Saint Augustine

If you live in Florida, you think of Saint Augustine as a city in your state.  If you took Western Civ in college, you may have heard of the saint.  Wasn't he like an early Christian thinker or something? you say.  Yes he was, and the person after whom the city is named.  He's actually one of the most important Christian thinkers of the West.  The following gives you a few highlights that ought to jog your memory of Western Civ--or fill in a gap if you never took it.

Before beginning, let's clarify, that there are two saints named Augustine.  The first one is the one we're talking about today (lived 354-430).  He was a bishop in North Africa when North Africa was still part of the Christian Roman Empire, pre-Islam.  I pronounce his name AW-gust-teen, like the Florida city.  The other one was sent from Rome to Anglo-Saxon England around the year 600 to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings to Christianity, at which he was fairly successful.  I pronounce his name Aw-GUST-tin, to keep him separate from the first one.  (Note that pronunciation of these names is fairly mix-and-match, depending on who you ask.)  (The name Austin is a variation of Augustine.  Thought you should know.)

Let's talk about the bishop.  He wasn't a bishop at first, of course.  He grew up in Roman North Africa, son of a Christian mother, Monica, and a father who didn't seem to worry much about religion one way or the other.  (Monica is also a saint now.  You go, girl.)  Young Augustine's father told him to enjoy his youth, sow some wild oats, and Augustine took him up on it.  We know all of this because Augustine was one of the first people to write an autobiography, a story of his own life, which he called "Confessions."  But among all the wine, women, and song, he started thinking about philosophical issues.

His big question (and a question that's continued to be big for all philosophers) was, Why is there evil in the world?  First he decided Dualism was the answer.  This is the philosophy that the universe is caught in an eternal struggle between Good and Evil.  They are equally balanced, and neither will ever win.  (This is also called Manichaeism.  It's officially a heresy.  It's also related to the religion of Zoroastrianism.)

Augustine ended up rejecting Dualism, however, after reading the pagan Greek philosopher Plato (lived in fifth century BC).  Plato argued for archetypes, absolutes, that we all reflect dimly, saying that there is such a thing as Absolute Good (this was against other Greek philosophers, who said everything was relative).  However, there was no Absolute Evil, only an absence of good.

(Think about light versus dark.  Dark isn't an absolute.  It's just the absence of light.  When you go to bed you don't reach for the switch and "turn on the dark.")

Young Augustine really studied Plato and other early Greeks (in translation into Latin, his own native language) and went off to Milan, where there was a famous school of philosophy at the time.  Here he encountered Ambrose, who was both bishop of Milan and a noted philosopher in his own right.  (Ambrose is also now a saint.  The cathedral of Milan is dedicated to Santo Ambrogio.  That's him.)  Ambrose converted Augustine to Christianity, and Augustine soon went home to North Africa to become bishop of the city of Hippo Regius (which was not a city of hippopotamuses, it's just its name‚ a city now in Algeria and called Annaba).

Here he started writing, so many books, in fact, that when he died it was said that no one could possibly read them all.  And these weren't just any books.  These became the most important works defining theology for the Middle Ages--and for that matter, he was also very influential on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Augustine settled on original sin and the will to explain evil.  Humans, he said, ever since Adam and Eve had wanted to have their own way, rather than do what was right and good.  There was no "childhood innocence" for him, but everyone was born a sinner.  He pointed out that if a woman were nursing two babies (either twins, or one of hers and another she was fostering) the two would fight over who had the Lucky Breast.  Without baptism that wiped out original sin (the sin of our origins, from Adam and Eve), everyone would go straight to hell.  Not surprisingly, this idea pushed baptism  from something you might undergo in old age back to infancy.

But, as he knew perfectly well, everybody kept on sinning away even after baptism.  Augustine stressed that no one can make their own salvation, no one can always be good and pure and earn their way into heaven.  (The idea that all it takes is to choose to do good to be saved is another heresy, Pelagianism.)  Since everyone's a sinner, we all need grace, he said, God undeservedly choosing to save at least some of us--a possibility because of Christ's sacrifice, grace given to humans via the sacraments.

Because Augustine rejected Dualism (though Christianity still has a lot of dualism in it), he rejected the idea that the body was naturally bad.  After all, Genesis is clear that God had created the physical world, including human bodies, and God doesn't create bad things, even if we mess them up.  Our problem is a will that tells the body to go for it.

Sex, like the body, was not naturally bad.  After all, Adam and Eve were supposed to multiply.  (And we're not talking here about the times-tables.)  Sex in marriage, for the purpose of having children, was just fine for Augustine.  But willfully deciding to have sex just for fun, especially if outside of marriage, was clearly sinful.  This is still the official Catholic position.  (But one was allowed to enjoy procreation.  Whew.)

Perhaps his most famous work is "The City of God," in which he argued that humans cannot create heaven on earth, but that the perfect city will be found only after death, in heaven.  This was written partially in response to the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410, which caused some to complain that things had been better in the olden, pagan days, when Rome wasn't sacked a bit, and others to blame God for allowing perfectly good Christians to have their city sacked.  You're missing the point, Augustine said.  The Vandals (like the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe) sacked his own city of Hippo as he was dying in 430, but they left his cathedral and library untouched.

Click here for more on figuring out philosophically why there is evil in the world.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval philosophy and religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.