dogmatical, polemical, ascetic, and autobiographical,--three hundred and
sixty-three of his sermons have come down to us, and numerous letters to
the great men and women of his time. Perhaps he wrote too much and too
loosely, without sufficient regard to art,--like Varro, the most
voluminous writer of antiquity, and to whose writings Augustine was much
indebted. If Saint Augustine had written less, and with more care, his
writings would now be more read and more valued. Thucydides compressed
the labors of his literary life into a single volume; but that volume
is immortal, is a classic, is a text-book. Yet no work of man is
probably more lasting than the "Confessions" of Augustine, from the
extraordinary affluence and subtilty of his thoughts, and his burning,
fervid, passionate style. When books were scarce and dear, his various
works were the food of the Middle Ages: and what better books ever
nourished the European mind in a long period of ignorance and ignominy?
So that we cannot overrate his influence in giving a direction to
Christian thought. He lived in the writings of the sainted doctors of
the Scholastic schools. And he was a very favored man in living to a
good old age, wearing the harness of a Christian laborer and the armor
of a Christian warrior until he was seventy-six. He was a bishop nearly
forty years. For forty years he was the oracle of the Church, the light
of doctors. His social and private life had also great charms: he lived
the doctrines that he preached; he completely triumphed over the
temptations which once assailed him. Everybody loved as well as revered
him, so genial was his humanity, so broad his charity. He was affable,
courteous, accessible, full of sympathy and kindness. He was tolerant of
human infirmities in an age of angry controversy and ascetic rigors. He
lived simply, but was exceedingly hospitable. He cared nothing for
money, and gave away what he had. He knew the luxury of charity, having
no superfluities. He was forgiving as well as tolerant; saying, It is
necessary to pardon offences, not seven times, but seventy times seven.
No one could remember an idle word from his lips after his conversion.
His humility was as marked as his charity, ascribing all his triumphs to
divine assistance. He was not a monk, but gave rules to monastic orders.
He might have been a metropolitan patriarch or pope; but he was
contented with being bishop of a little Numidian town. His only visits
beyond the sanctuary were to the poor and miserable. As he won every
heart by love, so he subdued every mind by eloquence. He died leaving no
testament, because he had no property to bequeath but his immortal
writings,--some ten hundred and thirty distinct productions. He died in
the year 430, when his city was besieged by the Vandals, and in the arms
of his faithful Alypius, then a neighboring bishop, full of visions of
the ineffable beauty of that blissful state to which his renovated
spirit had been for forty years constantly soaring.
"Thus ceased to flow," said a contemporary, "that river of eloquence
which had watered the thirsty fields of the Church; thus passed away the
glory of preachers, the master of doctors, and the light of scholars;
thus fell the courageous combatant who with the sword of truth had given
heresy a mortal blow; thus set this glorious sun of Christian doctrine,
leaving a world in darkness and in tears."
His vacant see had no successor. "The African province, the cherished
jewel of the Roman Empire, sparkled for a while in the Vandal diadem.
The Greek supplanted the Vandal, and the Saracen supplanted the Greek,
and the home of Augustine was blotted out from the map of Christendom."
The light of the gospel was totally extinguished in Northern Africa. The
acts of Rome and the doctrines of Cyprian were equally forgotten by the
Mahommedan conquerors. Only in Bona, as Hippo is now called, has the
memory of the great bishop been cherished,--the one solitary flower
which escaped the successive desolations of Vandals and Saracens. And
when Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830, the sacred relics of
the saint were transferred from Pavia (where they had been deposited by
the order of Charlemagne), in a coffin of lead, enclosed in a coffin of
silver, and the whole secured in a sarcophagus of marble, and finally
committed to the earth near the scenes which had witnessed his
transcendent labors. I do not know whether any monument of marble and
granite was erected to his memory; but he needs no chiselled stone, no
storied urn, no marble bust, to perpetuate his fame. For nearly fifteen
hundred years he has reigned as the great oracle of the Church, Catholic
and Protestant, in matters of doctrine,--the precursor of Bernard, of
Leibnitz, of Calvin, of Bossuet, all of whom reproduced his ideas, and
acknowledged him as the fountain of their own greatness. "Whether," said
one of the late martyred archbishops of Paris, "he reveals to us the
foundations of an impure polytheism, so varied in its developments, yet
so uniform in its elemental principles; or whether he sports with the
most difficult problems of philosophy, and throws out thoughts which in
after times are sufficient to give an immortality to Descartes,--we
always find in this great doctor all that human genius, enlightened by
the Spirit of God, can explain, and also to what a sublime height reason
herself may soar when allied with faith."
AUTHORITIES.
The voluminous Works of Saint Augustine, especially his "Confessions."
Mabillon, Tillemont, and Baronius have written very fully of this great
Father. See also Vaughan's Life of Thomas Aquinas. Neander, Geisler,
Mosheim, and Milman indorse, in the main, the eulogium of Catholic
writers. There are numerous popular biographies, of which those of
Baillie and Schaff are among the best; but the most satisfactory book I
have read is the History of M. Poujoulat, in three volumes, issued at
Paris in 1846. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, has an extended
biography. Even Gibbon pays a high tribute to his genius and character.
THEODOSIUS THE GREAT.
* * * * *
A.D. 346-395.
THE LATTER DAYS OF ROME.
The last of those Roman emperors whom we call great was Theodosius.
After him there is no great historic name, unless it be Justinian, who
reigned when Rome had fallen. With Theodosius is associated the
life-and-death struggle of Rome with the Gothic barbarians, and the
final collapse of Paganism as a tolerated religion. Paganism in its
essence, its spirit, was not extinguished; it entered into new forms,
even into the Church itself; and it still exists in Christian countries.
When Bismarck was asked why he did not throw down his burdens, he is
reported to have said: "Because no man can take my place. I should like
to retire to my estates and raise cabbages; but I have work to do
against Paganism: I live among Pagans." Neither Theodosius nor Bismarck
was what we should call a saint. Both have been stained by acts which it
is hard to distinguish from crimes; but both have given evidence of
hatred of certain evils which undermine society. Theodosius,
especially, made war and fought nobly against the two things which most
imperilled the Empire,--the barbarians who had begun their ravages, and
the Paganism which existed both in and outside the Church. For which
reasons he has been praised by most historians, in spite of great crimes
and some vices. The worldly Gibbon admires him for the noble stand he
took against external dangers, and the Fathers of the Church almost
adored him for his zealous efforts in behalf of orthodoxy. An eminent
scholar of the advanced school has seen nothing in him to admire, and
much to blame. But he was undoubtedly a very great man, and rendered
important services to his age and to civilization, although he could not
arrest the fatal disease which even then had destroyed the vitality of
the Empire. It was already doomed when he ascended the throne. No mortal
genius, no imperial power, could have saved the crumbling Empire.
In my lecture on Marcus Aurelius I alluded to the external prosperity
and internal weakness of the old Roman world during his reign. That
outward prosperity continued for a century after he was dead,--that is,
there were peace, thrift, art, wealth, and splendor. Men were unmolested
in the pursuit of pleasure. There were no great wars with enemies beyond
the limits of the Empire. There were wars of course; but these chiefly
were civil wars between rival aspirants for imperial power, or to
suppress rebellions, which did not alarm the people. They still sat
under their own vines and fig-trees, and danced to voluptuous music, and
rejoiced in the glory of their palaces. They feasted and married and
were given in marriage, like the antediluvians. They never dreamed that
a great catastrophe was near, that great calamities were impending.
I do not say that the people in that century were happy or contented, or
even generally prosperous. How could they be happy or prosperous when
monsters and tyrants sat on the throne of Augustus and Trajan? How could
they be contented when there was such a vast inequality of
condition,--when slaves were more numerous than freemen,--when most of
the women were guarded and oppressed,--when scarcely a man felt secure
of the virtue of his wife, or a wife of the fidelity of her
husband,--when there was no relief from corroding sorrows but in the
sports of the amphitheatre and circus, or some form of demoralizing
excitement or public spectacle,--when the great mass were ground down by
poverty and insult, and the few who were rich and favored were satiated
with pleasure, ennuéd, and broken down by dissipation,--when there was
no hope in this world or in the next, no true consolation in sickness or
in misfortune, except among the Christians, who fled by thousands to
desert places to escape the contaminating vices of society?
But if the people were not happy or fortunate as a general thing, they
anticipated no overwhelming calamities; the outward signs of prosperity
remained,--all the glories of art, all the wonders of imperial and
senatorial magnificence; the people were fed and amused at the expense
of the State; the colosseum was still daily crowded with its
eighty-seven thousand spectators, and large hogs were still roasted
whole at senatorial banquets, and wines were still drunk which had been
stored one hundred years. The "dark-skinned daughters of Isis" still
sported unmolested in wanton mien with the priests of Cybele in their
discordant cries. The streets still were filled with the worshippers of
Bacchus and Venus, with barbaric captives and their Teuton priests, with
chariots and horses, with richly apparelled young men, and fashionable
ladies in quest of new perfumes. The various places of amusement were
still thronged with giddy youth and gouty old men who would have felt
insulted had any one told them that the most precious thing they had was
the most neglected. Everywhere, as in the time of Trajan, were
unrestricted pleasures and unrestricted trades. What cared the
shopkeepers and the carpenters and the bakers whether a Commodus or a
Severus reigned? They were safe. It was only great nobles who were in
danger of being robbed or killed by grasping emperors. The people, on
the whole, lived for one hundred years after the accession of Commodus
as they did under Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. True, there had been great
calamities during this hundred years. There had been terrible plagues
and pestilences: in some of these as many as five thousand people died
daily in Rome alone. There were tumults and revolts; there were wars and
massacres; there was often the reign of monsters or idiots. Yet even as
late as the reign of Aurelian, ninety years after the death of Aurelius,
the Empire was thought to be eternal; nor was any triumph ever
celebrated with greater pride and magnificence than his. And as the
victorious emperor in his triumphal chariot marched along the Via Sacra
up the Capitoline hill, with the spoils and trophies of one hundred
battles, with ambassadors and captives, including Zenobia herself,
fainting with the weight of jewels and golden fetters, it would seem
that Rome was destined to overcome all the vicissitudes of Nature, and
reign as mistress of the world forever.
But that century did not close until real dangers stared the people in
the face, and so alarmed the guardians of the Empire that they no longer
could retire to their secluded villas for luxurious leisure, but were
forced to perpetual warfare, and with foes they had hitherto despised.
Two things marked the one hundred years before the accession of
Theodosius of especial historical importance,--the successful inroads
of barbarians carrying desolation and alarm to the very heart of the
Empire; and the wonderful spread of the Christian religion. Persecution
ended with Diocletian; and under Constantine Christianity seated herself
upon his throne. During this century of barbaric spoliations and public
miseries,--the desolation of provinces, the sack of cities, the ruin of
works of art, the burning of palaces, all the unnumbered evils which
universal war created,--the converts to Christianity increased, for
Christianity alone held out hope amid despair and ruin. The public
dangers were so great that only successful generals were allowed to wear
the imperial purple.
The ablest men of the Empire were at last summoned to govern it. From
the year 268 to 394 most of the emperors were able men, and some were
great and virtuous. Perhaps the Empire was never more ably administered
than was the Roman in the day of its calamities. Aurelian, Diocletian,
Constantine, Theodosius, are alike immortal. They all alike fought with
the same enemies, and contended with the same evils. The enemies were
the Gothic barbarians; the evils were the degeneracy and vices of Roman
soldiers, which universal corruption had at last produced. It was a sad
hour in the old capital of the world when its blinded inhabitants were
aroused from the stupendous delusion that they were invincible; when the
crushing fact blazed upon them that the legions had been beaten, that
province after province had been overrun, that the proudest cities had
fallen, that the barbarians were advancing,--everywhere
advancing,--treading beneath their feet temples, palaces, statues,
libraries, priceless works of art; that there was no shelter to which
they could fly; that Rome herself was doomed. In the year 378 the
Emperor Valens himself was slain, almost under the walls of his capital,
with two-thirds of his army,--some sixty thousand infantry and six
thousand cavalry,--while the victorious Goths, gorged with spoils,
advanced to take possession of the defeated and crumbling Empire. From
the shores of the Bosporus to the Julian Alps nothing was seen but
conflagration, murders, and depredations, and the cry of anguish went up
to heaven in accents of almost universal despair.
In such a crisis a great man was imperatively needed, and a great man
arose. The dismayed emperor cast his eyes over the whole extent of his
dominions to find a deliverer. And he found the needed hero living
quietly and in modest retirement on a farm in Spain. This man was
Theodosius the Great, a young man then,--as modest as David amid the
pastures, as unambitious as Cincinnatus at the plough. "The vulgar,"
says Gibbon, "gazed with admiration on the manly beauty of his face and
the graceful majesty of his person, while in the qualities of his mind
and heart intelligent observers perceived the blended excellences of
Trajan and Constantine." As prudent as Fabius, as persevering as Alfred,
as comprehensive as Charlemagne, as full of resources as Frederic II.,
no more fitting person could be found to wield the sceptre of Trajan his
ancestor. No greater man than he did the Empire then contain, and
Gratian was wise and fortunate in associating with himself so
illustrious a man in the imperial dignity.
If Theodosius was unassuming, he was not obscure and unimportant. His
father had been a successful general in Britain and Africa, and he
himself had been instructed by his father in the art of war, and had
served under him with distinction. As Duke of Maesia he had vanquished
an army of Sarmatians, saved the province, deserved the love of his
soldiers, and provoked the envy of the court. But his father having
incurred the jealousy of Gratian and been unjustly executed, he was
allowed to retire to his patrimonial estates near Valladolid, where he
gave himself up to rural enjoyments and ennobling studies. He was not
long permitted to remain in this retirement; for the public dangers
demanded the service of the ablest general in the Empire, and there was
no one so illustrious as he. And how lofty must have been his character,
if Gratian dared to associate with himself in the government of the
Empire a man whose father he had unjustly executed! He was thirty-three
when he was invested with imperial purple and intrusted with the conduct
of the Gothic war.
The Goths, who under Fritigern had defeated the Roman army before the
walls of Adrianople, were Germanic barbarians who lived between the
Rhine and the Vistula in those forests which now form the empire of
Germany. They belonged to a family of nations which had the same natural
characteristics,--love of independence, passion for war, veneration for
women, and religious tendency of mind. They were brave, persevering,
bold, hardy, and virtuous, for barbarians. They cast their eyes on the
Roman provinces in the time of Marius, and were defeated by him under
the name of Teutons. They had recovered strength when Caesar conquered
the Gauls. They were very formidable in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and
had formed a general union for the invasion of the Roman world. But a
barrier had been made against their incursions by those good and warlike
emperors who preceded Commodus, so that the Romans had peace for one
hundred years. These barbarians went under different names, which I will
not enumerate,--different tribes of the same Germanic family, whose
remote ancestors lived in Central Asia and were kindred to the Medes and
Persians. Like the early inhabitants of Greece and Italy, they were of
the Aryan race. All the members of this great family, in their early
history, had the same virtues and vices. They worshipped the forces of
Nature, recognizing behind these a supreme and superintending deity,
whose wrath they sought to deprecate by sacrifices. They set a great
value on personal independence, and hence had great individuality of
character. They delighted in the pleasures of the chase. They were
generally temperate and chaste. They were superstitious, social, and
quarrelsome, bent on conquest, and migrated from country to country with
a view of improving their fortunes.
The Goths were the first of these barbarians who signally triumphed over
the Roman arms. "Starting from their home in the Scandinavian peninsula,
they pressed upon the Slavic population of the Vistula, and by rapid
conquests established themselves in southern and eastern Germany. Here
they divided. The Visi or West Goths advanced to the Danube." In the
reign of Decius (249-251) they crossed the river and ravaged the Roman
territory. In 269 they imposed a tribute on the Emperor Gratian, and
seem to have been settled in Dacia. After this they made several
successful raids,--invading Bythinia, entering the Propontis, and
advancing as far as Athens and Corinth, even to the coasts of Asia
Minor; destroying in their ravages the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, with
its one hundred and twenty-seven marble columns.
These calamities happened in the middle of the third century, during the
reign of the frivolous Gallienus, who received the news with his
accustomed indifference. While the Goths were burning the Grecian
cities, this royal cook and gardener was soliciting a place in the
Areopagus of Athens.
In the reign of Claudius the barbarians united under the Gothic
standard, and in six thousand vessels prepared again to ravage the
world. Against three hundred and twenty thousand of these Goths Claudius
advanced, and defeated them at Naissus in Dalmatia. Fifty thousand were
slain, and three Gothic women fell to the share of every soldier. On the
return of spring nothing of that mighty host was seen. Aurelian--who
succeeded Claudius, and whose father had been a peasant of Sirmium--put
an end to the Gothic war, and the Empire again breathed; but only for a
time, for the barbarians continually advanced, although they were
continually beaten by the warlike emperors who succeeded Gallienus. In
the middle of the third century they were firmly settled in Dacia, by
permission of Valerian. One hundred years after, pressed by Huns, they
asked for lands south of the Danube, which request was granted by
Valens; but they were rudely treated by the Roman officials, especially
their women, and treachery was added to their other wrongs. Filled with
indignation, they made a combination and swept everything before
them,--plundering cities, and sparing neither age nor sex. These ravages
continued for a year. Valens, aroused, advanced against them, and was
slain in the memorable battle on the plains of Adrianople, 9th of
August, 378,--the most disastrous since the battle of Cannae, and from
which the Empire never recovered.
To save the crumbling world, Theodosius was now made associate emperor.
And in that great crisis prudence was more necessary than valor. No
Roman army at that time could contend openly in the field, face to face,
with the conquering hordes who assembled under the standard of
Fritigern,--the first historic name among the Visigoths. Theodosius
"fixed his headquarters at Thessalonica, from whence he could watch the
irregular actions of the barbarians and direct the movements of his
lieutenants." He strengthened his defences and fortifications, from
which his soldiers made frequent sallies,--as Alfred did against the
Danes,--and accustomed themselves to the warfare of their most dangerous
enemies. He pursued the same policy that Fabius did after the battle of
Cannae, to whose wisdom the Romans perhaps were more indebted for their
ultimate success than to the brilliant exploits of Scipio. The death of
Fritigern, the great predecessor of Alaric, relieved Theodosius from
many anxieties; for it was followed by the dissension and discord of the
barbarians themselves, by improvidence and disorderly movements; and
when the Goths were once more united under Athanaric, Theodosius
succeeded in making an honorable treaty with him, and in entertaining
him with princely hospitalities in his capital, whose glories alike
astonished and bewildered him. Temperance was not one of the virtues of
Gothic kings under strong temptation, and Athanaric, yielding to the
force of banquets and imperial seductions, soon after died. The politic
emperor gave his late guest a magnificent funeral, and erected to his
memory a stately monument; which won the favor of the Goths, and for a
time converted them to allies. In four years the entire capitulation of
the Visigoths was effected.
Theodosius then turned his attention to the Ostro or East Goths, who
advanced, with other barbarians, to the banks of the lower Danube, on
the Thracian frontier. Allured to cross the river in the night, the
barbarians found a triple line of Roman war-vessels chained to each
other in the middle of the river, which offered an effectual resistance
to their six thousand canoes, and they perished with their king.