On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity

John Peter Kenney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501314001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Reading Augustine is a new line of books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. The aim of the series is to make clear Augustine's importance to contemporary thought and to present Augustine not only or primarily as a pre-eminent Christian thinker but as a philosophical, spiritual, literary and intellectual icon of the West. Why did the ancients come to adopt monotheism and Christianity? On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity introduces possible answers to that question by looking closely at the development of the thought of Augustine of Hippo, whose complex spiritual trajectory included Gnosticism, academic skepticism, pagan Platonism, and orthodox Christianity. What was so compelling about Christianity and how did Augustine become convinced that his soul could enter into communion with a transcendent God? The apparently sudden shift of ancient culture to monotheism and Christianity was momentous, defining the subsequent nature of Western religion and thought. John Peter Kenney shows us that Augustine offers an unusually clear vantage point to understand the essential ideas that drove that transition.

1

Christian Enlightenment

And I heard as one hears in the heart, and from that moment there was no longer any doubt.

Augustine came to believe in the God of orthodox Christianity because he had no choice. He tells us in his Confessions that sometime around 384, when he was in a sceptical mood, he was completely overwhelmed by the presence of God, so much so that it would have been easier to doubt that he existed, than to doubt the reality of God (Confessions VII.10.16). This moment of understanding secured for him personal certainty about the existence of God and catalysed a new departure in his spiritual life.

We have all heard stories like this before: Prince Gautama’s enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, or the rabbi Saul’s blinding encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, his soul caught up to the third heaven. Lives forever changed; new spiritual movements initiated. So it was with Augustine. At the height of his fame as a rhetorician at the Imperial Roman Court, several moments of enlightenment led him not only to become a Catholic Christian but to abandon his worldly life and adopt asceticism. Before his enlightenment he had written only a short treatise, afterwards he generated hundreds of books, treatises, sermons and letters – over five million words. He had been transformed by the God of the Christians.

This chapter explores how Augustine found his way into orthodox Christianity through this transformative experience. But he was the first to admit that this outcome was initially unlikely. To understand why this was so, and what was going on in this momentous transition, we need first to consider his religious trajectory. That will then allow us to consider what options he rejected as he moved towards Christian monotheism and why he finally embraced it.

Varieties of Christianity

Augustine lived in an age that was not short on religious options. This was true not only of the Roman Empire as a whole, but also of his home province of Africa. Born in 354 in what is now Algeria, he grew up inland about 60 miles from the Mediterranean. His father Patricius was a successful farmer, with some regional significance as a member of the local Roman governing class. Patricius was a pagan, and an indifferent one at that. Augustine offers a brief but harsh portrait of him in the Confessions. He sketches him as a man without moral bearings and fiercely determined to improve his family’s status by advancing his son’s career as a rhetorician. Patricius eventually converted to Catholicism near the end of his life. By contrast his mother Monica was a committed Catholic, yet she too emerges from his autobiography as ambitious for her son. In her case, those ambitions were not entirely worldly, but included her intention to see Augustine baptized as a Catholic. She stalked him throughout his adult career, following him when he moved from Carthage to Rome and finally to Milan as he advanced in his profession.

Although Monica was keen to see her son become a Catholic, she did not have him baptized as an infant, a practice that was beginning to take hold in the period. Instead she delayed, Augustine tells us, because she wanted to wait until the moral storms of his adolescence had passed. The depiction of his adolescence in the Confessions suggests she may have had a point. If baptism was the one certain means for the remission of sin, better to hold off until maturity. But Augustine was almost baptized when his life seemed endangered by a fever, but the moment passed. Monica did have him enrolled as a Catholic catechumen, so that he was introduced to the basic teachings of his mother’s religion from his youth. Later on, after his conversion to orthodoxy, he would remember this fact fondly, recounting to a childhood friend how Catholicism had been grafted into his sinews from his youth (Against the Academics 2.2.5). So it is fair to say that Augustine was brought up and educated within the ambience of orthodox Christianity, even if he was never formally admitted through baptism.

Yet the Catholicism that Monica followed was by no means the largest Christian body in North Africa. In fact, Donatist Christianity was the dominant group in Augustine’s youth. The Donatists were a Christian sect whose theology was largely the same as the Catholics, except that they refused to countenance the readmission of Christians who had submitted to the Roman government and forsworn their Christian faith during the final worldwide persecution in 303–13 initiated under the pagan Emperor Diocletian. This was an acute matter in the case of clergy who had avoided torture and death by offering sacrifice to the pagan gods or surrendered the Gospel books for burning by Roman authorities. Should they simply be allowed to resume their roles, or was rebaptism and reconsecration necessary? Were the sacramental rituals that they had performed even valid? Naturally enough, there had been a wide range of accommodative behaviour, some of it designed to fool Roman authorities by surrendering non-canonical texts. Many Christians of all backgrounds had avoided persecution by slipping out of town until things blew over.

After the practice of Christianity became legal in 313, what to do with Christians who had committed various levels of apostasy became an exigent question. The followers of Donatus, a claimant to the episcopal office in Carthage, insisted on rigorism. Those Christians, whether lay or clerical, who had apostatized in any way before the Roman authorities would need to do penance and be rebaptized. Moreover, the sacraments performed by those apostate clergy were regarded as null and void, tainted by the sin of faithless clergy who had exercised their clerical office in an impaired moral state. In contrast, the Catholics required only acts of contrition and penance in order for apostates to be reinstated, not rebaptism. In the case of apostate clergy, they regarded the efficacy of the sacraments they had performed to be independent of the moral state of the officiating clergy. On the ground in North Africa, the rigorism of the Donatists won out, perhaps because the issues involved were more than just religious, but included political attitudes towards Roman imperial control in North Africa. Indeed, radical Donatists, known as Circumcellions, engaged in a military insurgency in opposition to Roman rule. After Augustine became a Catholic bishop, it appears that Circumcellions attempted to assassinate him several times. But the Donatists were prone to internal divisions and were eventually suppressed by Roman authorities in the early fifth century; their churches were surrendered to the imperially sanctioned Catholics and their adherents encouraged to rejoin. Augustine would acquiesce to this act of religious coercion, in large measure because of his estimation of the tacitly political character of the conflict and the sporadic violence that it had engendered. Scholars continue to assess his motives and complicity in this act of suppression (Brown 2000).

The nature of this division among North African Christians should alert us to the position of Catholic Christianity and its eventual appeal to Augustine. For Catholicism was the branch of Christianity that maintained the orthodox definition of Christianity decided at the Council of Nicaea in 324–5, the first w orldwide council of bishops after legalization. This Nicene Christianity understood itself to be Catholic or universal, emerging from several centuries of discussion over the uniqueness of the One God and the nature of Jesus Christ. That process was perforce an internal one while the Christian movement was illegal, but it surfaced into the imperial sunlight when Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea. It was on that public stage that the Catholic Church was now required to settle exactly what it believed about Christ and his relation to the God of the Hebrew scriptures. Out of that critical moment of religious self-definition emerged Catholic monotheism.

The creed that was cobbled together tells us much about the disputed issues within the Christian mainstream and leaves a great deal under-defined. It begins most importantly by establishing the divine Father as the centre of monotheism and its does so by characterizing him as the ‘maker of heaven and earth’. The Son of God is described as ‘only begotten’ from the Father. There is a clear imperative to make the connection between these two as tight as possible, with the Son’s derivation presented as ‘from the substance of the Father’, as ‘God from God’, as ‘light from light’ and as ‘true God from true God’. The Son is ‘begotten not made, of one substance with the Father’. It is also that ‘through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and on earth’. So the logic of Nicene monotheism is based on the essential connection of Father to Son, and on the sharp line of demarcation between what is uncreated and what is created. That formula throws into relief the inner nature of God shared by the Father and Son, and it brings to the fore the idea of divine creation as the bright seam of separation between God and everything else. This would one day become the creed of Augustine, although only later in his life, and only after he was able to interpret its sketchy language with greater philosophical precision.

It bears mention that while the council settled on this theology, it threw into relief other widely held theological views within the Christian movement. The creed of Nicaea came attached with a set of rejected ideas that help us see beneath the surface of its assertions and into the minds of its opponents. The ‘Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’ anathematized any suggestion that the Son is of a different substance from the Father, or that the Son is created, or that the Son could undergo alteration or change. Underlying those claims was a version of Christian monotheism associated with Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter. Although the ideas he espoused had been debated long before the council, the powerful faction at the council which adopted them became known to history as Arians. That form of Christian theism regarded the Father as the true God and placed the Son on the other side of the line of creation. The ‘first-born of all creation’ is a Pauline phrase from Col. 1.15. Arians interpreted it to mean that only the Father was uncreated. Thus, the Son must be of a different nature from the Father and, like all mundane things, the Son must be subject to change. This Arian theology had several appealing aspects. It made it easy to envision the person and mission of Jesus Christ, seen as an intermediary power whose incarnation was consistent with his inherent nature as a creature. It also made Christianity a form of monotheism straightforwardly continuous with the religion of ancient Israel, since this was an exclusive monotheism that understood the oneness of God in a strictly numerical fashion. Indeed, its persuasive force was sufficient to keep Arianism popular and under continuous debate throughout Augustine’s lifetime. Members of the imperial family shifted back and forth between Nicene and Arian Christianity for decades. Moreover, the barbarian Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 were Arians, converted by exiled Arian missionaries. As Augustine lay dying in 430, Hippo Regius, the city where he had preached Catholicism for decades, was besieged by the Vandals. In a bitter irony, they too were Arians.

These were some of the more dominant forms of Christianity in the age of Augustine. Yet, when he reached his late adolescence and went to study the liberal arts in Carthage, Augustine chose a very different path. He was drawn into a proscribed sort of Christianity, Manichaeism. Strikingly, Manichaeism was not even a form of monotheism, yet it had an appeal to Augustine that Nicene Catholicism lacked. That was its claim to intellectual sophistication. Looking back when he wrote his Confessions, Augustine tells us that the Manichees he encountered during his days as a student in Carthage presented their theology as rational and scientific. In contrast, the Catholicism of his rural childhood seemed to him deficient intellectually. In particular, the Manichees rejected as ridiculous the God of the Old Testament, a God depicted in anthropomorphic terms, with hands, feet and unpredictable mood swings. The hometown Catholicism of Augustine’s North African youth evidently took a largely literalist approach to the reading of scripture.

Before we follow him into Manichaeism, it is worth taking a moment to recognize the significance of this point. When he wrote his autobiography, Augustine was a newly consecrated Catholic bishop. Part of his motivation in telling his story lay in the need to explain his complicated religious past. It was awkward enough to have been a Manichee for a decade or so. But worse was the fact that he had started out as a Catholic catechumen in his youth but had rejected his mother’s religion. In the Confessions he is quite explicit that his reason was intellectual. He had failed to discover a concept of God that he regarded as adequate or defensible, a God free from naï ve anthropomorphism. That failure was driven by the literalistic biblicism of his hometown Catholicism, as well as by its lack of philosophical articulation. He says that he was never able to imagine a God who was not in some sense physical, even if that God was understood as the maker of things visible and invisible. So what the young Augustine required from Catholicism was more than the God he had encountered in the Nicene Creed and the Bible. And so he drifted off elsewhere. It would take him many years before he finally found what had been missing in his first exposure to Catholicism.

Where he went was to an esoteric form of Christianity founded by Mani, a Persian who styled himself as the ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’. While things ended badly for him, with his crucifixion by the Persian government in 276, the sect he founded survived by spreading both into the Roman Empire and out into the East. It travelled along the Silk Road all the way to China and beyond in the medieval period. So it was a force to be reckoned with, one whose inherent religious character was sufficiently compelling to draw significant adherents across many different cultures. Some of its teachings might, it is fair to say, strike contemporary readers as bizarre, as they ultimately came to seem to Augustine. But the outline of its main theological teaching is what interests us. What is most striking about Manichaeism is not just its postulation of two primordial powers, but in particular its presentation of these forces as locked in struggle with one another. This is the most salient aspect of Manichaeism. It is what might be called a ‘conflict dualism’; that is, it centres on the cosmic battle between two powers whose enmity defines the nature of reality.

Dualism was a ubiquito us cosmology in antiquity. Versions can be found throughout the ancient philosophical schools. Most of those theories claimed that two primordial powers were responsible for the cosmos, yet they were compatible with each other, not in conflict. They were distinct poles united by their interaction. For example, Plato’s great cosmological dialogue, the Timaeus, describes a primal power called ‘space’ that is full of discordant motion. It is the stuff used by a divine agent, the demiurge, to craft the cosmos, shaping it according to an independent divine pattern. The disorder of spatial chaos is said to yield to the persuasion of order, even if it remains recalcitrant to rational structure. Plato’s story can be read to describe a continuous process with its own inherent logic, an account of two fundamental powers – order and disorder – that constitute the ingredients of reality. This pattern can be found as well in the thought of Plato’s student Aristotle, who understood primordial matter as the potential foundation for the rational structure of the cosmos, drawn by the magnetism of divine order. So too the Stoics held a modified dualism, such that God or Nature encompassed the cosmos as an immanent power, but was itself divided into two poles. These were the active power of reason, the Logos, identified with fire, and the passive power of matter that is inert but receptive of rational ordering. Both powers permeate the cosmos.

All these ancient philosophical sorts of dualism, while postulating a principle separate from reason and order, nonetheless envisioned a comprehensive and rational pattern of association between the two poles. But this was not the case with Manichaeism. Instead, it presented these two powers as actively at odds and their cosmic struggle as intense and ongoing. The cosmos was thus not the best of all possible worlds that could have emerged from the confluence of two different sources, but the violent by-product of their ongoing clash. These two opposing principles were the power of goodness, light and spirit, over against the power of evil, darkness and matter. In Manichaeism the light was passive while evil was active, the ravenous power of the dark side. Moreover, these conflicting forces were not understood metaphorically, but were actual physical powers at odds within the visible cosmos. For that reason Manichaeism could present itself to postulants like Augustine as a scientific account of the natural universe, as much physics as metaphysics. And so for Manichees the battle between the immensity of darkness and the restricted points of goodness was writ large in the night sky. To Manichees, darkness was literally – nor figuratively – evil, and its ferocity could be directly seen by the naked eye in the war of the worlds above, as the bright goodness of meteors was extinguished by evil darkness and the planets occluded. The sun was the source of all goodness and light; the moon a halfway station for light particles who had escaped from bodies and were collecting themselves for the perilous journey back to the sun. We humans were venues for that cosmic struggle. Within those who were Manichees, there was a ruined fragment of primordial light, a spark of goodness, a bit of the divine spirit actually encased in the evil matter of the physical body. The goal of Manichees was passive resistance to the irrational passions that afflict the spirit, and the withdrawal of the spirit from the darkness that had physically covered over its true inner nature. Hence, rigorous asceticism was the norm for high-level Manichaean saints, the ‘perfect ones’, and something to be aspired to by ‘hearers’, the second-class members like Augustine who were still finding their way into the light within them.

Augustine was a Manichee for about a decade. Gradually, as his studies in the liberal arts progressed, he came to suspect that Manichaeism lacked the intellectual warrant that he had been led to believe. In particular he came to notice an obvious divergence between what the Manichees claimed about the nature of the cosmos and what he discovered in his reading of the classical physical sciences. He also grew to believe that Manichaean theories were in some cases quite implausible and ridiculous. A particularly striking instance of this was their belief that bits of divine light were trapped in fruit – a sort of theological version of photosynthesis. But those sparks could be released if the fruit were ingested and then vomited out by one of the Manichaean elect in an act of spiritual bulimia. Here is his description fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Reading Augustine
• 1 Christian Enlightenment
• 2 God
• 3 The Soul
• 4 Evil
• 5 The Rise of Christianity
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright