Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (37 page)

Theodosius yielded, but insisted that the Christians of Callinicus had to restore the sacred articles of worship they had plundered. He would rebuild the synagogue himself. Ambrose rejected this, too. The principle had to be established that the destruction of the "vile perfidy" of Jewish worship was a righteous act, in no way to be punished. Ambrose challenged the emperor to his face, during Mass at the cathedral of Milan. Rosemary Radford Ruether describes the scene: "Coming down from the altar to face him, the bishop declared that he would not continue with the Eucharist until the emperor obeyed. The emperor bowed to this threat of excommunication, and the rioters at Callinicum went unadmonished."
³⁷

21. Augustine Trembling

T
HE PREVIOUS EASTER,
in 387,
¹
this same Ambrose had taken a thirty-three-year-old man naked into a pool of water, and three times, pushing by the shoulders, he had forced the man under, saying, "I baptize you, Augustine." After Constantine, the conversion of Augustine (354–430) may be the most momentous in the history of the Church. He was born seventeen years after Constantine died. He was a bishop in Hippo, a small city in North Africa, but it is as a writer that he is remembered. He wrote nearly a hundred books, by his count, and thousands of letters and sermons, most of which survive. Garry Wills describes his method: "Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night ... He employed teams of copyists. His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others' shorthand writers. In some seasons, he preached daily. His letters were sent off in many copies. He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythm of his prose."
²
His greatest work, to which we will turn, may be
The City of God,
a meditation on the relationship of the Church and the empire, of politics and virtue, of history and hope. But his most compelling work is surely
The Confessions
,
³
the Western world's first great autobiography. This book, with its realistic exploration of human psychology and its affirmation that subjective experience is of ultimate value, stamped the mind of Europe. Its search for God in an act of memory makes each person a center of Christian revelation. That idea is the birthplace of modern individualism, for good and for ill.

Augustine's solid grounding in the classical intellectual tradition prepared him for the task of applying categories of Platonic thought to Christian theology. To take only one example of the importance of his ideas, he marshaled the definitive argument against the Donatists, who held that saintly virtue was a prerequisite for full membership in the Church. Augustine's position was rooted in Plato's distinction between the ideal and the real, and Augustine knew that the ideal would not be realized until God brought about the fulfillment of Creation at the end of time. Therefore, he held, the human condition was by definition flawed. Gospel was addressed to human beings, not to angels. Because Augustine carried the day against the Donatists, Christians could come together before God, confessing sin, and knowing that the Church itself, too, remained imperfect. The Church would not be a sect of the saved but a community open to all. Augustine is commonly credited as the father of Western Christian theology, but he is, perhaps more basically, the father of the inclusive Western Church we know, in both its Catholic and Protestant manifestations.

Augustine took his baptismal instructions from the great Ambrose.
⁴
For our purposes, it is worth noting that the mediating link between Augustine and Ambrose was Augustine's mother, Monica. She was a devout Christian, but the young, unchurched Augustine had fled her, leaving her standing "wild with grief"
⁵
on the pier in Carthage. But she followed him to Milan. There, while he continued his preconversion life as a pagan, she became a devoted follower of Ambrose. When the bishop was physically besieged by barbarian Arians in his basilica in 386, for example, Monica was with him, sharing the mortal danger.
⁶
She formed the habit of ending each day by chanting hymns that Ambrose had composed. The pattern of such devotion, especially focused on a prelate—in my mother's case, it was Cardinal Spellman—is familiar to sons who follow their mothers into piety.

the
Confessions
tells a mammoth story, but a central theme is Augustine's flight from his mother. Like Helena, she was a disappointed wife of a withholding husband, and she turned the laser of her need on her son.
⁷
Her love seemed overbearing and suffocating until—well, until it seemed like love. "Not long before the day on which she was to leave this life—you knew which day it was to be, O Lord, but we did not—my mother and I were alone, leaning from a window which overlooked the garden in the courtyard of the house where we were staying at Ostia.... We were talking alone together and our conversation was serene and joyful."
⁸
Monica died in 387, not long after her son's baptism. Garry Wills takes the view that "too much is often made of her role in Augustine's life,"
⁹
but Augustine's own testimony is poignant: "I closed her eyes, and a great wave of sorrow surged into my heart."
¹⁰

In the enclosed garden of his consciousness, Augustine watched as what his mother had planted in him came to flower. "Words cannot describe how dearly she loved me," he writes in
The Confessions,
"or how much greater was the anxiety she suffered for my spiritual birth than the physical pain she had endured in bringing me into the world."
¹¹

"You were there, before my eyes," he says to God (and, one infers, to Monica). "But I had deserted even my own self. I could not find myself, much less find you."
¹²
When he found God, he put into a new kind of language what the experience of God could be for human beings. In his milestone work of theology,
The Trinity,
Augustine detects the very structure of God's inner life in the dynamics of human consciousness and human relationships—an approach that could have rescued Christian theology from the dead-end disputes that had racked the Church for much of the previous century, when Christians went to war over definitions of words like "essence," "substance," and "person" as applied to God. "The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind," he begins, "that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason."
¹³
The point for Augustine was that whatever the
aspects
of the Godhead (or, as a Jewish sage might have put it, such
activities
of the Godhead as Word or Spirit) are to each other, they are in
relation
to each other.
Relationship
is the ground of divine being, an idea that opens up monotheism by moving the meaning of God's oneness away from "unit" and toward "unity." This tempering of the constant human temptation toward exclusivism could reasonably be expected to have tempered the universalist totalitarianism gripping the empire and the Church by then.
The Trinity
is a celebration of love as the basis of Christianity. As such, it may not be too much to detect its source in the love Augustine had experienced from and for Monica, the full range of which was revealed to him only in the writing of
The Confessions,
which he completed in c. 397. He completed
The Trinity
in c. 410, but in that same year Alaric's Gothic hordes sacked Rome. "When the brightest light was extinguished," said Saint Jerome of that event, "when the whole world perished in one city, then I was dumb with silence."
¹⁴
The culture-wide trauma of the Germanic tribes' arrival in Rome marked a turning point in Augustine's life and attitudes.

I referred to Augustine's assertion of the idea that the human condition implies a perennial state of finitude, weakness, and sin, all of which will be overcome, even for the Church, only with the end of time. Augustine's theology of original sin and the Fall has influenced all subsequent generations of Western Christians, none more so than Luther and Calvin in the Reformation era. Augustine is thus regarded as the father of a severe, flesh-hating, sin-obsessed theology, but that dark characterization misses the point of his insight. His honest admission of the universality of human woundedness is a precondition for both self-acceptance and forgiveness of the other, which for Augustine always involved the operation of grace, God's gift. Only humans capable of confronting the moral tragedy of existence, matched to God's offer of a repairing grace, are capable of community, and community is the antidote to human woundedness. Augustine sensed that
relationship
as being at the heart of God, and he saw it as being at the heart of human hope, too. This is a profoundly humane vision.

But hope faded. As was true of many of his contemporaries, Augustine's spirit was gradually weighed down as Alaric's armies began an inexorable movement east and south from Rome, while Attila's Huns took over the north, all the way to the Rhine. These invasions signaled what was even then taken to be the beginning of the end of the empire. With the coming invasions of the Vandals, clouds darkened Augustine's essentially positive outlook, marking his late writings with apprehension and unrest. By then Augustine was a man waiting for the end of the world, with reason. The Vandals destroyed the Roman order in North Africa in the summer of 429, wiping out all that Augustine had built and loved. Not long after his death in 430, they would overrun his city of Hippo.

Scholars draw a contrast between the early and late Augustine, between the life affirmer and the naysayer. It was the late Augustine who, no longer depending on the force of reason, justified the use of coercion in defending, and spreading, the orthodox faith: "For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment)," he wrote in a treatise ominously entitled
The Correction of the Donatists,
"in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching."
¹⁵
He supported the passage of laws against pagans and heretics, and he offered a theological justification for a policy of
correctio.
He could not advocate the extension of such fierce evangelizing without a qualm, but finally he did. And now the fierceness was armed. "What shall I say as to the infliction and remission of punishment in cases in which we only desire to forward the spiritual welfare of those we are deciding whether or not to punish?...What trembling we feel in these things, my brother Paulinus, O holy man of God!" This is from a letter Augustine wrote to Paulinus of Nola around the time of Alaric's invasion of Italy. "What trembling! What a darkness! May we not think that with reference to these things it was said, 'Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, O that I had wings like a dove, for then I should fly away and be at rest.'"
¹⁶

But the time when Augustine could flee was past. As a bishop now, he too had to make the hard decisions, in this brutal age, attendant on the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He had taken his place with those prepared to use violence in stamping out heresy; indeed, he gave them their theological rationale. In
The City of God,
his last great work, written to rebut the charge that the empire's embrace of Christianity had led to the collapse implied by Vandal victories, Augustine firmly justified the harsh, even totalitarian policies of the Christian rulers. If anything, they had not been harsh enough. Now, for Augustine, the world was divided between those who lived in the flesh of the City of Man and those who lived in the spirit of the City of God. The latter could look forward to heaven, the former to hell, and if hell began for them on earth, so be it. The dualistic Manichaeism of Augustine's youth reasserted itself with a vengeance. The basic theme of
The City of God,
as Peter Brown puts it, is "that the disasters of the Roman Empire had come not from neglect of the old rites, but from tolerating paganism, heresy and immorality in the new Christian empire."
¹⁷

Augustine's was a tragic vision, for it was authentically grounded—despite the shivers caused in us by his
correctio
—in the idea of God as love. The offer of that love, even to inhabitants of the City of Man, was permanent. If that was so, then violence could have no sacred significance, because it did not represent any attitude or action of the loving God. The City of God is based on love; the City of Man is based on war. Violence, Augustine felt, was not built into the nature of things, and so was not inevitable. Furthermore, while never to be seen as sacred, violence in defense of an endangered neighbor could be an act of love.

Despite the unbridled ruthlessness of his age, Augustine, building on the religious argument of the Hebrew Scriptures, initiated history's first political argument against war, an argument that has come down to us as his widely misunderstood theory of the just war. Instead of being a rationale for state-sponsored violence, as its critics are wont to say today, the theory is a rather desperate effort to curtail it, to hem war-making in, that is, by stringent conditions. The idea of the just war, the introduction of limiting principles, and a notion of war as always involving evil, even if a lesser evil, were profoundly humanizing innovations.