generous and affectionate treatment of Saint Augustine, at that time an
unconverted teacher of rhetoric. It was Ambrose who was instrumental in
his conversion; and only a man of broad experience, and deep
convictions, and profound knowledge, and exquisite tact, could have had
influence over the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity. Augustine
not only praises the private life of Ambrose, but the eloquence of his
sermons; and I suppose that Augustine was a judge in such matters.
"For," says Augustine, "while I opened my heart to admire how eloquently
he spoke, I also felt how truly he spoke." Everybody equally admired and
loved this great metropolitan, because his piety was enlightened,
because he was above all religious tricks and pious frauds. He even
refused money for the Church when given grudgingly, or extorted by
plausible sophistries. He remitted to a poor woman a legacy which her
brother had given to the Church, leaving her penniless and dependent;
declaring that "if the Church is to be enriched at the expense of
fraternal friendships, if family ties are to be sundered, the cause of
Christ would be dishonored rather than advanced." We see here not only a
broad humanity, but a profound sense of justice,--a practical piety,
showing an enlightened and generous soul. He was not the man to allow a
family to be starved because a conscience-stricken husband or father
wished, under ghostly influences and in face of death, to make a
propitiation for a life of greediness and usurious grindings, by an
unjust disposition of his fortune to the Church. Possibly he had doubts
whether any money would benefit the Church which was obtained by wicked
arts, or had been originally gained by injustice and hard-heartedness.
Thus does Saint Ambrose come down to us from antiquity,--great in his
feats of heroism, great as an executive ruler of the Church, great in
deeds of benevolence, rather than as orator, theologian, or student.
Yet, like Chrysostom, he preached every Sunday, and often in the week
besides, and his sermons had great power on his generation. When he died
in 397 he left behind him even a rich legacy of theological treatises,
as well as some fervid, inspiring hymns, and an influence for the better
in the modes of church music, which was the beginning of the modern
development of that great element in public worship. As a defender of
the faith by his pen, he may have yielded to greater geniuses than he;
but as the guardian of the interests of the Church, as a stalwart giant,
who prostrated the kings of the earth before him and gained the first
great battles of the spiritual over the temporal power, Ambrose is
worthy to be ranked among the great Fathers, and will continue to
receive the praises of enlightened Christendom.
AUTHORITIES.
Life of Ambrose, by his deacon, Paulinus; Theodoret; Tillemont's
Memoires Ecclesiastique, tom. x; Baronius; Zosimus; the Epistles of
Ambrose; Butler's Lives of the Saints; Biographie Universelle; Gibbon's
Decline and Fall. Milman has only a very brief notice of this great
bishop, the founder of sacerdotalism in the Latin Church. Neander's and
the standard Church Histories. There are some popular biographical
sketches in the encyclopedias, but no classical history of this prelate,
in English, with which I am acquainted. The French writers are the best.
SAINT AUGUSTINE.
* * * * *
A.D. 354-430.
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
The most intellectual of all the Fathers of the Church was doubtless
Saint Augustine. He is the great oracle of the Latin Church. He directed
the thinking of the Christian world for a thousand years. He was not
perhaps so learned as Origen, nor so critical as Jerome; but he was
broader, profounder, and more original than they, or any other of the
great lights who shed the radiance of genius on the crumbling fabric of
the ancient civilization. He is the sainted doctor of the Church,
equally an authority with both Catholics and Protestants. His
penetrating genius, his comprehensive views of all systems of ancient
thought, and his marvellous powers as a systematizer of Christian
doctrines place him among the immortal benefactors of mankind; while his
humanity, his breadth, his charity, and his piety have endeared him to
the heart of the Christian world.
Let me present, as well as I can, his history, his services, and his
personal character, all of which form no small part of the inheritance
bequeathed to us by the giants of the fourth and fifth centuries,--that
which we call the Patristic literature,--the only literature worthy of
preservation in the declining days of the old Roman world.
Augustine was born at Tagaste, or Tagastum, near Carthage, in the
Numidian province of the Roman Empire, in the year 354,--a province
rich, cultivated, luxurious, where the people (at least the educated
classes) spoke the Latin language, and had adopted the Roman laws and
institutions. They were not black, like negroes, though probably
swarthy, being descended from Tyrians and Greeks, as well as Numidians.
They were as civilized as the Spaniards or the Gauls or the Syrians.
Carthage then rivalled Alexandria, which was a Grecian city. If
Augustine was not as white as Ptolemy or Cleopatra, he was probably no
darker than Athanasius.
Unlike most of the great Fathers, his parentage was humble. He owed
nothing to the circumstances of wealth and rank. His father was a
heathen, and lived, as Augustine tells us, in "heathenish sin." But his
mother was a woman of remarkable piety and strength of mind, who devoted
herself to the education of her son. Augustine never alludes to her
except with veneration; and his history adds additional confirmation to
the fact that nearly all the remarkable men of our world have had
remarkable mothers. No woman is dearer to the Church than Monica, the
sainted mother of Augustine, and chiefly in view of her intense
solicitude for his spiritual interests, and her extraordinary faith in
his future conversion, in spite of his youthful follies and
excesses,--encouraged by that good bishop who told her "that it was
impossible that the child of so many prayers could be lost."
Augustine, in his "Confessions,"--that remarkable book which has lasted
fifteen hundred years, and is still prized for its intensity, its
candor, and its profound acquaintance with the human heart, as well as
evangelical truth; not an egotistical parade of morbid sentimentalities,
like the "Confessions" of Rousseau, but a mirror of Christian
experience,--tells us that until he was sixteen he was obstinate, lazy,
neglectful of his studies, indifferent to reproach, and abandoned to
heathenish sports. He even committed petty thefts, was quarrelsome, and
indulged in demoralizing pleasures. At nineteen he was sent to Carthage
to be educated, where he went still further astray; was a follower of
stage-players (then all but infamous), and gave himself up to unholy
loves. But his intellect was inquiring, his nature genial, and his
habits as studious as could be reconciled with a life of pleasure,--a
sort of Alcibiades, without his wealth and rank, willing to listen to
any Socrates who would stimulate his mind. With all his excesses and
vanities, he was not frivolous, and seemed at an early age to be a
sincere inquirer after truth. The first work which had a marked effect
on him was the "Hortensius" of Cicero,--a lost book, which contained an
eloquent exhortation to philosophy, or the love of wisdom. From that he
turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they seemed to him then very poor,
compared with the stateliness of Tully, nor could his sharp wit
penetrate their meaning. Those who seemed to have the greatest influence
over him were the Manicheans,--a transcendental, oracular, indefinite,
illogical, pretentious set of philosophers, who claimed superior wisdom,
and were not unlike (at least in spirit) those modern _savans_ in the
Christian commonwealth, who make a mockery of what is most sacred in
Christianity while themselves propounding the most absurd theories.
The Manicheans claimed to be a Christian sect, but were Oriental in
their origin and Pagan in their ideas. They derived their doctrines from
Manes, or Mani, who flourished in Persia in the second half of the third
century, and who engrafted some Christian doctrines on his system, which
was essentially the dualism of Zoroaster and the pantheism of Buddha. He
assumed two original substances,--God and Hyle, light and darkness,
good and evil,--which were opposed to each other. Matter, which is
neither good nor evil, was regarded as bad in itself, and identified
with darkness, the prince of which overthrew the primitive man. Among
the descendants of the fallen man light and darkness have struggled for
supremacy, but matter, or darkness, conquered; and Christ, who was
confounded with the sun, came to break the dominion. But the light of
his essential being could not unite with darkness; therefore he was not
born of a woman, nor did he die to rise again. Christ had thus no
personal existence. As the body, being matter, was thought to be
essentially evil, it was the aim of the Manicheans to set the soul free
from matter; hence abstinence, and the various forms of asceticism which
early entered into the pietism of the Oriental monks. That which gave
the Manicheans a hold on the mind of Augustine, seeking after truth, was
their arrogant claim to the solution of mysteries, especially the origin
of evil, and their affectation of superior knowledge. Their watchwords
were Reason, Science, Philosophy. Moreover, like the Sophists in the
time of Socrates, they were assuming, specious, and rhetorical.
Augustine--ardent, imaginative, credulous--was attracted by them, and he
enrolled himself in their esoteric circle.
The coarser forms of sin he now abandoned, only to resign himself to the
emptiness of dreamy speculations and the praises of admirers. He won
prizes and laurels in the schools. For nine years he was much flattered
for his philosophical attainments. I can almost see this enthusiastic
youth scandalizing and shocking his mother and her friends by his bold
advocacy of doctrines at war with the gospel, but which he supposed to
be very philosophical. Pert and bright young men in these times often
talk as he did, but do not know enough to see their own shallowness.
"Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
The mind of Augustine, however, was logical, and naturally profound; and
at last he became dissatisfied with the nonsense with which plausible
pretenders ensnared him. He was then what we should call a schoolmaster,
or what some would call a professor, and taught rhetoric for his
support, which was a lucrative and honorable calling. He became a master
of words. From words he ascended to definitions, and like all true
inquirers began to love the definite, the precise. He wanted a basis to
stand upon. He sought certitudes,--elemental truths which sophistry
could not cover up. Then the Manicheans could no longer satisfy him. He
had doubts, difficulties, which no Manichean could explain, not even Dr.
Faustus of Mileve, the great oracle and leader of the sect,--a subtle
dialectician and brilliant orator, but without depth or
earnestness,--whom he compares to a cup-bearer presenting a costly
goblet, but without anything in it. And when it became clear that this
high-priest of pretended wisdom was ignorant of the things in which he
was supposed to excel, but which Augustine himself had already learned,
his disappointment was so great that he lost faith both in the teacher
and his doctrines. Thus this Faustus, "neither willing nor witting it,"
was the very man who loosened the net which had ensnared Augustine for
so many years.
He was now thirty years of age, and had taught rhetoric in Carthage, the
capital of Northern Africa, with brilliant success, for three years; but
panting for new honors or for new truth, he removed to Rome, to pursue
both his profession and his philosophical studies. He entered the
capital of the world in the height of its material glories, but in the
decline of its political importance, when Damasus occupied the episcopal
throne, and Saint Jerome was explaining the Scriptures to the high-born
ladies of Mount Aventine, who grouped around him,--women like Paula,
Fabiola, and Marcella. Augustine knew none of these illustrious people.
He lodged with a Manichean, and still frequented the meetings of the
sect; convinced, indeed, that the truth was not with them, but
despairing to find it elsewhere. In this state of mind he was drawn to
the doctrines of the New Academy,--or, as Augustine in his
"Confessions" calls them, the Academics,--whose representatives,
Arcesilaus and Carneades, also made great pretensions, but denied the
possibility of arriving at absolute truth,--aiming only at probability.
However lofty the speculations of these philosophers, they were
sceptical in their tendency. They furnished no anchor for such an
earnest thinker as Augustine. They gave him no consolation. Yet his
dislike of Christianity remained.
Moreover, he was disappointed with Rome. He did not find there the great
men he sought, or if great men were there he could not get access to
them. He found himself in a moral desert, without friends and congenial
companions. He found everybody so immersed in pleasure, or gain, or
frivolity, that they had no time or inclination for the quest for truth,
except in those circles he despised. "Truth," they cynically said, "what
_is_ truth? Will truth enable us to make eligible matches with rich
women? Will it give us luxurious banquets, or build palaces, or procure
chariots of silver, or robes of silk, or oysters of the Lucrine lake, or
Falernian wines? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Inasmuch
as the arts of rhetoric enabled men to rise at the bar or shine in
fashionable circles, he had plenty of scholars; but they left his
lecture-room when required to pay. At Carthage his pupils were
boisterous and turbulent; at Rome they were tricky and mean. The
professor was not only disappointed,--he was disgusted. He found
neither truth nor money. Still, he was not wholly unknown or
unsuccessful. His great abilities were seen and admired; so that when
the people of Milan sent to Symmachus, the prefect of the city, to
procure for them an able teacher of rhetoric, he sent Augustine,--a
providential thing, since in the second capital of Italy he heard the
great Ambrose preach; he found one Christian whom he respected, whom he
admired,--and him he sought. And Ambrose found time to show him an
episcopal kindness. At first Augustine listened as a critic, trying the
eloquence of Ambrose, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed
fuller or lower than was reported; "but of the matter I was," says
Augustine, "a scornful and careless looker-on, being delighted with the
sweetness of his discourse. Yet I was, though by little and little,
gradually drawing nearer and nearer to truth; for though I took no pains
to learn _what_ he spoke, only to hear _how_ he spoke, yet, together
with the words which I would choose, came into my mind the things I
would refuse; and while I opened my heart to admire how eloquently he
spoke, I also felt how truly he spoke. And so by degrees I resolved to
abandon forever the Manicheans, whose falsehoods I detested, and
determined to be a catechumen of the Catholic Church."
This was the great crisis of his life. He had renounced a false
philosophy; he sought truth from a Christian bishop; he put himself
under Christian influences. Fortunately at this time his mother Monica,
to whom he had lied and from whom he had run away, joined him; also his
son Adeodatus,--the son of the woman with whom he had lived in illicit
intercourse for fifteen years. But his conversion was not accomplished.
He purposed marriage, sent away his concubine to Africa, and yet fell
again into the mazes of another unlawful and entangling love. It was not
easy to overcome the loose habits of his life. Sensuality ever robs a
man of the power of will. He had a double nature,--a strong sensual
body, with a lofty and inquiring soul. And awful were his conflicts, not
with an unfettered imagination, like Jerome in the wilderness, but with
positive sin. The evil that he would not, that he did, followed with
remorse and shame; still a slave to his senses, and perhaps to his
imagination, for though he had broken away from the materialism of the
Manicheans, he had not abandoned philosophy. He read the books of Plato,
which had a good effect, since he saw, what he had not seen before, that
true realities are purely intellectual, and that God, who occupies the
summit of the world of intelligence, is a pure spirit, inaccessible to
the senses; so that Platonism to him, in an important sense, was the
vestibule of Christianity. Platonism, the loftiest development of pagan
thought, however, did not emancipate him. He comprehended the Logos of
the Athenian sage; but he did not comprehend the Word made flesh, the
Word attached to the Cross. The mystery of the Incarnation offended his
pride of reason.
At length light beamed in upon him from another source, whose simplicity
he had despised. He read Saint Paul. No longer did the apostle's style
seem barbarous, as it did to Cardinal Bembo,--it was a fountain of life.
He was taught two things he had not read in the books of the
Platonists,--the lost state of man, and the need of divine grace. The
Incarnation appeared in a new light. Jesus Christ was revealed to him as
the restorer of fallen humanity.
He was now "rationally convinced." He accepted the theology of Saint
Paul; but he could not break away from his sins. And yet the awful
truths he accepted filled him with anguish, and produced dreadful
conflicts. The law of his members warred against the law of his mind. In
agonies he cried, "Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from
this body of death?" He shunned all intercourse. He withdrew to his
garden, reclined under a fig-tree, and gave vent to bitter tears. He
wrestled with the angel, and his deliverance was at hand. It was under
the fig-tree of his garden that he fancied he heard a voice of boy or
girl, he could not tell, chanting and often repeating, "Take up and
read; take up and read." He opened the Scriptures, and his eye alighted
not on the text which had converted Antony the monk, "Go and sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven," but on this: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in
rioting, drunkenness, and wantonness, but put ye on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and not make provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts
thereof." That text decided him, and broke his fetters. His conversion
was accomplished. He poured forth his soul in thanksgiving and praise.
He was now in the thirty-second year of his age, and resolved to
renounce his profession,--or, to use his language, "to withdraw from the
marts of lip-labor and the selling of words,"--and enter the service of
the new master who had called him to prepare himself for a higher
vocation. He retired to a country house, near Milan, which belonged to
his friend Veracundus, and he was accompanied in his retreat by his
mother, his brother Navigius, his son Adeodatus, Alypius his confidant,
Trigentius and Licentius his scholars, and his cousins Lastidianus and
Rusticus. I should like to describe those blissful and enchanting days,
when without asceticism and without fanaticism, surrounded with admiring
friends and relatives, he discoursed on the highest truths which can
elevate the human mind. Amid the rich olive-groves and dark waving
chesnuts which skirted the loveliest of Italian lakes, in sight of both
Alps and Apennines, did this great master of Christian philosophy
prepare himself for his future labors, and forge the weapons with which
he overthrew the high-priests who assailed the integrity of the
Christian faith. The hand of opulent friendship supplied his wants, as
Paula ministered to Jerome in Bethlehem. Often were discussions with his
pupils and friends prolonged into the night and continued until the
morning. Plato and Saint Paul reappeared in the gardens of Como. Thus
three more glorious years were passed in study, in retirement, and in
profitable discourse, without scandal and without vanity. The proud
philosopher was changed into a humble Christian, thirsting for a living
union with God. The Psalms of David, next to the Epistles of Saint Paul,
were his favorite study,--that pure and lofty poetry "which strips away
the curtains of the skies, and approaches boldly but meekly into the
presence of Him who dwells in boundless and inaccessible majesty." In
the year 387, at the age of thirty-three, he received the rite of
baptism from the great archbishop who was so instrumental in his
conversion, and was admitted into the ranks of the visible Church, and
prepared to return to Africa. But before he could embark, his beloved
mother died at Ostia, feeling, with Simeon, that she could now depart in
peace, having seen the salvation of the Lord,--but to the immoderate
grief of Augustine who made no effort to dry his tears. It was not till
the following year that he sailed for Carthage, not long tarrying there,
but retiring to Tagaste, to his paternal estate, where he spent three
years more in study and meditation, giving away all he possessed to
religion and charity, living with his friends in a complete community of
goods. It was there that some of his best works were composed. In the
year 391, on a visit to Hippo, a Numidian seaport, he was forced into
more active duties. Entering the church, the people clamored for his
ordination; and such was his power as a pulpit orator, and so
universally was he revered, that in two years after he became coadjutor
bishop, and his great career began.
As a bishop he won universal admiration. Councils could do nothing
without his presence. Emperors condescended to sue for his advice. He
wrote letters to all parts of Christendom. He was alike saint, oracle,
prelate, and preacher. He labored day and night, living simply, but
without monkish austerity. At table, reading and literary conferences
were preferred to secular conversation. His person was accessible. He
interested himself in everybody's troubles, and visited the forlorn and
miserable. He was indefatigable in reclaiming those who had strayed from
the fold. He won every heart by charity, and captivated every mind with
his eloquence; so that Hippo, a little African town, was no longer
"least among the cities of Judah," since her prelate was consulted from
the extremities of the earth, and his influence went forth throughout
the crumbling Empire, to heal division and establish the faith of the
wavering,--a Father of the Church universal.
Yet it is not as bishop, but as doctor, that he is immortal. It was his
mission to head off the dissensions and heresies of his age, and to
establish the faith of Paul even among the Germanic barbarians. He is
the great theologian of the Church, and his system of divinity not only
was the creed of the Middle Ages, but is still an authority in the
schools, both Catholic and Protestant.
Let us, then, turn to his services as theologian and philosopher. He
wrote over a thousand treatises, and on almost every subject that has
interested the human mind; but his labors were chiefly confined to the
prevailing and more subtle and dangerous errors of his day. Nor was it
by dry dialectics that he refuted these heresies, although the most
logical and acute of men, but by his profound insight into the cardinal
principles of Christianity, which he discoursed upon with the most
extraordinary affluence of thought and language, disdaining all
sophistries and speculations. He went to the very core,--a realist of
the most exalted type, permeated with the spirit of Plato, yet bowing
down to Paul.
We first find him combating the opinions which had originally enthralled
him, and which he understood better than any theologian who ever lived.