“I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,” sang Bob Dylan, “alive as you or me.” That bishop of Hippo, in Northern Africa, who lived from 354 to 430 A.D., is acclaimed not only as one of the greatest theologians in Christendom, but also as “as one of the most influential philosophers in the history of the Western world.” And he continues to have an impact on people today.
St. Augustine is one of the few theologians who is appreciated by nearly every theological tradition. Roman Catholics see him as foundational to their ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and monasticism. Calvinists like him for his emphasis on grace and predestination. Evangelicals like him for his born-again conversion story.
Luther was an Augustinian monk. Lutherans appreciate St. Augustine for his emphasis on salvation by grace and his critique of Pelagianism (that is to say, “decision theology” and salvation by works), all integrated with a high view of the sacraments.
As for philosophy, not only was his thought formative for Thomas Aquinas and virtually every other Christian philosopher. He is respected by modern, non-Christian philosophers, including Bertrand Russell (who was impressed by his reflections on the nature of time), Edmund Husserl (who recognized that Augustine anticipated phenomenology), Heidegger (who saw some connections with existentialism), and Hannah Arendt (who prized his view of evil as a privation of goodness and being, as in her treatment of the “banality of evil”).
Not that St. Augustine’s thought is accepted by everybody. Lutherans see him as confusing justification and sanctification. The Orthodox don’t approve of his doctrine of original sin. The Calvinists don’t like his sacramentalism. Catholics dislike his downplaying of free will in salvation. Of course the modern philosophers don’t approve of his Christianity.
I would say that Augustine is too Platonic, and as a result downplays the value of the physical realm. As a result, he is overly ascetic, feeling guilty about ordinary pleasures such as enjoying food and music, to the point of saying that sex in marriage involves sinful passions. But I have to give him credit where credit is due, which is considerable.
I bring him up because I came across a recent appreciation by John Mac Ghlionn at Religion Unplugged entitled Augustine Of Hippo: Meet The Man Who Forever Rewired Christianity.
He focuses on Augustine’s most well-known work, The Confessions. (I’m linking to Thomas Williams’ 2019 translation, acclaimed for its readability, accuracy, and literary quality.) This is not only the best introduction to Augustine, it’s one of truly Great Book of our civilization. It’s the first autobiography. More than that, it’s the first detailed exploration of someone’s inner life. We get, literally, inside the mind of young Augustine, giving us a vivid recreation of life in the Roman Empire from the point of view of an ancient Roman. We are with him as he reflects on his childhood habit of stealing pears, his friendships, his taking a mistress, his embrace of false religions, his conversion to Christianity and its aftermath. The “confession” is addressed to God, and he confesses both his sin and his faith.
Along the way, we get other fine moments. As he drifts further into sin and falsehood, his mother Monica–a Christian–keeps praying that he comes to faith, and we see her joy when he does. Then there is his account about a friend of his who also converts to Christianity, but he was a fan of the sport of gladiator combat. Despite all his pious efforts, he could not help getting caught up in the cruelty of cheering for them to kill each other.
More significantly, we hear Augustine marveling that his mentor, the future St. Ambrose, is able to read silently, simply in his mind. Thus teaching us that the ancients when they read usually spoke the words out loud, which explains how Philip knew what the Ethiopian eunuch was reading (Acts 8:30). That little detail about St. Ambrose as the first recorded person to read silently ties in to the Confessions themselves as the first written depiction of an author’s inner life. In the “history of consciousness,” to use Barfield’s term, we are witnessing a new inwardness, very likely due to the influence of Christianity.
This inwardness, along with Augustine’s spiritual honesty, is what John Mac Ghlionn focuses on:
“Confessions” — completed around the year 400 — is the book that taught Western Christianity how to talk about itself. Before Augustine, religious writing tended toward the declarative. Here are the rules. Here is the creed. Here is what you must believe and how you must live.
The tone was confident, instructional and occasionally thunderous. Augustine arrived with something stranger and far more unsettling. He told the truth about himself. Publicly, in detail and without flattering edits.
For example:
Augustine admitted he had prayed, as a young man, for chastity — but not yet. He found this funny enough to record and revealing enough to leave in. He admitted to stealing pears as a teenager. Not because he was hungry, but because theft felt thrilling; transgression had its own intoxicating pull.
He admitted he kept a mistress for over a decade, fathered a son, loved them both and still managed to construct an elaborate intellectual framework to explain why conversion could wait. The man who would become one of Christianity’s most formidable minds spent his twenties doing things he knew were wrong and deploying his considerable intelligence to explain why that was probably fine.
This is not the biography of a saint, but one of a recognizable human being. This is precisely why it landed so hard and has held on ever since.
The honesty was revolutionary. Not because confession was new — Christians confessed. But because Augustine made the inner life legible in a way it had rarely been before. . . .
The “Confessions” reordered Christian thinking about pride, grace, the mechanics of change and the kind of transparency that makes transformation possible. It taught believers that the interior life matters.
“Augustine made interiority a theological category,” Mac Ghlionn concludes. “That is precisely why, sixteen centuries later, people still read it in the small hours of the night and feel, with some discomfort and more relief, completely seen.”
Illustration: Sts. Augustine and Ambrose (1437) by Filippo Lippi – Web Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15497302
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