International Catholic University
In our previous lectures we have focused on some of the main themes that weave their way through the teaching of the Church Fathers, including Trinitarian doctrine, the different aspects of Christ's saving work, key themes of theological anthropology, and sacramental theology. One name continuously comes up, Saint Augustine. In this lecture we will look in more detail at his life and teachings, and at the gifts he gives to our Catholic theology.
All through the Middle Ages Saint Augustine was known as Magister. Even today the number of doctoral theses written on Saint Augustine remains high. He has left a great wealth of doctrine and wonderful insights.
Saint Augustine was born of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica, on November 13, 354 in North Africa. He received his early education in North Africa and later taught in his native city and then at Carthage. He was in Rome from 383-384, and then he moved to Milan where he was deeply attracted by the personality and preaching of the great Bishop there, Saint Ambrose. He himself wrote that while reading certain platonic books, he went through a spiritual revolution that changed his vision of reality. On April 25, 387, he was baptized by Saint Ambrose. In 388 he returned to Africa and lived a retired semi-monastic life of study and prayer. He was called to a more active life when his Bishop ordained him a priest in 391. He became the Bishop of Hippo in 395 and it was there that he died on August 28, 430, during the siege of the city by the Vandals. Until 399, Augustine combated Manicheism, to which he tells us in his Confessions he had been attracted in his earlier years. In 392 he began his campaign against the Donatists, which involved him in debates about the unity and catholicity of the Church and about sacramental practices. About 412 he began to devote his energy primarily to problems about grace, especially as interpreted by Pelagius and his followers. In his last years he defended his teaching on grace against a group of monks mainly from Southeastern Gaul called Massilians. Only in the Sixteenth Century were these monks named Semi-Pelagians. Arianism had been relatively unknown in North Africa until the arrival of the Arian Goths around 418, at which time Augustine also became involved in controversies with them.
In theology, his outstanding work is his De Trinitate on which he worked intermittently for twenty-three years, between 399 and 422. In his writings against the Donatists, he developed more fully his theology of the Church and the sacraments. Although his doctrine of grace is already present in earlier writings it is more clearly worked out in his debate with the Pelagians and with the Massilians. To understand his theology, one must not neglect his numerous letters, sermons and other shorter writings. His Scriptural commentaries include the important 124 tracts on the Gospel of John and his Enarrationes on the Psalms. His Confessions, a masterpiece for all time has a dual dimension. Confession means praise of God as well as revelation of personal failings, and in his writings, praise of God is primary. The City of God, written to defend Christians against those who blamed them for the fall of Rome, is a vast study of God's providential guidance of history. His retractions, which review his earlier writings and at times correct them, should always be consulted. This is another example of how the Church Fathers may take an inaccurate path on different aspects of the developing theology, so it is always good to see them in the context of the whole.
Saint Augustine's influence is unequaled, especially in Medieval theology. If we examine the index of authors quoted by Peter Lombard in his Sentences, a mid twelfth century work that became the textbook of theology for centuries, we find only a few references to Greek Fathers such as Origen and John Chrysostom. There are somewhat more numerous references to the Latin Fathers such as Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville and Bede. But references to Saint Augustine outnumber all of these put together and by a great deal. This purely material consideration brings home Augustine's influence in just one instance.
The theological principles of Augustine became the very framework of theological investigation. Augustine's influence is still alive. Beyond Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and their followers, Augustine influenced Luther and Calvin and much of the Protestant theology down to our present time. Modern personalism and existentialism also have their roots in Saint Augustine. Augustine was helped and inspired by works of earlier theologians such as Saint Hilary, who wrote a wonderful treatise on the Trinity, and by the teaching and preaching of Saint Ambrose, and by that of many others. Unfortunately, Saint Augustine had only an elementary knowledge of Greek so he could not read the Greek Fathers in the original. However, he was the main channel through which earlier doctrinal developments reached the West.
What can be said about his concept and method of theology? Saint Augustine's theology must be seen within the broader, and in some ways loftier context, of wisdom. In 386 he was converted to the search for wisdom which for him involved at first only knowledge of self and of God according to scholars. For Saint Augustine there are three types of wisdom. The first is natural wisdom. Natural wisdom is the rational basis or foundation from which one may proceed to higher wisdom. This natural wisdom embraces knowledge of God and of providence needed for those seeking faith. A second type of wisdom is theological wisdom. Wisdom of the theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, this is the wisdom possessed by baptized Christians who believe in, hope in, and love God and who are thereby united to God. This wisdom purifies and rectifies ideas and orders one's life anew. The third type of wisdom is contemplative or mystical wisdom. This wisdom is a resting in God and in divine truths. It is an anticipation of eternal life. For Saint Augustine, the fruit of the highest gifts of the Holy Spirit is this wisdom. After his ordination in 391 Saint Augustine became more concerned with active knowledge of the temporal order required for pastoral activity, and so he became more involved with theological wisdom as distinguished from contemplative or mystical wisdom. This led him to further statements about the role and method of theological research under and within wisdom. The fruits of this thought are found especially in his Dei Doctrina Christiana and in his De Trinitate. The wisdom most operative in theology seems to be the second, the wisdom of the theological virtues. The first wisdom, that of natural reason, plays a part in a person's coming to the faith. But once faith opens the eyes of the soul, it heals, deepens and enlarges the mind, urging it to some understanding of what it believes. And so, the famous dictum of Saint Augustine: Believe that you might understand and understand that you might believe.
With regard to Saint Augustine's theology of the Trinity, some major points of development led to the settling of the Trinitarian questions at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Saint Augustine built on this solid framework and developed the thought even further. While in general it is true that Western thinkers were less original than those in the East with regard to the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, an exception is found in the organization and systematization of the theology of the Trinity. Here the West was in advance. Augustine began his De Trinitate in 399 and worked on it over time. When the first twelve books were published without his knowledge and consent, he decided not to complete it. Urged on by his friends, he resumed the work and completed it in 422 in fifteen books. It is a work that preoccupied him for twenty-three years. Remember that Saint Augustine as a bishop was involved in many other things as well, but this is the fruit of twenty-three years of reflection, study, prayer and writing.
There are three main steps in Saint Augustine's approach to the mystery of the Trinity. First, deeply immersed in Scripture, Saint Augustine examines the various expressions about God, both those pointing to the distinctiveness within God and those affirming the oneness or unity of God as absolute being, simple, indivisible, unchangeable. Since this unity is identical with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and they are identical with it, though really distinct from each other, there is no tri-theism as if the three were like three of the same genus (e.g., three men in a human nature). And since they are perfectly equal in this identity of being there is absolutely no subordinationism for Saint Augustine.
From this identity of each of the three persons with the divine essence or substance follow three conclusions. First, the so called absolute perfections of God, that is, goodness, wisdom, eternity, and omnipotence are to be expressed in the singular, not as divided into three. Father is good, Son is good, Holy Spirit is good; yet there is only one goodness, one good. Second, the three Persons act inseparably or in common. In the words of Saint Augustine, "Because there is one will belonging to the Father and the Son their operation is also inseparable." Third, we may attribute to one Divine Person what belongs to or proceeds from all three Persons acting together. Thus power is usually attributed to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and love to the Holy Spirit. So the first aspect is expressing distinctness within the oneness of God.
The second is the fact that despite their substantial or essential identity, the three are really distinct from each other, and this by reason of their being really related to each other. You may recall that the doctrine of relation was first advanced by the Cappadocian Fathers in the East. Saint Augustine built upon that doctrine and developed it, saying that each Person is related to the Person from whom he originates. Thus the Son is related as Son to the Father, and the Father as Father to the Son. These mutual opposing relations cannot be identical in the same Person. That is, a father cannot be his own son, nor a son his own father. Hence each relation is really distinct from its mutually opposed relation. In a similar way the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father and Son and they are really distinct from the Holy Spirit. Saint Augustine is reluctant to use the word person because for him it seems to connote an independent substance. But he identifies Person in God with relation and ends up by saying: When we are asked about the three human speech labors under a very great inadequacy. Still we say three Persons, not in order to say it but in order not to remain silent. This is an important part of our Trinitarian understanding. The mystery of the Trinity of course is a Divine reality. We as humans use our limited faculties to try to understand as much as we can. When we use words like person, nature, and consubstantial these are concepts that lead us in the right direction. Sometimes the analogy of an archer is used. The archer shoots his arrow toward the target, with the target being the mystery of the Trinity, our arrows being the science of theology. Saint Augustine directs us towards the end, but like the archer unable to shoot his arrow totally to the target, so our human vocabulary, our human capacity for penetration of divine mystery, always falls short. Saint Augustine reminds us that it is to the extent that we embrace the teachings of the Church and the articulation of the perennial theology to which he made such a great contribution, we will not be in error. We do not claim to grasp the total reality of who God is in Himself, but at least in some limited way we are in the right direction awaiting what fully will be revealed to us in the next life.
The third aspect of Saint Augustine's approach to the Trinity has to do with the Holy Spirit. The Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity proceeds from the Father as well from the Son. The Father and the Son are one single principle or source with respect to the Holy Spirit. Saint Augustine writes, "The Son is born of the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father principally and by his gift with no lapse of time commonly from both." According to the Greek Fathers, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. Saint Augustine combines their viewpoints with his own and says: for if whatever the Son has He has from the Father; He certainly has it from the Father that the Holy Spirit should also proceed from Him.
Saint Augustine's use of analogies, especially those drawn from the structure of the human soul, is an original contribution to Trinitarian theology. We might refer to them as psychological analogies. Saint Augustine uses analogies from the human person showing how certain faculties have three aspects and yet remain one single unified reality. This is a base to teach the distinction and unity in the Blessed Trinity through the relations. The basis for this analogical procedure in Saint Augustine is his reading of Genesis 1/26: "Let us make man in our own image."
In his De Trinitate, he deals at some length with the analogy of three elements in one love, which was taken up by Richard of Saint Victor in the Twelfth Century. Saint Augustine writes, "Here are three things, a lover, what is loved and the love." What does the soul love in one's friend except his soul, and so there are three things there - the lover, what is loved and the love. In Book XI, Saint Augustine considers sense perception in humans and finds an analogical trinity consisting of the things seen, the seeing by the imagination, and the tending or willing focusing on the things seen. In the same book he considers internal sensation and finds a trinity of memory, internal seeing and will, uniting the memory impression and the external image. These are some examples of more external analogies, or likenesses, but because they are external, they failed to satisfy Saint Augustine. Hence he moved to the internal faculties and acts of man.
In Book XV, he summarizes what he has done in the earlier books. He notes that in Book IX he was concerned with the trinity of mind, knowledge and love. He repeats this trinity, replacing love with desire. These three are in man, but they are not man, and here the analogy of image falls short of God. He goes on and comes to what he calls a more evident trinity in the mind, in memory, understanding and will. It should be noted that in this case the object of each is the self, one's own mind. Saint Augustine is aware of the differences between the images he has found in man and their reality in the Trinity. He constantly points out their limitations even while showing their value for obtaining some understanding of what we believe. He uses this analogical method again, not with any thought to fully express the reality of the Trinity, but to help believers grasp in a more concrete way something of the mystery of how there could be three distinct Persons but only one Divine nature.
What about Saint Augustine's doctrine on the Incarnation and Redemption? As noted earlier, there had already been established in the West a proper balance between the unity or oneness of person in Christ and the distinction of the Divine and human nature in Him, This came through the writings of Tertullian, Saint Hilary and Saint Ambrose. Saint Augustine simply continued, perfecting their work. In this case he did not add many original contributions. But because of his influence, his statements of the theology of Christ were the most frequently quoted right through the Middle Ages. Saint Augustine teaches that all three Persons of the Trinity effected the union of the divine and human natures in the one Divine Person of the Son. Only the Son is Incarnate. Saint Augustine often uses the name Son of God to designate Christ as to his divinity and Son of Man to designate Christ as to his humanity. The Incarnation took place in the Virgin Mary by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. If John 1/14 says that the Word became flesh, John really means that the Word became man. Saint Augustine says, "Here to be sure we ought to take flesh to mean man." Mary never ceased to be a virgin whether in her conceiving or in her giving birth. Saint Augustine notes that, "It is difficult for human reason to grasp this yet faith understands it." In his sermons particularly, Saint Augustine uses the communication of idioms that we have referred to earlier, or the sharing or the interchange of properties. In Sermon 124 he says, "He did not leave the Father yet He came to us. He suckled at the breast yet He contained the world. He lay in the crib yet He fed the Angels." In this connection he will speak of God as dying on the cross.
In speaking of Christ's Saving work which we have seen as one of the themes that weaves it way through all of the teachings of the Church Fathers, Saint Augustine develops considerably the theme of Christ as mediator between God and human persons. Christ is the head of the body which is His Church. Saint Augustine does not use the term Mystical Body in this context. This term came to be used of Christ and the Church only in the Middle Ages. For Saint Augustine, the Church is the continuation of the Incarnation. He viewed Christ in three ways: as the eternal Word of God who is in and with God the Father, the preexistent Logos; as the God Man through the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, (the fundamental fact of human and cosmic history, the turning point, the very crown of God's creation); and as the total Christ, (Christus totus), in the fullness of the Church, that is head and body. Saint Augustine is an important link to the Medieval and modern development of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. He built upon Pauline theology found in the Letters to the Corinthians and other Letters, developing a rich understanding of the mystery of Christ, the total Christ, the whole Christ, the mystic Christ, the fullness of the Church which is both head and body. Saint Augustine reminds us that this total Christ is the eternal Church in heaven. In Sermon 341 he proclaims, "That Church which is now a pilgrim is joined to that Heavenly Church where we shall have the Angels as fellow citizens and there will come into being one Church, the City of the Great King."
Saint Augustine is often called the Doctor of Grace because he brought together and really has articulated in a systematic way the Church's understanding and teaching on this important doctrine. The basic components of his theology of grace are as follows: first, grace is needed as a remedy for original sin. We have seen how the understanding of original sin and its relationship to the descendants of Adam and Eve has slowly developed and been brought into consciousness through the Patristic era. Saint Augustine clearly teaches that grace is needed as a remedy for the original sin that has been passed on from our first parents. Second, Saint Augustine insists, God's grace precedes and accompanies human works. Third, he insists that grace heals fallen nature and leads to true liberty. Remember the important stress of the Church Fathers on free will and true liberty. Saint Augustine insists that true liberty is not contrary to free will but rather is complementary to it, and that true liberty without grace is not possible because then we would be slaves to our fallen nature. There is a remedy for original sin in grace, but there is also a healing dimension of grace. And fourth, the Doctor of Grace insists that grace is needed for final perseverance. We remain weak members of the human family and to persevere and run the race to the finish line, to grow in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, grace is absolutely essential.
Augustine does develop these four themes abundantly, particularly in opposition to Pelagius and others who denied the importance or the primacy of God's grace with respect to human action. But it cannot be emphasized too strongly that these four aspects that Saint Augustine develops are only one aspect of a far richer doctrine of grace in Saint Augustine.
We spoke of the theme of grace under the heading of theological anthropology. The Church Fathers see grace as a participation in the graciousness of God, the participation through adoption as sons and daughters in the very life of God. Saint Augustine is in striking continuity with the Greek Fathers as to the positive perfections that God's graciousness and love confer on the person when the person is born into Christ through Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. Like the Greek Fathers, Saint Augustine often speaks of the divinization. This happens to the human person through the grace of God and through adoption. With Saint Augustine's understanding of the Church as the Totus Christus, Saint Augustine after Saint Paul and Saint John and to some extent Irenaeus, is the great proponent of the Church as the Body of Christ. He is fond of the expression, Christus totus, the whole Christ, to designate the Church. Saint Augustine teaches that the whole Christ is so much one that the Psalms may often be applied not only to Christ but also to we who are his members. In his commentary on the Epistle of Saint John he uses the beautiful phrase "one Christ loving himself." To express the results of this close union of Christ and Christians he says, "By loving one becomes himself a member and through love he enters into the structure of the Body of Christ. And there will be one Christ loving himself for when the members love one another the body loves itself."
Another aspect of the doctrine of grace in Saint Augustine is his teaching about the missions or sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit, resulting in their dwelling within the Christian. In a text that had great influence on subsequent spirituality regarding contemplation and mystical experience, Saint Augustine says, "The Son and the Holy Spirit are sent to the Christians and so dwell in them when they are known and perceived," and he continues,
"therefore the Word of God is sent by the Father whose Word He is; He is sent by Him from whom He is born. He sends who begot; He is sent who is begotten. And He is then sent to anyone when He is known and perceived according to the capacity of the rational soul that is either progressing toward God or is already perfect in God."
With so vigorous a notion of the positive effects of God's graciousness, Saint Augustine was bound to reject the naturalism and exteriorism taught by Pelagius. This monk, who was perhaps of Irish extraction, lived in Rome from about 384 until the fall of Rome in the year 410, when he fled to Africa where Saint Augustine soon became one of his strongest critics. About 411 or 412, Saint Augustine published two works against Pelagius. In the meantime, Pelagius went to Palestine where he is said to have died. Highly intelligent followers of Pelagius were Julian of Eclanum and Celestius. The charges against Pelagius and his followers were that they claimed Adam would have died even if he had not sinned. They argued that Adam's sin injured only himself, not the whole race. Thus, newborns are in the same condition as Adam was before his fall because they have no personal sin. The whole human race does not die because of Adam's death or sin, nor will it rise again because of Christ's Resurrection. The Law as well as the Gospel offers entrance into Heaven, and even before the coming of Christ there were men wholly without sin.
What was involved in the controversy was the power of unaided human nature and the relations between man's liberty and God's causality. Saint Augustine had a special personal understanding of the problem. He had a special reason for asserting the role of grace in freeing man from sin and giving him true liberty, because of his own life and his own experience as described so poignantly in his Confessions. Saint Augustine contrasts the initial state of man with his fallen condition after original sin, which has been transmitted to Adam's posterity. Adam had the power not to sin, but sinned. Fallen man cannot not sin, as his nature is wounded. He is limited by ignorance. Man's liberty is curtailed since he is drawn towards sin by concupiscence. Augustine sees the role of grace as breaking this slavery and thereby freeing man. On his own man would have eternally been held captive. For Saint Augustine, grace may be, as for Pelagius, external help such as preaching, exhortation, providential events, etc., but that is only its start. The Holy Spirit must intervene interiorly to justify the sinner and move him to do the good things he cannot do by his nature without God's gracious aid. This grace for Saint Augustine is always undeserved and not merited by man. Pelagius is held to have taught that man can begin his work of salvation, that he can merit God's help and grace. Saint Augustine holds that grace is not subject to merit, rather it precedes man's actions.
Saint Augustine's theology of the sacraments is also of interest. One famous definition of sacramentum given by him in connection with a discussion of Jewish sacrifices says that the visible sacrifice is the sacrament, that is a sacred sign of the invisible sacrifice. He defines sign in De Doctrina Christiana as "a thing that in addition to the appearance it imprints on our senses of itself makes something else come into our thoughts." Saint Augustine also points out that there are natural signs, e.g. smoke being a natural sign of fire. Others are what he calls signa divinitus data, signs contained in Scripture. Saint Augustine, in showing how a sacrament comes into being, established a principle that is derived from baptismal practice, that the word comes to the element and the sacrament comes into being. And so the element is this matter or this natural sign such as water in Baptism, or bread and wine in the Eucharist. And the verbum, the word, has been generally interpreted to mean the words or formula used by the minister. We have come to our current understanding of the form and the matter that is essential to all of the sacraments through this. For our sacramental theology, for our understanding of grace, original sin, original justice, in the foundational dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity, Saint Augustine was in a privileged place. He lived and taught towards the end of the golden era of the Church Fathers. He had tremendous capacity to integrate what went before, to assimilate it into a whole, and to articulate it in a powerful way that continues to serve the Church so well. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, for his learning, but also for his holiness, for his witness of life, for he certainly lived what he proclaimed. He believed in what he lived and he has handed down to us an invaluable inheritance of richness.
Describe the main themes in Augustine's theology of grace.
Describe Augustine's use of analogies as a contribution to Trinitarian theology.
Describe the three main steps in Augustine's approach to the mystery of the Trinity.
Describe how Pelagius and Augustine differ as to their understanding of grace.
Jurgens, William.