Amid these diversions he found time for theology. He had begun with his mother’s simple faith, but had cast it off proudly at school. For nine years (374–83) he accepted Manichean dualism as the most satisfactory explanation of a world so indifferently compounded of evil and good. For a time he flirted with the skepticism of the later Academy; but he was too emotional to remain long in suspended judgment. At Rome and Milan he studied Plato and Plotinus; Neoplatonism entered deeply into his philosophy, and, through him, dominated Christian theology till Abélard. It became for Augustine the vestibule to Christianity. Ambrose had recommended him to read the Bible in the light of Paul’s statement that “the letter killeth but the spirit maketh to live.” Augustine found that a symbolic interpretation removed what had seemed to him the puerilities of Genesis. He read Paul’s epistles, and felt that here was a man who, like himself, had passed through a thousand doubts. In Paul’s final faith there had been no mere abstract Platonic Logos, but a Divine Word that had become man. One day, as Augustine sat in a Milan garden with his friend Alypius, a voice seemed to keep ringing in his ears: “Take up and read; take up and read.” He opened Paul again, and read: “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 not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” The passage completed for Augustine a long evolution of feeling and thought; there was something infinitely warmer and deeper in this strange faith than in all the logic of philosophy. Christianity came to him as a profound emotional satisfaction. Surrendering the skepticism of the intellect, he found, for the first time in his life, moral stimulus and mental peace. His friend Alypius confessed himself ready for a like submission. Monica, receiving their capitulation, melted her heart out in grateful prayer.
On Easter Sunday of 387 Augustine, Alypius, and Adeodatus were baptized by Ambrose, with Monica standing happily by. All four resolved to go to Africa and live a monastic life. At Ostia Monica died, confident of reunion in paradise. Arrived in Africa, Augustine sold his modest patrimony and gave the proceeds to the poor. Then he and Alypius and some friends formed a religious community, and lived at Tagaste in poverty, celibacy, study, and prayer. So was founded (388) the Augustinian order, the oldest monastic fraternity in the West.
2. The Theologian
In 389 Adeodatus passed away, and Augustine mourned him as bitterly as if still uncertain of the eternal bliss awaiting those who died in Christ. Work and writing were his only consolations. In 391 Valerius, Bishop of near-by Hippo (now Bone), asked his aid in administering the diocese, and for this purpose ordained him a priest. Valerius often yielded the pulpit to him, and Augustine’s eloquence impressed the congregation even when they could not understand him. Hippo was a seaport of some 40,000 population; the Catholics had one church there, the Donatists another; the remainder of the people were Manicheans or pagans. The Manichean bishop, Fortunatus, had hitherto dominated the theological scene; Donatists joined Catholics in urging Augustine to meet him in debate; he consented; and for two days these novel gladiators crossed words before a crowd that filled the Baths of Sosius. Augustine won; Fortunatus left Hippo, and never returned (392).
Four years later Valerius, alleging his age, asked the congregation to choose his successor. Augustine was unanimously elected; and though he protested and wept, and begged the privilege of returning to his monastery, he was prevailed upon, and for the remaining thirty-four years of his life he was Bishop of Hippo; from this foot of earth he moved the world. He chose one or two deacons, and brought two monks from his monastery to help him; they lived monastically and communistically in the episcopal rectory; Augustine was a bit puzzled to understand how one of his aides, at death, could leave a tidy legacy.59 All subsisted on a vegetarian diet, reserving meat for guests and the sick. Augustine himself is described as short and thin, and never strong; he complained of a lung disorder, and suffered unduly from the cold. He was a man of sensitive nerves, easily excited, of keen and somewhat morbid imagination, of subtle and flexible intellect. Despite a tenacious dogmatism and some occasional intolerance, he must have had many lovable qualities; several men who came to learn rhetoric from him accepted his lead into Christianity; and Alypius followed him to the end.
He had hardly taken his seat as bishop when he began a lifelong war against the Donatists. He challenged their leaders to public debate, but few cared to accept; he invited them to friendly conferences, but was met first with silence, then with insult, then with violence; several Catholic bishops in North Africa were assaulted, and some attempts seem to have been made upon the life of Augustine himself;60 however, we do not have the Donatist side of this story. In 411 a council called by the Emperor Honorius met at Carthage to quiet the Donatist dispute; the Donatists sent 279 bishops, the Catholics 286-but bishop in Africa meant little more than parish priest. The Emperor’s legate, Marcellinus, after hearing both sides, decreed that the Donatists must hold no further meetings, and must hand over all their churches to the Catholics. The Donatists replied with acts of desperate violence, including, we are told, the murder of Restitutus, a priest of Hippo, and the mutilation of another member of Augustine’s staff. Augustine urged the government to enforce its decree vigorously;61 he retracted his earlier view that “no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ … that we must fight only by arguments, and prevail only by force of reason”;62 he concluded that the Church, being the spiritual father of all, should have a parent’s right to chastise an unruly son for his own good;63 it seemed to him better that a few Donatists should suffer “than that all should be damned for want of co-ercion.”64 At the same time he pled repeatedly with the state officials not to enforce the death penalty against the heretics.65
Aside from this bitter contest, and the cares of his see, Augustine lived in the Country of the Mind, and labored chiefly with his pen. Almost every day he wrote a letter whose influence is still active in Catholic theology. His sermons alone fill volumes; and though some are spoiled by an artificial rhetoric of opposed and balanced clauses, and many deal with local and transient topics in a simple style adapted to his unlettered congregation, many of them rise to a noble eloquence born of mystic passion and profound belief. His busy mind, trained in the logic of the schools, could not be confined within the issues of his parish. In treatise after treatise he labored to reconcile with reason the doctrines of the Church that he had come to revere as the one pillar of order and decency in a ruined and riotous world. He knew that the Trinity was a stumbling block to the intellect; for fifteen years he worked on his most systematic production—De Trinitate—struggling to find analogies in human experience for three persons in one God. More puzzling still-filling all Augustine’s life with wonder and debate—was the problem of harmonizing the free will of man with the foreknowledge of God. If God is omniscient He sees the future in all details; since God is immutable, this picture that He has of all coming events lays upon them the necessity of occurring as He has foreseen them; they are irrevocably predestined. Then how can man be free? Must he not do what God has foreseen? And if God has foreseen all things, He has known from all eternity the final fate of every soul that He creates; why, then, should He create those that are predestined to be damned?