TTC 《忏悔录》精读 St Augustines Confessions

Key Points:

• Lecture two narrows the focus from the broader overview in lecture one.
• Augustine was a Roman born in North Africa, highlighting the interplay of cultures.
• The Roman Empire faced significant challenges, influencing Augustine's context.
• Major theological debates, such as Arianism and Donatism, shaped the church during Augustine's time.
• The relationship between church (Christianity) and state evolved significantly under emperors like Constantine.

In lecture two, we're beginning to narrow the scope from where we were in lecture one. Lecture one was the big overview. In this talk, we're going to focus more on the political and religious events of Augustine's time. And in lecture three, then we're going to move on to still more focus as we prepare to actually turn to the text of Confessions.

We pointed out in the last lecture that Augustine was a Roman. He was a native Latin speaker. He was born inside the Roman Empire in a town called Thagaste in North Africa in the modern nation of Algeria. What I would want to emphasize is that to us, that sounds like he's on the periphery, because after all, today North Africa is a very different place than Europe. But let's remember the center of the Roman world was not Europe. The center of the Roman world was the Mediterranean. And therefore, in a real sense, the closer you lived to the Mediterranean, the more thoroughly Romanized you were.

Hence, not only was Augustine a Roman, he was probably more culturally Romanized than Roman citizens born, let's say, in Paris or London or York or Trier in Northern Germany. And therefore we need never to forget, among the many other things, the Romainess of Augustine.

Yeah, I would make two points just to add to what Bill said. One is to emphasize the fact that sometimes we get this sense as moderns that Augustine wasn't really a Roman, or he only became one when later in his life he traveled to Italy and lived in Rome and lived in Milan and so on. Not at all. He was part of that Roman culture right from the beginning.

But the second point that I would make is that culture, of course, was a kind of combination, a kind of synthesis of Roman ideas and native ideas as well. So that, just to take one example, scholars have pointed out that the name of Augustine's mother, Monica, a person who in fact is a very important character in the Confessions, is not a Roman name, and therefore she may have been of Berber origin.

So to say that he was Roman doesn't exclude other influences. It's rather another way to say that Rome was a kind of syncretistic empire. It took things and put them together and did that pretty well. But of course, the point to emphasize is that by education, by culture, and by habit, Augustine was as Roman as they came.

Now, one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is that Rome itself, that is to say, the idea of the Roman Empire, was facing all kinds of new challenges during this time as well. It wasn't simply within the Christian tradition that enormous changes were taking place. And Augustine's Romainess reflects this.

The two-minute review of Roman history goes something like this. In the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, the Roman Empire worked pretty well. And even though there were a couple of goofy emperors along the way and so on, by and large, at one point in the second century, the Roman Empire reached from the Irish Sea to the Persian Gulf. The great historian Edward Gibbon talked about the second century as perhaps the best century of all time in which to live.

However, the third century in the Common Era was an era of chaos. Emperor after emperor after emperor, disease, Germanic invasion, all kinds of things. In fact, Rome actually had its first set of walls built around the year 285. But then came along two great reforming emperors back to back, Diocletian and Constantine. Of course, in religion, they were very different because Diocletian persecuted Christians and Constantine became a Christian.

But in many ways, in terms of how to administer the empire, they agreed. They made a number of changes. Perhaps for us, the most important change was to divide the Roman Empire roughly into two large administrative districts that we would call the West and the East. And the idea was there'd be an emperor in each half, but that one emperor would be sort of higher than the other emperor.

Well, you can imagine how well that worked over time. First of all, there was no great Roman succession, no obvious way of choosing who the next emperor was. And you can imagine how uncomfortable either of the Roman emperors would be in being Roman emperor number two.

Therefore, what we have is a situation in the 4th century where there is a lot of political conflict—not just because of invaders coming from the outside, but also within the empire, between the two halves, between pretender emperors and real emperors, between Western emperor and Eastern emperor. It was a time of change, it was a time of tension, it was a time sometimes of great violence within the confines of the Roman Empire.

I should also add to that the split between East and West was not simply political, but was cultural as well, which is to say the Western half was Latin speaking, the Eastern half was Greek speaking.

Well, it's very interesting to take a look at that split in terms of Augustine himself, because one of the things that he tells us in the Confessions was that he never really did get very good at Greek. And the thing that's sort of interesting about that from the point of view of the history of Christianity is that up until the time of Augustine, most of the serious theological reflection followed the fact that Scripture itself was written in Greek. It was written in Greek, and Augustine is in a kind of newer tradition doing this in Latin.

The fact that he is the greatest of the Latin fathers, something that would have been as evident in his own time as it has become retrospectively in history, the fact is that by doing what he did in Latin, he has changed the course of history in very important ways.

Let's also remember that in addition to these conflicts taking place inside the Roman Empire, as Ron suggested, in some ways cultural conflicts as well as political conflicts, we have another layer of problem. Especially in the second half of the fourth century, again, remember Augustine was born in 354, right?

Then, when Augustine is growing up, if you will, we have serious Germanic invasions of Goths and other tribes into the Roman Empire. How serious? In 378, one of the Roman emperors was killed by a Germanic army in a battle that obviously the Roman Empire lost. And therefore, although we tend to think of it as the guys in the horned helmets with the spears that sort of look like Hagar the Horrible coming to invade Europe, that's not a very good way of looking at it. Nevertheless, the Germanic threat is a very important one.

Let me suggest two ways in which the invasion of the Germans into the Roman Empire directly affect Augustine. One is that when the Germans came, they didn't stop in the European part of the Roman Empire. They in fact crossed over into Africa. And when Augustine was on his deathbed in Hippo in 430, a Germanic tribe with the charming name of the Vandals was actually besieging the city of Hippo. Within a few months of Augustine's death, they had captured the city of Hippo.

A second issue with the Germans is that because the Germans were coming from the north into the Empire, the Emperor actually sort of moved his place of residence from Rome further north to where he was closer to the front line. The place he moved to was Milan. And therefore, as we will read in the Confessions, when Augustine goes to Italy, he goes first to Rome, but then he moves to Milan.

That might seem like he's moving away from the center of Roman power, but in fact, he's moving to it because the emperor at that time is resident in Milan. Therefore, the bishop that so influences Augustine and also baptizes Augustine, Ambrose, is also in a sense the Emperor's bishop—the one that the Emperor hears preaching on a Sunday morning in the cathedral of Milan.

So in a couple of different ways, even those obscure things that we associate with the Middle Ages, the Germanic invasions into Europe affected the life of St. Augustine. One other Augustinian footnote to these events: we'll see in the Confessions later on that when he does travel to Italy, Rome and Milan turn out to be the key cities where he spends time.

In addition to that, important for us to realize that these events found their way into his writings in other ways as well. What some would consider his most monumental work, the City of God, written as a response to a particular event—the fact that the Goths, another tribe with a charming name, turned out to sack Rome itself in the year 410.

This event, again, it would be hard to think about an event with comparable significance in terms of the way it kind of turned everybody's ideas upside down. Here was Rome that had lasted forever, and now all of a sudden, it looked strangely vulnerable. This brought forth a lot of anguish and anguished writing trying to figure out what was this all about. Augustine's entry into the field was the City of God written in direct response to that particular cataclysm.

So in a number of ways, we need to set this political and even military context for Augustine. Now let's turn to perhaps an even more immediately important context. What were the basic arguments, conflicts, discussions among Christians in Augustine's time?

Because even though Augustine will not in the Confessions tick them off and say, well, let me respond to this one and this one and this one, in fact, he does that. The more we know of this background of what the debates of the day are, the more subtle we can read the Confessions of St. Augustine.

I suppose the place to begin was what was the burning issue in the first, and it somewhat continued into the second half of the fourth century? And that was the issue over the nature of Christ. Here is, in a sense, the issue in a nutshell: Is Christ God, or is Christ the first thing that God created?

Now, sometimes today, even to people who go to church every Sunday, these seem like rather obscure issues that don't have anything to do with living out the Christian faith. But perhaps it seems that way to us only because a long time ago they ultimately got settled. The issue is the first thing of creation or part of Creator.

The conflict developed in North Africa, in the eastern part of North Africa, in Egypt, between those who said Jesus is in fact part of God, and a priest from Alexandria named Arius who said there was a time when Christ was not. He's the first thing that God created. That led to the first ecumenical council, the first worldwide council of Bishops, which was held in 325—again, just about a quarter of a century before Augustine was born.

The ideas of Arius, oddly enough, came to be known as Arianism. They were, as Bill said, condemned at the first two ecumenical councils, and the other position was the position that turned out to be the orthodox one. But we need to remember that all of this is a lot easier to see in hindsight, both because of the fact that theologically there were an awful lot of both sides, and because the political ramifications were such that at certain times in history, the Arians were in the lead.

Okay, there were more of them, and they were more powerful. And so it's important to keep that in mind when we look at this.

You know, again, as Bill said, it's hard for us to get worked up over this. But it was a burning issue in Augustine's time, especially because some of the folks who moved to North Africa turned out to hold Arian positions, and there were particularly bitter disputes here.

And again, to kind of piggyback on something that Bill said before, one of the important issues is to realize that Augustine couldn't help but write on these in other works. In other words, in the Confessions, we're going to see some of this indirectly. It's going to be important in terms of the background and the context.

But in other works, he sort of takes on these heretical movements very directly. And we have to keep in mind that in a very real sense, he had no choice but to do this in his position as bishop. That is to say, in his position as leader of the Christian flock, he had to guide, he had to direct, he had to teach. That was part of his priestly office.

So that Augustine writes on all of these issues with great frequency in the course of his career. Let me just illustrate a couple of ways in which this Arian question is present in Augustine's time. One of the great works he wrote that we're not going to discuss, even in the next lecture that looks at the corpus of the Works of St. Augustine, is a work on the Trinity.

Well, there is no Trinity if Jesus isn't God. That is to say, that Christian concept of Trinity doesn't make any sense apart from the rejection of the Arian position. Whenever we see Augustine in the Confessions invoking Christ, Christ, the human Christ, the God, we need to be aware that in some way, directly or indirectly, consciously or just subconsciously, he is reflecting on this debate that is still going on despite the condemnation of the Arians in 325.

A second more practical thing, although Augustine probably didn't think a great deal about this, he would have known about it. Those Vandals who were closing in on Hippo at the time Augustine died were Arian Christians. In other words, Arianism spread to several of the Germanic tribes, and therefore, when they invaded into the Roman Empire, they not only were a military problem, they were a religious problem.

Therefore, we don't want to forget that even though that's not going to be a primary focus of Augustine, Arianism, which gradually seemed to be dying in the Roman Empire in the late 4th and 5th centuries, was condemned the second time in 381 by bishops. Nevertheless, it got new life because the very Germans who sacked Rome, the very Germans who took the city of Hippo shortly after Augustine's death, were, in fact, Arian Christians.

If the Arian controversy is about the question of who Jesus is, the second question that we want to deal with briefly in this lecture is a question about what is the nature of the Church? The dispute that arises about the nature of the Church turns out to have just as strong and just as important consequences as Arianism.

The name that we give to this dispute is called Donatism, again named after Donatus, who is the most who expounded the position. And it too had been condemned early but remained very powerful for reasons that we'll show right now.

Here's the deal. There were several reasons why one might want to give up one's Christianity in the face of persecution. It had been something Christians had to face throughout their history. But now, all of a sudden, you have to deal with the question, what happens when Christianity kind of rebounds in a particular area where the threat, where the danger of death isn't there anymore?

You used to be a priest, but you say, well, give that stuff up because it's much better to go back to being a pagan than being fed to a lion. But then there's no threat anymore, and you go back and you want to take over your position as priest or bishop again.

So the larger issue, to take what Ron said as a specific, the larger issue is: Are leaders leaders by virtue of their virtue? That is to say, to be a legitimate bishop, do you have to be a good guy in addition to having been consecrated? And that's a really important question because there were some bishops who gave up and surrendered essentially to the Romans when the Romans knocked on the door and said, hand us your books and swear to pagan gods.

When in North Africa, after the persecution, those guys said, okay, now I want my bishopric back, that brought about a conflict. Again, the way it was phrased is, well, if these guys are bad guys, if they're going to hell because of the fact they abandoned the faith when there was trouble, doesn't that mean they're not really bishops?

And therefore, doesn't that mean, think about what the logic of this is. If they're not bishops, then the people that they gave communion to didn't take communion. The people they ordained as priests aren't priests, and so on and so forth.

So there was a belief, the Donatist belief, that your ability to hold office was deeply rooted in and dependent upon your moral state. The position that won out eventually, the orthodox position, is that no, it's by virtue of the office you hold. You may go to hell, but your character doesn't impede the validity of what you do if you've been legitimately consecrated.

North Africa was the battleground of this, and Augustine had to deal with this one directly because in fact, we sometimes forget about this. In all the cities of North Africa, that would include Hippo and Augustine's hometown of Thagaste, there was a Donatist church and a Catholic Church, and they might have even had roughly equal numbers of members. In other words, this was a real-life, day-to-day, walk-down-the-street kind of issue for Augustine as well as a theological issue.

It's important to think about some of the logical consequences of the fact that the orthodox position won out. One is that if in fact you accepted Donatist belief and said that a person has to be a person of virtue, the problem is you don't always know that a person's spiritual state is something that is not apparent.

It's also something that is, by golly, possible to fake so that there would be enormous theological problems. If you're always worried about whether or not the person administering the rite to the Christian Church was a people of virtue or not, it would ultimately be a real mess.

Equally important, it's a definition of what the Church really turns out to be. Is this an organization of the holy and only the holy? Is it only for the sanctified? Or is it better to look at the Church as a kind of hospital for sinners, a spiritual hospital that helps us on the road to salvation, allowing us to get better but welcoming saints and sinners alike?

And again, since this was the orthodox position, or rather, this was the logic that comes from the orthodox position, it's important to keep in mind that it provides ultimately a much more inclusive idea of what the Church and the Christian community is all about.

And notice, of course, that that ties into the issue of the fact that the Christian community is getting ever larger and larger and larger, that it's now reached the point where it is a world religion. Augustine is a bishop with pastoral responsibilities.

The fact that he is orthodox, not Donatist on this issue, says what kind of a community he envisions himself as being the pastor of and what his jobs are. Let's just give a couple of illustrations of some of the practical problems. One of the great facts of history is that although Constantine favored Christianity for a long, long time as emperor, he was only baptized on his deathbed.

That seemed like a very odd story to us, but I think we can ask why? Well, baptism washes you clean of sin. Therefore, why not wait till I really can't sin anymore to be washed clean because I can only be baptized once?

And so adult baptism, which is what we read about in New Testament scriptures, was the norm in the early church. There was even a separate part of early churches where those who were preparing for baptism could stand and look in on the services before they were allowed in upon their baptism.

So one of the issues of this inclusion is the issue of, well, do you baptize an infant? Augustine was one of the very important supporters of infant baptism. Another issue is how do you, if you do sin following baptism, get back to even? How do you get cleansed of sin since you can't be baptized again?

We are living in a time period in which that question is being asked in new ways as infant baptism and, as Ron said, large Christian population is now becoming the norm. How do we reconcile people—not just keep them in the church, but bring them back in after they've done something even something fairly heinous? Augustine and Augustine's baptizer Ambrose are both important figures in the Christian tradition in dealing with this issue.

Bill had mentioned a little earlier that the two emperors most responsible for the reorganization of the empire were Diocletian and Constantine. Let's take a look at those two folks from the religious point of view now and come back to something that we've been kind of hinting at in a number of different ways, namely that before Constantine, Christianity had been a minority, persecuted religion, and afterwards it is a favored religion within the empire.

What we want to suggest, in other words, is some of the ways in which Constantine and his conversion to Christianity turned out to change the relationship between what we would now call church and state within the empire.

Constantine, for one thing, legislates so that Christianity now is favored. Well, let's think about what the implications of that might be. One thing that happens, of course, is that in the previous quote-unquote administration under empire, under Emperor Diocletian, what happens is that if they knock on the door, taking the census and say religious preference and you say Christian, they say, ah, well, there is an empty slot in the 3 o'clock feeding of the lions. Why don't you come down and be lunch for some rather large cats that we have down there?

A generation later that same census-taker would say Christian. Ah, good, because the emperor is looking for people of your persuasion. There are some jobs that he wants to fill with some good Christian folk. What that means is that now all of a sudden you not only are not persecuted, but you have a kind of favored, privileged status within the empire.

Well, all kinds of things change when that changes. What it means, of course, is that the Church gets powerful, and it also means that the Church gets wealthy. These were two things that were new in the history of Christianity and were defined to be very, very interesting and very, very difficult to handle.

If one goes to Rome today, what we discover is that there are a lot of great big old churches, but the earliest of them date from the 4th century because, A, you needed big buildings for a lot of people, but B, the Church began to get the wealth to build those buildings. In fact, the first of those big churches in Rome was attached to a palace that had belonged to Constantine, which he gave to the Bishop of Rome when he moved to Constantinople.

Thus, we begin to see the good side of the Church gaining some wealth. That is to say, big places to assemble, the bishop living in a decent place, the art that decorates those buildings that explains Christianity to people in a variety of ways—all those things seem good to us, and we celebrate those monuments today.

But also, the Church and its bishops, not just the Bishop of Rome, but all bishops began to get certain kinds of authority, some of which are pretty close to being quasi-governmental authority because the emperor is comfortable trusting bishops with certain kinds of jobs that didn't belong to religious officials up to this time.

In a number of ways, what we would call church and state—it's something of an anachronism—but what we would call church and state is growing close, not only closer together but we begin to get a little bit of overlapping and inner penetration, if you will, in ways that, well, we know in the 21st century, we're still sorting out those kinds of relationships, even though in somewhat different terms than they were in the 4th century.

Let's talk a little bit about those kinds of overlapping for a minute. One thing, of course, is that it meant that because the empire was clearly implicated in this Christianity business, emperors, Constantine certainly among them, were pretty eager to give what we would think of now as specifically religious advice to the Church.

Another thing that's very interesting is the way in which the Christian's sense of war and fighting changed. It seems to be the case that Christianity in its earliest years was pacifist in its orientation, which would certainly follow from a reading of the Gospels.

And it was, I guess, easier. One way to look at it is a lot easier to refuse to fight in the emperor's armies when the emperor was a pagan and when there was persecution going around anyhow. But what happens once the emperor is a Christian?

One of the things that we find is that Christians begin to serve in the army. A defense of the empire also, in a very real way, becomes a defense of Christianity. Well, that brings with it enormous complications and enormous problems. It is certainly worth mentioning at this point that Augustine is a thinker who dealt with that particular issue because he began to speak very eloquently about conditions under which Christians could fight.

Again, we see the way in which the larger context is important in terms of what it is that Augustine is actually writing about. Even today, in articles that appear in popular magazines every now and then, especially if America is at war or preparing for war, there’ll be articles about Christian just war theory. And wherever that is, in Time or Newsweek or whatever, virtually always they start with St. Augustine.

He is, in a sense, the key Christian figure in developing a theory—often misunderstood, I might add—but nevertheless, a theory of just war. It's another reminder of the time in which Augustine lived. This is a really new question for Christians because it's a new reality in which they're living with an emperor that not only goes to war but worships next to you on Sunday morning, which is not a situation the early Christians had to deal with at all.

So to sort of summarize this lecture, it's important for us to remember and keep in mind as we're going through the text of the Confessions, that Augustine grew to adulthood, converted to Christianity in the most dynamic century of Christian history, and that is going to be reflected in the text of the Confessions.