AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, bishop, theologian, St. (354–430). Greatest of the Latin Church Fathers (q.v.), Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa near Carthage from 395–430, his influence has been enormous on subsequent Western Christian thought, determining the main lines of its theological development from his immediate successors to the leaders of the Reformation. Augustine was for centuries after him the Church Father par excellence. It was a reputation justly won through the production of a vast library of theological works, virtually any one of which would have sufficed to secure the reputation of a lesser thinker.

In one field of theological inquiry after another, especially in responding to three threatening heresies (q.v.), Augustine set the standard for Latin Christian thought. His great work On the Trinity established Western triadology along lines it has never abandoned, nor seriously criticized. Prominent within it is a portrayal of the central Christian mystery on the psychological model, i.e., the human soul as the created analogue of the Trinity (q.v.). His City of God provided a theology of history that is still powerfully influential and, moreover, had no equivalent in the Christian East. The many treatises on the Donatist Schism established fundamental guidelines for later thought on the nature of the Church and the sacraments (qq.v.). Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, pioneered a new approach to the mysteries of the interior life, which would afterward have imitators to the present day. No ancient writer before or after him had ever revealed himself in such detail or sought to expose the workings of divine grace (q.v.) with such personal insight or such moving prose. His commentaries on the Scriptures (q.v.) fill yet more volumes, the fruit of his daily preaching in the cathedral of Hippo in the exercise of his pastorate. Yet, of all these, he is perhaps best known for the writings of his old age against Pelagius, the British monk who claimed (so Augustine said, in turn) that the believer could achieve salvation by self-efforts. For one so acutely conscious of the insidious and subtle corrosion of sin as this writer, Pelagius’s position was utter anathema. In responding to this threat to the sovereignty of divine grace, as Augustine saw it, he elaborated a strikingly pessimistic view of human nature that viewed humanity after the Fall as thoroughly corrupted and, in addition, as laboring under the condemnation of God originally pronounced upon Adam.

A number of things, all very influential in subsequent Western Christian anthropology (q.v.), followed from this. First, Augustine maintained that everyone descended from Adam inherited the personal judgment decreed for that forefather. Everyone is born guilty of the original sin (q.v.). Second, so corrupted is the “damned mass” of the human race that its members no longer have the power to avoid sin (posse non pecare). Thus, without true freedom (q.v.) to act, third, all are utterly dependent on the free gift of divine mercy. Fourth, that mercy, completely gratuitous as it consequently must be, is not obliged to save all or any. Those whom God does choose to save are completely his to choose, and that choice has been established in the divine counsel before the world. Thus, fifth, those whom he has chosen and those whom he has not are so designated from before their birth, predestined. The doctrine of predestination has been a kind of leitmotiv, or at least a counterpoint, throughout the following centuries of Western Christian theology. (Thomas Aquinas has it, so does Luther, and so, of course, does its best-known exponent, Joh n Calvin.)

Perhaps most important for the Orthodox Holy Tradition, Augustine was not translated into Greek until the 14th c., nor did he have any influence on the chief lines of Orthodox thought until 17th c. Ukraine and 18th c. Russia (qq.v.). For anyone approaching Eastern Christianity from the West this capital fact must continually be kept in mind, for it affects every aspect of what is, in general, a common faith.