The Bishop of Hippo
Reverse Hagiography
A new biography of
by Jason Byassee
Augustine:
A New Biography
by James J. O'Donnell
Ecco Press, 2005
296 pp. $26.95
As modern convention has it, we draw a sharp distinction
between "theology" and "history." According to this
distinction, James O'Donnell is a historian of the first order. His
three-volume commentary on Augustine's Confessions will remain the
unsurpassed reference for generations. His skills as a classicist make for easy
familiarity with the Latin primary sources. His keen critical eye allows him to
pose probing new questions and uncover potential embarrassments in our
hagiographies that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. In Augustine: A New Biography, he works hard to blaze a trail in
Augustinian biography by asking more deeply critical questions of the church
father's life, in hopes that he can "wring a real confession or two from
him against his will."
As a theologian, alas,
O'Donnell's skills are less patently on display. Because he mistrusts
Augustine's own accounting of his life—which mistrust marks his skill as a
critical historian—he pays either very little or very poor attention to the
intellectual content of Augustine's work. A reader of this book will be left
wondering how Augustine could have had such wide readership for so many
centuries when his ideas are so flimsy. That Augustine comes in for
intellectual criticism here is no surprise—scholars for decades now have
complained about his inability quite to leave off the dualism of his Manichaean
past, his ruthless use of imperial power against his Donatist enemies, and his
late-life grumpy and inadequate responses to the intellectually spry Pelagian,
Julian of Eclanum. But at every turn in O'Donnell's critique, Augustine
is portrayed as dreadfully anxious, intellectually inferior to his enemies, and
so inclined to deal with them duplicitously and brutally, and to tell the story
subsequently in such a way as to exonerate himself and
excoriate their memory.
O'Donnell begins with Confessions, a "triumph of self-absorption" in which
Augustine so deftly managed to "dramatically mislead his readers"
that few before O'Donnell have had the gumption to challenge Augustine's
narration of his life. Certainly this ur-memoir whitewashes history.
Augustine's "one truly impassioned religious experience," for
example, was with the very Manichees whom he here disavows, and the deepest
allegiance of his mother Monnica (O'Donnell uses an old Punic spelling of her
name) was to the Donatists, mention of whom Augustine surgically omits to avoid
this embarrassment. At the time he was writing his life story, Augustine was a
bishop of a nowhere town in North Africa (ordination to that ecclesiastical
jurisdiction was the only genuine conversion in his life, O'Donnell says, in a
characteristically withering jibe), and nowhere does he mention that he only
retreated to Africa from Italy with his tail between his legs when his social
ambitions proved a failure.
Confessions, then, in O'Donnell's reading, is really a book about
failure. It ends with Augustine's supposed conversion in order to hide the
disillusionment that had already set in before he set to writing and that would
steadily creep over his entire life, chasing away his friends, clouding his
philosophical judgment, and sweeping him up in anxiety about God's indifference
and his own frailty—an anxiety so consuming that it bordered on paralyzing
dread. For O'Donnell, "the real power of this text [comes] to the surface
just as the hegemony of its author's ideas and his church's ideas begins to
fade from memory." Luckily for Augustine, his work helped birth modern
psychological introspection and even the literary form of the novel—for without
this unintended success we would not so readily believe the false version of
events he craftily constructed and would think no more of him than of any
number of unimportant late antique Latin clerics.
O'Donnell is
consistent in his mistrust of Augustine's telling of events. The Donatists, he
tell us, were actually a more locally rooted African version of Christianity,
whose popular support Augustine envied and which he could only dispel by
arranging for its brutal suppression at the hands of the imperial authorities.
O'Donnell calls Augustine's favored brand of Christianity the
"Caecilianists," after an earlier bishop who opposed Donatus—even
though no one else in Augustine's day or since has called the Catholics that.
O'Donnell is out to puncture stereotypes, to show us that one can slap a name
on a group one dislikes and dismiss it as evil—and that he can do it no less
effectively than Augustine. The supposed "theology" in this
controversy is a mere pretext; this is a political quarrel, plain and simple,
in which Augustine effectively "invents" a notion of
"Catholicism" to "help him win a local war of punishing
intensity." Because O'Donnell's book is meant to have popular appeal he
often turns to contemporary parallels, and the one used here is telling:
"Augustine resembles nothing so much as one of those pious churchmen of
Francoist times, leader of a state-promoted church, followed prudently by many,
despised quietly by some, and opposed fiercely by a remnant quite sure of its
own fidelity to a truer church."
O'Donnell's historical
account continues in this vein: show Augustine in the worst light possible, his
enemies in the best, and dispatch him with a final zinger in the form of an ad
hominem slur or what's taken to be a devastating analogy. In truth,
Augustine was simply "jealous" of Pelagius and Pelagius' skilled
protégé Julian. He was not only a social climber but also connivingly
acquisitive—despite his pious claims that he wanted people's wealth for his
church and not for himself. Every one of his famous polemical disputes is
described as a fight Augustine needlessly picked, with disastrous consequences.
His fight with the Donatists needlessly weakened the African church and
prepared the way for the later Islamic conquest. His unnecessary pouring of
vitriol on the
And that's not even
Augustine's theology—merely his political machinations. "Augustine's god
was off the charts," O'Donnell tells us, giving us a glimpse of a
professor trying to appeal to undergraduates with hip language. That is to say,
Augustine's god was "powerful, knowing, arbitrary yet ultimately just and
fair" (the lowercase "g" alerts us that Augustine knew, deep
down, there were many gods to choose from but tried to pretend there was only
one). His god was "high, unapproachable, ineffable" and finally the
"unsayable Other," before whom the
individual stands alone in dread of a capricious judgment that produces
"anxious, depressive, lonely, and distraught" believers. This
arbitrary god naturally produced an arbitrary vision of the church. As
O'Donnell puts it,
The notion that what one sees today on an
evangelist's television program, in the cave monasteries of the Pechersk Lavra
in Kiev, and in an African cathedral welcoming a papal visit, to say nothing of
an upper Manhattan Episcopalian Sunday service regularly attended by house pets
and their owners, are all of a piece with what happened in Augustine's lifetime
in the Syrian desert, in farming villages in Africa, and among perfumed
socialites in Rome is to make a quite extraordinary theological assertion in
the guise of history.
This wonderful passage
shows that despite O'Donnell's strident effort to be critical at every turn,
occasionally he sees clearly what Augustine is saying and simply dislikes it.
Of course it's an extraordinary thing to claim that believers are united in
Christ's body across space and time: that is why belief in the church is
something we hold to by faith. For O'Donnell, such faith is tantamount to the
cessation of thought—as when he mocks Augustine's inability fully to explain
notions of God as a non-bodily Spirit, or the promised resurrection of all
flesh. But for Augustine—and for all Christians—a "mystery" is
something we can talk about with insight from Scripture and tradition even as
we cannot explain it fully. All O'Donnell can see in such moments is
theological tyranny and an arbitrary divinity. After a long quotation from a
sermon about evil as a privation of the good—a classic Christian
position—O'Donnell paraphrases, "you can't make sense of sin: the
god's book says so."
These
moments in which O'Donnell comes clean by laying out Augustine's position and
his own antagonism to it are refreshing. There is hardly a heresy Augustine
confronted that O'Donnell does not praise. The Manichees' Cologne Mani Codex is a "magically beautiful" book.
The Sabellians' description of the Trinity as one God wearing three masks
"might be a fresh approach to a difficult subject." The Arians'
description of Jesus as a creature of God is a "rather more nuanced
philosophical position" than the view of Jesus' divinity that won out. The
Pelagians' religion was "serene, optimistic, cultivated"—too
bad Augustine's view won the day. Yet O'Donnell also advises us moderns who are
troubled by Augustine's views to "look closely to see what text or
scripture he has in mind and how it more or less forces him to say what he
says." At least O'Donnell doesn't subscribe to the common (and mistaken)
claim that Augustine is not a biblical theologian. Augustine is faithful to
Scripture; O'Donnell just wishes he weren't.
Unfortunately these
moments of honest antagonism are overwhelmed by others in which O'Donnell
simply misunderstands his subject. His description of Augustine's view of God
as distant and arbitrary, creating dread, is sadly
misinformed. However much one dislikes the "Platonism" that informed
Augustine's theology, one has to attend to those places where Augustine himself
shows how the incarnation thoroughly reshapes that philosophical legacy, as a
new wave of Augustine scholarship has made clear, despite O'Donnell's ignoring
it here. O'Donnell also seems unable to imagine any view of religion other than
of an individual before God. This is obviously a thoroughly modern view, but
O'Donnell maintains that it is present in both Paul and Augustine and only has
come to be questioned recently in late modernity! O'Donnell's chronology on
this point is simply backward.
On other matters too,
for all his justly deserved reputation as a historian, O'Donnell offers
brand-new historical theses with startlingly little evidence in support. Manichaeism as Augustine's only religious passion? Ordination as his only conversion? His praise of
Augustine's opponents and his opprobrium heaped on Augustine are simply
hagiography in reverse: we mistrust everything from the saint's mouth and
believe everything from his enemies. Startlingly, Augustine himself was more
kind to his interlocutors, believing that even communities he disavows in Confessions have things to offer insofar as any goodness in them
attests to the goodness of the Creator. Augustine frequently thanks God for
heretics—without them, how can we know or clarify the truth? Modern critical
inquiry shows itself here to be far more intolerant than the Bishop of Hippo
and father of the church.
So we see that the
convention of separating theology and history finally fails. For O'Donnell here
subjects Augustine to a ferocious inquisition and judges him worthy of
condemnation at every turn. O'Donnell's own theological commitments clearly
guide him in this endeavor. Unfortunately, they keep him from offering a
helpful work of history. While critics of great thinkers often clarify matters,
here they are badly muddled. We are frequently left wondering why exactly
Augustine opposed the Donatists, or Pelagians, or whomever; when O'Donnell
explains, we get more about the arbitrary god or the anxious self, rather than
anything informed by Augustine's actual thought. This incessant suspicion
collapses as O'Donnell pays Augustine so little respect that he hardly ever
bothers to give us Augustine's ideas in terms that he himself would recognize.
The problem may be
that O'Donnell avoids attention to the community that is the successor to
Augustine's: the Christian Church. For the billion and a half
or so Western Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, who are his
intellectual heirs, the ideas matter. Our ministers are trained in Augustine's
ideas about the goodness of marriage and creation against the Manichees, the
universality of the church and the power of the sacraments against the
Donatists, the grace of God against the Pelagians. That O'Donnell finds these
ideas unintelligible may have something to do with his evident distaste for the
community that still tries, by fits and starts, to live them out. "It is
impossible for Augustine's Christianity … to exist any longer," O'Donnell
maintains. (In his day job, by the way, he is provost of
Jason Byassee is an assistant editor
at the Christian Century.