Augustine

James J. O'Donnell

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061864728
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito religioso

Saint Augustine -- the celebrated theologian who served as Bishop of Hippo from 396 C.E. until his death in 430 C.E. -- is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in the Western world. His autobiography, Confessions, remains among the most important religious writings in the Christian tradition. In this eye-opening and eminently readable biography, renowned historical scholar James J. O'Donnell picks up where Augustine himself left off to offer a fascinating, in-depth portrait of an unparalleled politician, writer, and churchman in a time of uncertainty and religious turmoil.

Augustine is a triumphant chronicle of an extraordinary life that is certain to surprise and enlighten even those who believed they knew the complex and remarkable man of God.

I

THE VIEW FROM AFRICA

HIPPO AND BEYOND

Augustine’s Hippo Regius⁵ was the center of the universe for some who lived there and the back of beyond for many who visited. A port city on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, where the river Seybouse came down from the mountains to the sea, it stood a distant second to Carthage in commerce and prestige. Augustine hadn’t lived there all his life.

He had grown up between two Africas: the more Romanized coastal land with its port cities and settled society, and the up-country olive-and breadbasket of Numidia, a society less consciously dignified and Rome-oriented. Even at this date, the mid-350s, Numidia felt a little like western Canada before World War II.

Augustine never saw the sea as a child. He tells of imagining what it was like from a glass of water,⁶ and then is enthralled by its colors,⁷ but he’s afraid to go out upon it again after his one trip to Italy and back, and he never saw the other sea to the south, the Sahara.⁸ He was born in a green valley in the mountains, in the market town of Tagaste (the modern Souk Ahras), in a landscape reminiscent of Tuscany, his horizons bounded within a couple of miles on each side by hill crests and forests. As a boy, he headed farther inland, to Madauros, climbing up out of his valley to find the beginnings of the broad expanse of high plain that lies between the coast and the desert of North Africa. From a closed-in valley, he entered vertiginous open spaces, where grasslands stretched to the horizons, interrupted only by the well-cultivated olive groves that brought this land its prosperity.

He was a nobody, the son of a minor landowner in a third-rate town, with no money to speak of and few connections. For such nobodies, proximity to power was the first step to eminence. A precise sense of the wealth and standing of his father, Patricius, eludes us, but the things we know are: (1) he belonged to the curial class, that is, the “senate” of landowners of Tagaste who were responsible for the community’s governance, including collective responsibility for civic works (not surprisingly, membership on those councils was an honor many would just as soon avoid, and many, like Augustine, did so by joining the clergy⁹); (2) he owned a “few little acres” (pauci agelluli);¹⁰ and (3) he relied on the friendship and support of Romanianus, a much richer landowner in the same town, to provide the financial resources to send Augustine off to university in Carthage (then the greatest port city of Africa). Augustine’s important luck was in continuing to have Romanianus support him through his Milan days. (The patron fell in with Augustine’s philosophical and religious enthusiasms up to a point, but in the end, he reverted to type, taking baptism only at death’s door, recovering, and taking up in widowhood with mistresses. Augustine is last seen writing to Romanianus to rebuke him.¹¹)

Augustine succeeded three times in the public eye when still very young. It was an achievement when he was a young man that he got to teach in Carthage; an achievement again when he was crowned there by the proconsul Vindicianus, the man who lived in the palace on a hill, as winner in an oratorial contest (a very familiar and very “pagan” public scene in the old city);¹² and an achievement again when he went to Italy and won appointment to Milan as imperial professor of rhetoric through well-placed friends. When Augustine went to Milan, his family’s ambitions pursuing him, he had hopes he later reconstructed¹³ this way: “We have our powerful friends, and if nothing else (I say this in a rush), at least a governorship could come our way, and I could marry a wife with money (so she wouldn’t be a burden on our outgoings)—that’s the limit of my desires.” Many provincials from backwaters like Tagaste would have shared this ambition, but it was remarkably within reach for Augustine. If he was not yet a “friend of the emperor,” he was closing in on that status during his time in Milan.

Yet his worldly career came to an end, as we shall soon see, and when it did, he did as most others would do: he went home to make the best of things. Even with a worldly career of the sort we have just imagined, it’s likely that he would still have ended, sooner or later, back where he started. In 388, he settled on his family property and lived there without visible hopes or plans for three years. Here is how his first biographer, Possidius, described his intention:

And it pleased him, after he had been baptized, to take his friends and neighbors who had joined him in serving god, and go back to Africa, to his own house and lands. When he got there and settled down, for about three years he put aside worldly cares and with those who stayed with him he lived for god, with fasting, prayer, and good works, meditating on the law of god day and night. And whatever god revealed to him as he thought and prayed, he taught to others; with conversation and with books he taught one and all, near and far.¹⁴

Many writers have spoken of the Augustine of 388–91 as a monk, or at least a monk-in-all-but-name. That is an anachronism.¹⁵ His retirement to the family property was entirely in character and entirely typical. That he chose philosophy over philandering would have puzzled only a few of his neighbors or relatives. In Tagaste, after his time in Italy, he was an oddity, to be sure. No one we can see in Africa of that time at all resembles the gentlemanly Augustine.¹⁶ The closest contemporary comparison that presents itself is an unflattering one—to the fractious and obtuse Consentius of Minorca: amateur of theology, self-absorbed, and not much inclined to hear what anybody was saying to him. (We’ll meet him later.) Consentius is in many ways the classical “idiot,” the man living too much on his own and with his own ideas. If Augustine had really succeeded in finding isolation and retirement in Tagaste, he might very well have developed his own quirks and eccentricities. (As though there were not plenty of people to say that the Augustine of Hippo had his share of eccentricities!) But this Augustine is an easy one to imagine—beginning to age, obsessive, not quite in touch with the ideas and issues of his world, but ready to offer an opinion all the same.

Instead, he found himself back in the public eye.

He lived in a golden age in Africa, with wealth on display on all sides, even when surrounded by squalor, after five hundred years of Roman rule. No emperor had set foot in Africa in living memory, nor would any appear there again; they were busy with the army on Rome’s northern frontiers. In Africa, the empire showed itself in the form of soldiers (some on frontier duty), tax collectors, and judges. People’s fears were personal and local: sickness, death, drought, famine, brigandage in remote locations. The empire could take care of itself, or so it had seemed for a very long time.

When in 391 Augustine came to live in Hippo as a junior clergy member of the African church, the city was, while not great, at least busy. To an ancient visitor, it would have seemed noisy and “modern,”¹⁷ with perhaps thirty to forty thousand residents (a tenth the size of Carthage at the time). The farmland that brought the metropolis its prosperity lay in an arc south of the city stretching twenty or so miles. On the city’s northern and western approaches, the Djebel Edough mountains loomed large and shadowy, offering some cooling relief in the summer, when the sun fell behind the mountain ridge a good hour or so before natural sunset and left behind long twilights without the direct heat of the day. In winter, the mountains disappeared behind the rain clouds for days on end as Atlantic storms funneled through Gibraltar and hurtled across the inland sea. Hippo was much closer to Tagaste than to Carthage, but the mountains of the Medjerda lay between the two and offered no easy ascent or descent for man or donkey. Because Hippo was also the westernmost convenient port for travelers going to Numidia and the Mauretanias, the road from the city lay to the south and west inland to Cirta (modern Constantine), the next center of administration and prosperity.

Before Augustine, we know nothing of Hippo to suggest cultural or intellectual activity, apart from the anomaly of a statue of the historian Suetonius found there. It was a businessman’s town, a small stage, and unlike today’s cities in many ways. The stretch of class distinction was even wider than we see now, with abject slaves chained, sometimes literally, to their work, rich men and their grand retinues, and precious little egalitarian sentiment to counter such realities. Women were generally confined and excluded from public life. The greatest difference, however, probably lay in the comparative absence of the extraordinary overlay of meaning that marks modern communities. Today we see an urban street and know that every building is a conscious construction, with a sign on every door and every street and every parking place, and with explicit names and numbers that docket and control and define the space. The interpreter and the imagination have little to do but rebel. Ancient cities were naïve by comparison, with islands of overdetermined meaning proclaimed to the viewer in a limited number of public buildings, by inscriptions on stone designed to advertise the dignity of the donor who had them carved, and in the annual round of festivals and spectacles. Games in the circus and gossip in the forum could take people outside themselves, but not much else did, apart from church. Not long before Augustine’s days there, a predictable round of public processions and ceremonies, often culminating in sacrifices in temples, had diverted the urban public. Augustine remembered those days with horror and spoke ill of them, but others must have recalled them fondly.

For in 391, the emperor Theodosius had forbidden all public sacrifice and “pagan” ritual. The ban had left empty spaces and times in every Roman city. The stench of butchery and barbecue that had regularly filled the public spaces of the cities faded away. The underlying order of the community came from the preverbal ties of family and community and belonging, an order invisible to a visitor but ineluctable to the resident. Christianity was the official religion and public practice, but Christians were divided and there were many in the city whose adherence to Christianity fell far short of what the bishop would like to have seen.

Since the 1950s, the visitor to modern Annaba has been able to see remains of what is called the Christian quarter of Hippo, and much of the rest of the ancient city besides. The site was excavated between the 1920s and the 1950s by a French naval officer and archaeologist, Erwan Marec. Much more could have been done and much is still unknown, but a visit to the site is nonetheless instructive. Two hillocks separated by a few hundred yards rise on either side of the remains of the ancient city. The forum lies directly between the hills, one of which must have been the citadel of the earliest city and the location of one or another god’s temple over time.¹⁸ The way from the forum to the Christian quarter lies near what was the seashore in antiquity (the sea has now retreated about half a mile). The Christian buildings uncovered in the 1950s lay very close to the water, separated from it apparently only by a row of opulent villas.

The centerpiece of the modern excavation is the grand basilica, the ground-level remains of a substantial church. The nave was about 120 feet by 60 feet, and at one end a semicircular apse about 30 feet across. The apse was surrounded by a low bench for the clergy, and at the center of the apse was the marble seat, now lost, of the presiding bishop. An altar table would have stood in front of where he sat. We can still walk around in this place, sit on the bench, and get a sense of the size and shape of the building. Too small to hold more than a tiny fraction of the city’s population, but large enough to challenge the vocal capacity of any modern and most ancient voices, it was Augustine’s familiar stage for at least a part of his career. Adjacent to the church is a smaller chapel, and next to it a small baptistry, with the font intact, waist-deep for an adult. The baptistry undoubtedly had a sacred quality about it, but the basilica itself would have felt remarkably secular to most ancients. Christians had modeled their meeting places on the open public spaces of the meeting halls around the forum, not on the closed and numinous temples.¹⁹

The basilica that survives was built sometime in the fourth century; we’re not sure exactly when. It was not grand, and the ornamentation was probably never completed. We infer from inscriptions on graves in the church that in the fifth and sixth centuries it fell into the hands of Vandal conquerors and Arian clergy whom Augustine would have condemned. For some part of Augustine’s life, this was surely his church. From his own works, we know of two churches in Hippo that Augustine used during his career: the basilica Leontiana, named after a bishop of Hippo who apparently was martyred in the late third century, and the basilica maior, or basilica pacis (greater basilica, or basilica of peace).

But there had to be a third substantial church in Hippo: that of the Donatists, whom Augustine hated. In Augustine’s Africa, Donatism was an austere and well-established Christian community that looked back to great bishops of Carthage as guarantors of its authenticity. Cyprian, the martyred bishop of the third century, and Donatus, who led the church for thirty years in the early fourth century, were names to conjure with. Cyprian’s annual feast day, celebrating the day of his martyrdom, was a high point of the Christian year.

Augustine chose a different community, one that followed the successors of Donatus’s rival (from the early 300s), Caecilian. The divisions that separated Christians into angry and often violent factions were a characteristic and deeply rooted part of African life by now. The Caecilianist community had opposed the majority Donatist faction for almost all of the fourth century. Hostility and history separated the two communities, not doctrine. When pressed, they could find real disagreement only over the administration of baptism: Donatists found some sins so grave that only a fresh baptism could wash them away, while the Caecilianists thought baptism so high and powerful a rite that it could never be administered a second time. The two communities complicated and reinforced their enmity with obsessive historical argument and endless mutual recrimination. We will see how obsessively, and dangerously, Augustine fought to advance the cause of his sect against that of the majority.

The uncertainty of the dating of the extant basilica leaves open the strong possibility that it was constructed by the majority Donatists, probably during the time of respite from official harassment that came under the emperor Julian and his successors, after 362, thirty years before Augustine came to Hippo. That would explain how the ornamentation was left incomplete, likely reflecting some crackdown by the government against the sect. Was the original Caecilianist basilica somewhere nearby? Augustine tells us in one letter that the sounds of celebration from the Donatist basilica could be heard in his own church’s precincts.²⁰

If the church we can see was originally the Donatist basilica, the building would have come into Augustine’s hands, but only in 411 or so, when edicts took effect dissolving the Donatist church, confiscating its property, and regularizing its clergy into the ranks of the official church. The capture of the majority church’s property and people was a dramatic event in the life of the church of Hippo and Augustine’s greatest personal victory, yet he never describes it. The story of that revolution will be central to our exploration of him and his world.

THE WIDER WORLD

Augustine stayed on dry land in Hippo, but his adoptive home lived on shipping and used its position to communicate quickly and well with the great world on the other side of the water, a world of which Augustine was always more conscious than most other Africans. In large part what made him independent and powerful were the comings and goings of his letter-bearers, who kept him in touch with the world beyond the mountains and the sea.

Our name for it, Mediterranean, recognizes that the water lies at the center of a circle of lands. The idea that all the seas from Gibraltar and Marseilles to Alexandria and Constantinople are one is an idea with its own history.²¹ Fishermen in small boats in antiquity knew their own neighborhoods, rarely ventured out of sight of land, and told awe-inspiring and awful tales of what happened to those mad enough to sail far from home. The oldest of such tales that we read is the Odyssey: the Laestrygonians, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, and Calypso all lay over the horizon for those readers, and they knew nothing of a “Mediterranean” yet.

Herodotus knew of lands beyond his ken, a little more accurately than Homer did. Bu...