveness of sins.

      Augustine starting point is a glowing picture of human nature as it was created by God. Adam as he was created was immune from physical ills and had surpassing intellectual gifts; he was in a state of righteousness, illumination and beatitude. Immortality was within his grasp if only he continued to feed upon the Tree of Life. The freedom that he possessed, not in the sense of the inability to sin (the non posse peccare which Augustine believed to be the true freedom enjoyed in heaven by the blessed), but of the ability not to sin (posse non peccare). And his will was good, that is, devoted to carrying out God's commands, for God endowed it with a settled inclination to virtue. So his body was subject to his soul, his carnal desires to his will, and his will to God. Nevertheless, he fell, as the Bible records. Augustine considered that that was the fault of Adam himself. God could not be blamed, for He had given Adam every advantage; the one prohibition He imposed, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was the opposite of burdensome, and his desires did not conflict with it. His only weakness was his creatureliness, which meant that he was changeable by nature and so liable to turn away from the transcendent good. Any blame must lie exclusively with his own will, which, though inclined towards the good, had the possibility, being free, of choosing wrongfully. When it did so, the latent ground of the act was pride, the desire to break away from his natural master, God, and be his own master. If there had not been this proud satisfaction with self in his soul, this craving to substitute self for God as the goal of his being, he would never have listened to the Tempter. And from this character of the first sin flows its heinousness. It was worse than any other conceivable sin in proportion as Adam was nobler than any other man and as the will which produced it was uniquely free. In fact, such was its gravity that it resulted in the ruin of the entire race, which became a massa damnata, sinful itself and propagating sinners. Augustine believed that the taint was propagated from parent to child by the physical act of generation, or rather as the result of the carnal excitement which accompanied it and was present, he observed, in sexual intercourse even of baptized persons. Augustine was divided between the traducianist theory and various forms of the creationist theory of the soul's origin. If the former is right, original sin passes to us directly from our parents; if the latter, the freshly created soul becomes soiled as it enters the body. There are two aspects in Augustine's explanation of the nature of original sin. In the first place the essence of original sin consists in our participation in, and co-responsibility for Adam's perverse choice. We were one with him when he made it and thus we willed it in and with him. As he expressed it, "In the misdirected choice of that one man all sinned in him, since all were that one man, from whom on that account they all severally derive original sin". Sin is a matter of the will, and "all sinned in Adam on that occasion, for all were already identical with him in that nature of his which was endowed with the capacity to generate them". To the objection that, if sin lies in the will, infants must be exempt from original sin since they cannot will freely. His answer is that there is nothing absurd in speaking of their original sin as voluntary, derived as it is from the free act of their first parent. As a result, while drawing a distinction between the guilt (reatus) of original sin and the evil it inflicts on our nature, he sees nothing incongruous in saddling us with both. Indeed, it is precisely this guilt, he argues, that baptism was designed to remove. Secondly, as a consequence of Adam's sin which is ours too, human nature has been terribly scarred and vitiated. Augustine does not advocate a doctrine of "total depravity", according to which the image of God has been totally obliterated in us. Even though grievously altered, fallen man remains noble: "the spark, as it were, of reason in virtue of which he was made in God's likeness has not been completely extinguished". But the corruption has gone far enough. The most obvious symptom of it, apart from the general misery of man's existence, is his enslavement to ignorance, concupiscence and death. In Augustine's vocabulary concupiscence stands, in a general way, for every inclination making man turn from God to find satisfaction in material things which are intrinsically evanescent. Far the most violent, persistent and widespread of these, is in his opinion, sexual desire, and for practical purposes he identifies concupiscence with it. As a by-product of our fall in Adam, we have lost that liberty (libertas) which he enjoyed, that is, of being able to avoid sin and do good. Henceforth we cannot avoid sin without God's grace, and without an even more special grace we cannot accomplish the good. Augustine does not intend to convey by this that we have been deprived of free will (liberum arbitrium) itself. While we retain our free will intact, the sole use to which we in our unregenerate state put it is to do wrong. In this sense he can speak of "a cruel necessity of sinning" resting upon the human race. That is, it is not possible for unregenerate man not to sin (non posse non paccare).

      With this pessimistic view of man's situation, for Augustine grace was an absolute necessity: "without God's help we cannot by free will overcome the temptations of this life". The letter of the law can only kill unless we have the life-giving Spirit to enable us to carry out it prescriptions. And grace cannot be restricted to the purely external aids which the Pelagians considered it to be. Before man can even begin to aspire to what is good, God's grace must be at work within us. Grace is therefore "an internal and secret power, wonderful and ineffable", by which God operates in men's hearts. Augustine distinguishes four kinds of grace.

      1. There is first "prevenient grace" (from Psa. 59:10: "His mercy will go before [in Latin, praeveniet] me"), by which God initiates in our souls whatever good we think or aspire to or will.
      2. Then there is secondly "cooperating grace", by which God assists and co-operates with our will once it has been bestirred.
      3. Then there is thirdly "sufficient grace" (or the adiutorium sine quo) which is the grace that Adam possessed in Paradise and which placed him in the position, subject to his using his free will to that end, to practice and persevere in virtue.
      4. Then there is fourthly "efficient grace" (the adiutorium quo) which is granted to the saints predestined to God's kingdom to enable them both to will and to do what God expects of them.
      But grace of whatever kind is God's free gift: gratia dei gratita. The divine favor cannot be earned by the good deeds men do for the simple reason that those deeds are themselves the effect of grace: "grace bestows merits, and is not bestowed in reward for them". No good act can be performed without God's help, and even the initial motions of faith are inspired in our hearts by God. Since grace takes the initiative and apart from it all men form a massa damnata, it is for God to determine which shall receive grace and which shall not. This God has done, Augustine believed on the basis of Scripture, from all eternity. The number of the elect is strictly limited, being neither more or less than is required to replace the fallen angels. But Augustine had to twist such passages of Scripture as "God wills all men to be saved" (I Tim. 2:4), making it to mean that God wills the salvation of all the elect, among whom men of every race and type are represented. God's choice of those to whom grace is to be given in no way depends on God's foreknowledge of their future merits, for whatever good deeds they will do will themselves be the fruit of God's grace. In so far as God's foreknowledge is involved, what God foreknows is what He Himself is going to do. Then how does God decide to justify this man rather that? This is the problem of predestination and there can be in the end no answer to this difficult question. God has mercy on those whom He wishes to save, and justifies them; God hardens those upon whom He does not wish to have mercy, not offering them grace in conditions in which they are likely to accept it. If this looks like favoritism, we should remember that all are in any case justly condemned, and that if God decides to save any it is an act of ineffable compassion. Certainly there is deep mystery here, Augustine concluded, but we must believe that God makes His decision in the light of "a secret and, to human calculation, inscrutable justice". Augustine is therefore prepared to speak of certain people as being predestined to eternal death and damnation; they may include, apparently, decent Christians who have been called and baptized, but to whom the grace of perseverance has not been given. But more often Augustine speaks of the predestination of the saints which consists in "God's foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits by which those who are to be delivered are most assuredly delivered". These alone have the grace of perseverance, and even before they are born they are sons of God and cannot perish.

      The Council of Carthage (A.D. 418), as confirmed by Pope Zositmus in his Epistula tractoria, outlawed Pelagianism in unambiguous terms. The main points that were insisted upon were

      1. that death was not an evil necessarily attaching to human nature, but was a penalty imposed on it in view of Adam's sin;
      2. that original sin inherited from Adam is present in every man, and even newly born children need baptism if they are to be cleansed from this taint of sin; and
      3. that grace is not simply given us so that we can do more easily what we can in any case do by our own free will, but is absolutely indispensable since the Lord said, "Without Me you can do nothing".
      Men like Julian of Eclanum might strive to prolong the debate, but the widespread acceptance of these propositions meant the failure of their efforts. On the other hand, Augustine could not fairly claim that the Church had ratified his distinctive teaching in its fullness. So far as the East was concerned, his ideas made no noticeable impact. In the West, especially in South Gaul, there were many, including enthusiastic supporters of the council, who found some of Augustine's ideas wholly unpalatable. Chief among these were the suggestion that, though free, the will is incapable in its fallen state of choosing the good, and the fatalism which seemed inherent in his theory of predestination. These have been unkindly called Semi-Pelagians since the seventeenth century and should be more correctly called Semi-Augustinians.

   5. The Trinity.
      Augustine gave the Western view of the Trinity its mature and final expression. All during his life as a Christian, Augustine was meditating upon the problem of the Trinity, explaining the Church's doctrine to inquirers and defending it against attack. Augustine put together on different occasions between A.D. 399 and 419 a long (written in fifteen volumes) and elaborate discussion of the Trinity in perhaps his greatest work known as the De Trinitate. He accepts without question the truth there is one God Who is Trinity, and that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are at once distinct and co-essential, numerically one in substance; and his writing about it is a detailed statements of it. However, he nowhere attempts to prove it; it is a datum of revelation which, on his view, Scripture proclaims on almost every page and which is "the Catholic faith [fides cathoica]" to be handed on to believers. According to his fundamental principle that faith must precede understanding (praecedit fides, sequitur intellectus), his theological task is to understand and comprehend the doctrine that is accepted by faith.

      Augustine's exposition of the Trinitarian orthodoxy begins with the conception of God as absolute being, simple and indivisible, transcending the categories. In contrast to the tradition which made the Father its starting point, Augustine begins with the divine nature Itself. It is this simple, immutable nature or essence (he prefers "essence" to "substance", for the latter suggests a subject with attributes, whereas God for Augustine is identical with His attributes) which is Trinity. The unity of the Trinity is thus set in the foreground, subordinationism of every kind being rigorously excluded. Whatever is affirmed of God is affirmed equally of each of the three Persons. Since it is one and the same substance which constitutes each of Them, "not only is the Father not greater than the Son in respect of divinity, but Father and Son together are not greater than the Holy Spirit, and no single Person of the Three is less than the Trinity Itself".

      Several corollaries follows from this emphasis on the oneness of the divine nature.

      1. First, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three separate individuals in the same way as three human beings who belong to one genus. Rather, each of the divine Persons, from the point of view of substance, is identical with the others or with the divine substance itself. In this way God is not correctly describe, as Victorinus had described Him, as "threefold" (triplex: a word which suggested to Augustine the conjunction of three individuals), but as Trinity, and the Persons can be said severally to indwell or coinhere with each other.
      2. Secondly, whatever belongs to the divine nature as such should, in strictness of language, be expressed in the singular, since that nature is unique. As the later Athanasian creed, which is Augustinian through and through, puts it, while each of the Persons is increate, infinite, omnipotent, eternal, etc., there are not three increates, infinites, omnipotents, eternals, etc., but one.
      3. Thirdly, the Trinity possesses a single, indivisible action and a single will; Its operation is "inseparable". In relation to the contingent order the three Persons act as "one principle" (unum principium), and, "as They are inseparable, so They operate inseparably". In his own words, "where there is no difference of natures, there is none of wills either". As an illustration of this Augustine argues that the theophanies recorded in the Old Testament should not be regarded, as the earlier patristic tradition had tended to regard them, as appearances exclusively of the Son. Augustine argues that sometimes they can be attributed to the Son or to the Spirit, sometimes to the Father, and sometimes to all Three; on occasion it is impossible to decide to which of the Three to ascribe them.
      4. Lastly, Augustine faces the obvious difficulty that his theory suggests, that is, that it seems to obliterate the several roles of the three Persons. Augustine's answer is that, while it is true that the Son, as distinct from the Father, was born, suffered and rose again, it remains equally true that the Father cooperated with the Son in bringing about the incarnation, passion and resurrection; it was fitting for the Son, however, in virtue of His relation to the Father, to be manifested and made visible. In other words, since each of the Persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner, it is proper to attribute to each of Them, in the external operation of the Godhead, the role which is appropriate to Him in virtue of His origin. It is a case of what later Western theologians were to describe as appropriation.

      The Persons of the Godhead are identical considered as the divine substance, the Father is distinguished as Father because He begets the Son, and the Son is distinguished as Son because He is begotten. The Spirit, similarly, is distinguished from Father and Son inasmuch as He is "bestowed" by Them; He is Their "common gift" (donum), being a kind of communion of Father and Son , or else the love which They together pour into our hearts. Thus the question arises: what in fact are the Three. Augustine recognizes that they are traditionally designated Persons, but he is clearly unhappy about the term; probably it conveyed the suggestion of separate individuals to him. If in the end he consents to adopt the current usage, it is because of the necessity of affirming the distinction of the Three against Modalism ("the formula 'three Persons' was employed, not so that that might be said, but so as to avoid having to say nothing at all"), and with a deep sense of the inadequacy of human language. His own positive theory was the original and, for the history of Western Trinitarianism, highly important one that the Three are real or subsistent relations. His motive in formulating it was to escape a cunning dilemma posed by Arian critics. Basing themselves on the Aristotelian scheme of categories, they contended that the distinction within the Godhead, if they existed, must be classified under the category either of substance or of accident. The latter was out of question, God having no accidents; the former led to the conclusion that the Three are independent substances. Augustine rejected both alternatives, pointing out that the concept of relation (ad aliquid relatio) still remains. The Three, he goes on to claim, are relations, as real and eternal as the factors of begetting, being begotten and proceeding (or being bestowed) within the Godhead which give rise to them. Father, Son and Spirit are thus relations in the sense that whatever each of Them is, He is in relation to one or both of the others.

      Augustine attempts to explain what the procession of the Spirit is, or wherein it differs from the Son's generation. Augustine was certain that the Spirit is the mutual love of Father and Son (communem qua invicem se diligunt pater et filius caritatem), the consubstantial bond which unites Them. His consistent teaching was that He is the Spirit of both alike; as he put it, "The Holy Spirit is not the Spirit of one of Them, but of both". This he believed to be the clear teaching of the Scripture. Thus in relation to the Holy Spirit the Father and the Son form a single principle; and since the relation of both to Him is identical, and where there is no difference of relation Their operation is inseparable. Hence Augustine, more clearly than any of the Western fathers before him, taught the doctrine of the double precession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son (filioque). Answering the objection that since both the Son and the Spirit derive from the Father there should be two Sons, he states, "The Son is from the Father, the Spirit also is from the Father. But the former is begotten, the latter proceeds. So the former is Son of the Father from Whom He is begotten, but the latter is the Spirit of both since He proceeds from both. ... The Father is the author of the Spirit's procession because He begot such a Son, and in begetting Him made Him also the source from which the Spirit proceeds." Augustine warns us that it should not be inferred that the Spirit has therefore two sources or principles; on the contrary, the action of the Father and Son in bestowing the Spirit is common, as is the action of all three Persons in creation. Further, despite the double procession, the Father remains the primordial source, inasmuch as it is He from Whom the Son derives His capacity to bestow the Spirit.

      According to Augustine, there are analogies or "vestiges" of the Trinity everywhere, for in so far as creatures exist at all they exist by participating in the ideas of God; hence everything must reflect, however faintly, the Trinity Which created it. The function of these, is not so much to demonstrate that God is Trinity, but as to deepen our understanding of the mystery of the absolute oneness and yet real distinction of the Three. But for the veritable image, man should look primarily into himself, for the Scripture presents God as saying, "Let us [that is, the Three] make man in our image and our likeness". Even the outer man, that is, man considered in his sensible nature, offers "a kind of resemblance to the Trinity". The process of perception, for example, yields three distinct elements which are at the same time closely united, and of which the first in a sense begets the second while the third binds the other two together, that is, the external object (res quam videmus), the mind's sensible representation of it (visio), and the intention or act of focusing the mind (intentio; voluntas; intentio voluntatis). However, for the actual image of the Triune Godhead we should look to the inner man, or soul, and in the inner man to his rational nature, or mens, which is the loftiest and most God-like part of him. This is the mind's activity as directed upon itself or, better still, upon God. This analogy fascinated him all his life, so that in such an early work as the Confessions (397-398 A.D.) we find him pondering the triad of being, knowing and willing (esse, nosse, velle). In the De Trinitate he elaborates it at length in three successive stages, the resulting trinities being

      1. the mind, its knowledge of itself, and its love of itself;
      2. memory or, more properly, the mind's latent knowledge of itself, understanding, that is, its apprehension of itself in the light of the eternal reasons, and the will, or love of itself, by which this process self-knowledge is set in motion; and
      3. the mind as remembering, knowing and loving God Himself. Each of these in different degrees, reveals three real elements which, according Augustine's metaphysic of personality, are coordinate and therefore equal, and at the same time essentially one; each of them throws light on the mutual relations of the divine Persons.
      It is the last of the three analogies, however, that Augustine considers most satisfactory. The three factors disclosed in the second "are not three lives but one life, not three minds but one mind, and consequently are not three substances but one substance"; but he reasons that it is only when the mind has focused itself with all its powers of remembering, understanding and loving on its Creator, that the image it bears of Him, corrupted as it is by sin, can be fully restored.

      Augustine has no illusions about the limitations of the analogies.

      1. In the first place, the image of God in man's mind is in any case a remote and imperfect one: "a likeness indeed, but a far distant image. ... The image is one thing in the Son, another in the mirror."
      2. Secondly, while man's rational nature exhibits the trinities mentioned above, they are by no means identical with his being in the way in which the divine Trinity constitutes the essence of the Godhead; they represent faculties or attributes which the human being possesses, whereas the divine nature is perfectly simple.
      3. Thirdly, as a corollary from this, while memory, understanding and will operate separately, the three Persons mutually coinhere and Their action is one and indivisible.
      4. Lastly, whereas in the Godhead the three members of the Trinity are Persons, they are not so in the mind of man. "The image of the Trinity is one person, but the supreme Trinity Itself is three Persons": which is a paradox when one reflects that nevertheless the Three are more inseparably one than is the trinity in the mind. This discrepancy between the image and the Trinity Itself merely reminds us of the fact, of which the Apostle Paul has told us, that here on earth we see "in a mirror, darkly"; afterwards we shall see "face to face".

   6. The City of God.
      Augustine's The City of God (c.413-426 A.D.) began as an apologia against the allegations that Christianity was ultimately responsible for the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 by Alaric, the Goth. This encyclopedic work is written in twenty-two books which are divided into five parts. In the first part (Books 1-5) Augustine argues that the pagan gods were powerless to protect cities, as the story of Troy and other ancient cities had long ago shown. Only moral virtue could protect a nation and guarantee success. In its early days Rome had possessed these virtues but corruption had crept in through overweening ambition and pride. The Christian faith had rescued the Roman state from a irretrievable slide toward destruction.

      The second part (Books 6-10) Augustine takes up the philosophical problems of polytheism and Platonism. He demonstrates the internal inconsistencies of each, and shows the neither can provide the universal way of salvation found only in Christ. In this part Augustine so thoroughly and forcefully condemned the cult of the gods that paganism has never since been a serious religious option in Western society.

      In the third part (Books 11-14) Augustine turns from attack to defense. He starts with the Scriptures, claiming that they are the only basis of all Christian thought. His method is clearly philosophical not exegetical, and his use of the Scriptures is open to question, although his general argument is clear enough. The Bible teaches that God created the world and it is essentially good, not evil as the Platonist maintained. Augustine denies the cyclical view of history, according to which the world would keep repeating itself. Augustine argues for a linear view of history with a specific goal in the second coming of Christ. He explains the origin of sin as the diobedinece of the first man, Adam, and that only the Creator has the power undo its effects. Augustine argues that human history must be understood as the struggle between good and evil, not in the abstract, but as two cities or kingdoms which belong respecitively to God and to Satan. These themes are developed throughout his The City of God, where Augustine sets forth a philosophy of history. It becomes a review of Roman and Christian history, interpreted theologically and thus eschatologically, through the entangled earthly fortunes of two "cities" created by two conflicting loves. Since the fall of man, "two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self." (14:28) These had their representatives in Cain and Abel.

      In part four (Books 15-18) the history of the world as given in the Bible is recounted. Starting with story of Cain and Abel Augustine reveiws biblical history showing the development of the two cities. In Book 18 Augustine develops the theme of the two cities much further. Jerusalem and Babylon are symbolic representations, and references to them in Scripture are usually typological in intent. According to Augustine, man is attracted in life by two loves - the love of God and the love of self - and human history results from their tension. By choice each man is a citizen of one of two cities, the City of God, or the City of Man, Jerusalem or Babylon. While the City of God is exempt from destruction, the City of Man is not. In the City of Man all of the risks of contingent being are present. Between these two alternatives there is a third - Rome as shaped by Jerusalem, the state shaped by the values of the City of God. To some extent, this is a relevant ideal, and was partially shaped by Augustine. But his clearest view is that the values of the City of God, held by the Church, are superior to those of civil society: the Church then is superior to the state. Later generations were to interpret the two cities as Church and state, but that interpretation was never Augustine's teaching.

      Augustine divides human history into four periods: paradise before the fall, the world after the fall, the period of the law, and the period in which we now exist - after the first coming of Christ - a period of grace. Then follows the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. Augustine did not believe that there would be a literal thousand year reign of Christ on earth before the final judgment.

      In part five (Books 19-22) Augustine concludes his work with a lengthy discussion of man's destiny. He interprets all human striving as a desire for peace, which can only be found in Christ. He discusses the last judgment and defends the concept of eternal punishment in hell. He then concludes with a discussion of the resurrection and eternal life, which he interprets as the mystical vision of God, the supreme fulfilment of the Christian's spiritual pilgrimage.