Augustine of Hippo

Warrior of the word

May 12th 2005
From The Economist print edition

 

Augustine: A New Biography




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LORD, how right those early Christians were. And how wrong everyone else, not least their fellow Christians. And didn't they just know it. Today's Trotskyite factions ferociously dispute their rival claims to be the true and sole heirs of the butcher of Kronstadt. Claiming a nobler heritage, no doubt, but with not vastly more brotherly love, the early fathers of the church did likewise.

One such was Augustine, from 396AD to his death in 430, bishop of Hippo, a town in the far north-east of what is now Algeria. Few people today know more of him than his engaging confession that, as a youth, he had invited God to make him virtuous but not just yet. A handful maybe have heard of “The City of God”, in which he set out the distinction between those who were inside and the pagans (some of them Christian) who were not. Hardly any will have set eyes on even five lines of 5m words he left behind. Now learn more from one who has, James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, who has written a massively scholarly--—there are 629 footnote--—but lively biography.

Augustine was born in 354AD in North Africa, studied philosophy and rhetoric, fell for Manichean dualism, went at 28 to Rome, then Milan, and there discovered Christianity. Baptised in 387, he soon returned home, became a priest, and then a bishop, in an atmosphere well suited to bring out the worst (and, less certainly, the best) in a brilliant, ardent, combative and deeply read believer. Which it did.

Then, as now, there was not a church but churches--—though none of them claimed supremacy. North Africa's Christians were split. The large majority looked back to an early 4th-century bishop, Donatus; a few to his rival, Caecilian. Enter the new bishop. Augustine was both a Caecilianist--—today we'd say a Catholi--c—and determined to restore order, his order, and impose authority in his diocese. He did so, with sermons by the quire and reams of controversy, all recorded by an army of scribes. And, in the end, with appeal to imperial authority and force.

And what were the rivals split about? Well, the Donatists thought sinners must be re-baptised, the Caecilianists that one baptism was for ever. Over this pinhead, not just Christian ink but blood was spilt; not as much or cruelly as in the "“crusad"” set afoot by Pope Innocent III against the Albigensian heretics, or in Europe's later ghastly wars of religion. But enough, surely, that Jesus wept.

Even as he was winning this battle Augustine set about another, against Pelagius. Who he, you ask? Or Petilian or Priscillian or Julian of Eclanum, other victims of Augustine's pen, driven by the righteous certainty that he knew best. Or even the earlier Origen or Arius? And did the points of difference matter anyway? To Augustine and his opponents, like today's Trotskyites, yes, enormously.

Indeed, the church having more divisions and longer life-expectancy than Marxism, they matter still. Time has labelled the losers heretics. Mr O'Donnell does well to make plain how much less clear-cut orthodoxy was in 400AD. And oddly, Augustine, rightly seen in some matters as the father of Catholicism, won his anti-Pelagian battle but in the end lost the war. Pelagius thought each man free to choose good or evil. To Augustine that choice was preordained--—an idea closer to Calvinism than to those, today, of Rome.

One war, alas, Augustine did not lose. Like many church notables then and now, he was obsessed with the sins of the body. Few who smile at the engaging young man seeking virtue postponed will know how in the end he achieved it: by dumping his (at least common-law) wife. Some might think that a sin of the spirit.

HarperCollins; 396 pages; $26.95. Profile Books; £25