_________________________________________________________________ Title: History of Dogma - Volume V Creator(s): Harnack, Adolf (1851-1930) CCEL Subjects: All; Theology; History LC Call no: BT21.H33 V.5 LC Subjects: Doctrinal theology Doctrine and dogma _________________________________________________________________ HISTORY OF DOGMA BY DR. ADOLPH HARNACK VOLUME V _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ EDITORIAL NOTE. THE present volume is the first of three, which will reproduce in English the contents of Vol. III. of Harnack’s great work in the German original, third Edition. The author’s prefaces to the first and second Editions and to the third Edition are here translated. This volume deals with the epoch-making service of Augustine as a reformer of Christian piety and as a theological teacher, and with the influence he exercised down to the period of the Carlovingian Renaissance. The following volume will complete the history of the Development of Dogma by telling the story of Mediæval Theology. The concluding volume will treat of the Issues of Dogma in the period since the Reformation, and will contain a General Index for the whole work. A. B. BRUCE. PREFACE TO FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS. There does not yet exist a recognised method for presenting the History of Dogma of the Mediæval and more modern period. There is no agreement either as to the extent or treatment of our material, and the greatest confusion prevails as to the goal to be aimed at. The end and aim, the method and course adopted in the present Text-Book, were clearly indicated in the introduction to the first volume. I have seen no reason to make any change in carrying out the work. But however definite may be our conception of the task involved in our branch of study, the immense theological material presented by the Middle Ages, and the uncertainty as to what was Dogma at that time, make selection in many places an experiment. I may not hope that the experiment has always been successful. After a considerable pause, great activity has been shown in the study of our subject in the last two years. Benrath, Hauck, Bonwetsch, and Seeberg have published new editions of older Text-Books; Loofs has produced an excellent Guide to the History of Dogma; Kaftan has given a sketch of the study in his work on the Truth of the Christian Religion; Möller and Koffmane have devoted special attention to the sections dealing with it in their volumes on Ancient Church History. The study of these books, and many others which I have gratefully made use of, has shown me that my labours on this great subject have not remained isolated or been fruitless. The knowledge of this has outweighed many experiences which I pass over in silence. This concluding volume counts, to a greater extent than its predecessors, on the indulgence of my learned colleagues; for its author is not a “specialist,” either in the history of the Mediæval Church or in the period of the Reformation. But the advantage possessed by him who comes to the Middle Ages and the Reformation with a thorough knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquity perhaps outweighs the defects of an account which does not everywhere rest on a complete induction. One man can really review all the sources for the history of the Ancient Church; but as regards the Middle Ages and the history of the Reformation, even one more familiar with them than the author of this Text-Book will prove his wisdom simply by the most judicious choice of the material which he studies independently. The exposition of Augustine, Anselm, Thomas, the Council of Trent, Socinianism, and Luther rests throughout on independent studies. This is also true of other parts; but sections will be found in which the study is not advanced, but only its present position is reproduced. I have spent a great deal of time on the preparation of a Table of Contents. I trust it will assist the use of the book. But for the book itself, I wish that it may contribute to break down the power that really dictates in the theological conflicts of the present, viz., ignorance. We cannot, indeed, think too humbly of the importance of theological science for Christian piety; but we cannot rate it too highly as regards the development of the Evangelical Church, our relation to the past, and the preparation of that better future in which, as once in the second century, the Christian faith will again be the comfort of the weak and the strength of the strong. Berlin, 24th Dec., 1889. PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. Since this volume first appeared, there may have been published about fifty monographs and more extensive treatises on the Western History of Dogma, most of which have referred to it. I have tried to make use of them for the new Edition, and I also proposed to make other additions and corrections on the original form of the book, without finding myself compelled to carry out changes in essential points. I have thankfully studied the investigations, published by Dilthey in the Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie, Vols. V. to VII., on the reformed system of doctrine in its relation to Humanism and the “natural system.” He has examined the reformed conceptions in connections in which they have hitherto been seldom or only superficially considered, and he has, therefore, essentially advanced a knowledge of them. Among the many objections to the plan of this work, and the critical standards observed in it, four are especially of importance. It has been said that in this account the development of Dogma is judged by the gospel, but that we do not learn clearly what the gospel is. It has further been maintained that the History of Dogma is depicted as a pathological process. Again, the plan of Book III., headed “The threefold outcome of Dogma,” has been attacked. And, lastly, it has been declared that, although the account marks a scientific advance, it yet bears too subjective or churchly a stamp, and does not correspond to the strictest claims of historical objectivity. As to the first objection, I believe that I have given a fuller account of my conception of the gospel than has been yet done in any text-book of the History of Dogma. But I gladly give here a brief epitome of my view. The preaching of Jesus contains three great main sections. Firstly, the message of the approaching Kingdom of God or of the future salvation; secondly, the proclamation of the actual state of things and of thoughts, such as are given in Matthew VI. 25-34; VII. 7-11; IX. 2; X. 28-33, etc. (see Vol. I., p. 74 f.); thirdly, the new righteousness (the new law). The middle section connected with Matthew XI. 25-30, and therefore also combined with the primitive Christian testimony regarding Jesus as Lord and Saviour, I hold, from strictly historical and objective grounds, to be the true main section, the gospel in the gospel, and to it I subordinate the other portions. That Christ himself expressed it under cover of Eschatology I know as well (Vol. I., p. 58) as the antiquarians who have so keen an eye for the everlasting yesterday, As to the second objection I am at a loss. After the new religion had entered the Roman Empire, and had combined with it in the form of the universal Catholic Church, the History of Dogma shows an advance and a rise in all its main features down to the Reformation. I have described it in this sense from Origen to Athanasius, Augustine, Bernard, and Francis, to mystic Scholasticism and to Luther. It is to me a mystery how far the history should nevertheless have been depicted as a “process of disease.” Of course superstitions accumulated, as in every history of religion, but within this incrustation the individual ever became stronger, the sense for the gospel more active, and the feeling for what was holy and moral more refined and pure. But as regards the development from the beginnings of the evangelic message in the Empire down to the rise of the Catholic Church, I have not permitted myself to speculate how splendid it would have been if everything had happened differently from what it did. On the other hand, I grant that I have not been able to join in praising the formation of that tradition and theology which has lowered immediate religion to one that is mediated, and has burdened faith with complicated theological and philosophical formulas. Just as little could it occur to me to extol the rise of that ecclesiastical rule that chiefly means obedience, when it speaks of faith. But in this there is no “pathology”; the formations that arose overcame Gnosticism. My critics have not convinced me that the conception followed by me in reference to the final offshoots of the History of Dogma is unhistorical. But I readily admit that the History of Dogma can also be treated as history of ecclesiastical theology, and that in this way the account can bring it down to the present time. Little is to be gained by disputing about such questions in an either-or fashion. If we regard Protestantism as a new principle which has superseded the absolute authority of Dogmas, then, in dealing with the History of Dogma, we must disregard Protestant forms of doctrine, however closely they may approximate to ancient Dogma. But if we look upon it as a particular reform of Western Catholicism, we shall have to admit its doctrinal formations into that history. Only, even in that case, we must not forget that the Evangelical Churches, tried by the notion of a church which prevailed for 1300 years, are no churches. From this the rest follows of itself. Finally, as regards the last objection, I may apply chiefly to my account a verdict recently passed by a younger fellow-worker:—“The History of Dogma of to-day is, when regarded as science, a half thing.” Certainly it is in its beginnings, and it falls far short of perfection. It must become still more circumspect and reserved; but I should fear, lest it be so purified in the crucible of this youngest adept—who meantime, however, is still a member of the numerous company of those who only give advice—that nothing of consequence would remain, or only that hollow gospel, “religion is history,” which he professes to have derived from the teaching of four great prophets, from whom he could have learnt better. We are all alike sensible of the labours and controversies which he would evade; but it is one of the surprises that are rare even in theology, that one of our number should be trying in all seriousness to divide the child between the contending mothers, and that by a method which would necessarily once more perpetuate the dispute that preceded the division. The ecclesiastics among Protestants, although they arrogate to themselves the monopoly of “Christian” theology on the title-pages of their books, will never give up the claim to history and science; they will, therefore, always feel it their duty to come to terms with the “other” theology. Nor will scientific theology ever forget that it is the conscience of the Evangelical Church, and as such has to impose demands on the Church which it serves in freedom. Berlin, 11th July, 1897. ADOLF HARNACK. CONTENTS. PART II. DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMA. BOOK II. Expansion and Remodelling of Dogma into a Doctrine of Sin, Grace, and Means of Grace on the basis of the Church. Page CHAPTER I.—Historical Situation 3-13 Augustine the standard authority till the period of the Reformation 3 Augustine and Western Christianity 3 Augustine as Reformer of Christian Piety 4 Augustine as teacher of the Church 4 Augustine and Dogma 5 Dogma in the Middle Ages 6 The German and Roman Peoples and Dogma 6 Method of Mediæval History of Dogma 9 Division into Periods 12 CHAPTER II.—Western Christianity and Western Theologians before Augustine 14-60 Tertullian as Founder of Western Christianity 14 Elements of Tertullian’s Christianity as elements of Western Christianity as a whole 14 Law (lex) 15 Juristic element 16 Syllogistic and Dialectical 17 Psychological 21 Biblical and Practical 22 Eschatology and Morality 23 Cyprian’s importance 24 The Roman Church 25 Revolution under Constantine: Origen’s theology and Monachism are imported into the West 27 Græcised Western Theology and the Old Latin type enter into Augustine 29 The importance to Augustine of the Greek scholars Ambrose (p. 29) and Victorinus Rhetor 33 The influence upon him of genuine Latins 37 Of Cyprian 38 The Donatist Controversy 38 Optatus 42 Ambrose as Latin 48 Results of Pre-Augustinian development 53 Doctrine of the Symbol 53 Death of Christ 54 Soteriology 55 The Church 59 Rome and Heathenism 59 CHAPTER III.—Historical Position of Augustine as Reformer of Christian Piety 61-94 General Characteristics 61 Augustine’s new Christian self-criticism 66 Pre-Augustinian and Augustinian Piety 67 Sin and Grace the decisive factors in Augustine 69 The changed tone of Piety 72 Criticism of this Piety 75 Four elements constituting the Catholic stamp of Piety 77 a Authority of Church for Faith 78 b God and Means of Grace 83 g Faith, Forgiveness of Sins, and Merit 87 d Pessimistic view of Present State 91 Concluding remarks 93 CHAPTER IV.—Historical Position of Augustine as Teacher of the Church 95-240 The new Dogmatic Scheme 95 The connection with the Symbol 95 Discord between Symbol and Holy Scripture 98 Discord between Scripture and the principle of Salvation 99 Discord between Religion and Philosophy 100 Discord between Doctrine of Grace and Ecclesiasticism 101 Contradictions within these series of conceptions 101 Impossibility of an Augustinian system 102 Universal influence of Augustine 103 Method of presenting Augustinianism; Dogma and Augustine 104 1. Augustine’s Doctrines of the First and Last Things l06-140 Augustine’s Theology and Psychology (“Aristoteles Alter”) were born of Piety 106 Dissolution of the ancient feeling 108 Psychological and Neo-Platonic view of the soul 111 The ethical views interwoven with this (God, world, soul, will, love) 113 Influence of Christian ecclesiasticism 124 [On reason, revelation, faith, and knowledge] 125 Authority of Christ and Christology 125 Final aims in the other and this world 134 Concluding observation 138 2. The Donatist Controversy. The Work: De civitate Dei. Doctrine of the Church and Means of Grace 140-168 Introduction 140 The Church as Doctrinal Authority 143 Unity of the Church 144 Its Holiness 146 Catholicity 149 Apostolicity and other attributes 149 Church and Kingdom of God 151 Word and Sacrament 155 The Sacraments 156 Lord’s Supper 158 Baptism 159 Ordination 161 The Church as societas sacramentorum 163 As a heavenly communion 164 As primeval 164 As communio fidelium 165 As numerus electorum 166 Closing observations 167 3. The Pelagian Controversy. Doctrine of Grace and Sin 168-221 Augustine’s Doctrine before the controversy 168 General characteristics of Augustinianism and Pelagianism, as of Pelagius, Cælestius, and Julian 168 Origin and nature of Pelagianism 172 § 1. The outward course of the dispute 173 Pelagius and Cælestius in Rome and Carthage 173 Events in Palestine 177 Events in North Africa and Rome 181 Condemnation in Rome; Julian of Eclanum 186 Final Stages 187 § 2. The Pelagian Doctrine 188 Agreement and differences between the leaders 189 The chief doctrines 191 The separate doctrines in their degree of conformity to tradition 196 § 3. The Augustinian doctrine 203 The doctrine of grace, predestination, redemption, and justification 204 Doctrine of sin, original sin, and the primitive state 210 Criticism of Augustinianism 217 4. Augustine’s explanation of the Symbol (Enchiridion ad Laurentium). New system of religion 222-240 Exposition of Article I. 223 Article II. 225 Article III. 228 Criticism of this exposition; old and new system of religion 234 CHAPTER V.—History of Dogma in the West down to the beginning of the Middle Ages, A.D. 430-604 241-273 Historical position 242 1. Conflict between Semi-Pelagianism and Augustinianism 245-261 The monks of Hadrumetum and in South Gaul, Cassian 246 Prosper 249 De vocatione gentium 250 Liber Prædestinatus 251 Faustus of Rhegium 252 Decree de libris recipiendis 255 The Scythian monks, Fulgentius, Hormisdas 255 Cæsarius of Arles, Synods of Valencia and Orange 257 Results 260 2. Gregory the Great 262-273 General characteristics 262 Superstition, Christology, Intercessions 263 Doctrine of Sin and Grace 266 Merits, satisfactions, saints, relics, purgatory 267 Penance 269 Gregory’s position between Augustine and the Middle Ages 270 CHAPTER VI.—History of Dogma in the period of the Carlovingian Renaissance 274-331 The importance of the Carlovingian epoch in the History of Dogma and of the Church 274 1 a. The Adoptian Controversy 278-292 Genesis of the problem 278 Spanish affairs and the dispute in Spain. Teaching of Elipandus, Felix and Beatus is Augustinian 281 Dispute before the Frankish and Roman tribunals 287 Alcuin’s teaching. Influence of Greek conception 289 Connection with doctrine of the Lord’s Supper 291 Result 292 1 b. Controversy about Predestination 292-302 The monk Gottschalk 293 Rabanus and Ratrainnus, his opponents 295 Controversy among Frankish and Lothringian Bishops. Objective untruthfulness of Gottschalk’s opponents. Synod at Chiersey 299 Synod at Valencia 299 Synods at Savonieres and Toucy 300 The theory consonant to Church practice holds the field under Augustinian formulas 301 2. Dispute as to the filioque and about images 302-308 The filioque, the Franks and the Pope 302 Attitude of the Franks to images 305 The libri Carolini and the self-consciousness of the Frankish Church. Synod of Frankfurt 306 Later history of images 308 3. Development of theory and practice of the Mass (the Dogma of the Lord’s Supper) and of Penance 308-331 The three causes of the development of theory of the Lord’s Supper in the West 308 The controversy defartu virgins 310 The Augustinian conception promoted by Beda checked by Alcuin 311 Paschasius Radbertus 312 Rabanus and Ratramnus 318 Ideas of the Mass as part of the institution of expiation 322 Practice of Confession: a The notion of God at its root 323 b Development of institution of penance from Roman Church and German premises, Influence of Monachism 324 g Defective theory 326 d Growth of satisfactions and indulgences 327 _________________________________________________________________ Second Part. DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMA. _________________________________________________________________ SECOND BOOK. Expansion and Remodelling of Dogma into a Doctrine of Sin, Grace and means of Grace on the basis of the Church. “Domini mors potentior erat quam vita .. . Lex Christianorum crux est sancta Christi.” —Pseudo-Cyprian. “Die Ehrfurcht vor dem, was unter uns ist, ist ein Letztes wozu die Menschheit gelangen konnte and musste. Aber was gehörte dazu, die Erde nicht allein unter sich liegen zu lassen and sich auf einen höheren Geburtsort zu berufen, sondern auch Niedrigkeit and Armuth, Spott and Verachtung, Schmach and Elend, Leiden and Tod als göttlich anzuerkennen, ja selbst Sünde and Verbrechen nicht als Hindernisse, sondern als Fördernisse des Heiligen zu verehren!” —Goethe. _________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL SITUATION. [1] The history of piety and of dogmas in the West was so thoroughly dominated by Augustine from the beginning of the fifth century to the era of the Reformation, that we must take this whole time as forming one period. It is indeed possible to doubt whether it is not correct to include also the succeeding period, since Augustinianism continued to exert its influence in the sixteenth century. But we are compelled to prefer the views that the Reformation had all the significance of a new movement, and that the revolt from Augustine was marked even in post-tridentine Catholicism, as well as, completely, in Socinianism. [2] In this second Book of the second Section, therefore, we regard the history of dogma of the West from Augustine to the Reformation as one complete development, and then, in accordance with our definition of dogma and its history, [3] we add the “final stages of dogma” in their triple form—Tridentine Catholicism, Socinianism, and Protestantism. 2. In order rightly to appreciate the part played by Augustine, it is necessary first (Chap. II.) to describe the distinctive character of Western Christianity and Western theologians anterior to his appearance. It will then appear that while the West was prepared to favour Augustinianism, those very elements that especially characterised Western Christianity—the juristic and moralistic—resisted the Augustinian type of thought in matters of faith. This fact at once foreshadows the later history of Augustinianism in the Church. 3. Augustine comes before us, in the first place, as a reformer of Christian piety, altering much that belonged to vulgar Catholicism, and carrying out monotheism strictly and thoroughly. He gave the central place to the living relation of the soul to God; he took religion out of the sphere of cosmology and the cultus, and demonstrated and cherished it in the domain of the deepest life of the soul. On the other hand, we will have to show that while establishing the sovereignty of faith over all that is natural, he did not surmount the old Catholic foundation of the theological mode of thought; further, that he was not completely convinced of the supremacy of the religious over the moral, of the personal state of faith over ecclesiasticism; and finally, that in his religious tendencies, as generally, he remained burdened by the rubbish of ecclesiastical tradition. (Chap. III.) 4. Augustine falls next to be considered as a Church teacher. The union of three great circles of thought, which he reconstructed and connected absolutely, assured him, along with the incomparable impression made by his inexhaustible personality, of a lasting influence. In the first place, he built up a complete circle of conceptions, which is marked by the categories, “God, the soul, alienation from God, irresistible grace, hunger for God, unrest in the world and rest in God, and felicity,” a circle in which we can easily demonstrate the co-operation of Neoplatonic and monastic Christian elements, but which is really so pure and simple that it can be taken as the fundamental form of monotheistic piety in general. Secondly, he gave expression to a group of ideas in which sin, grace through Christ, grace in general, faith, love, and hope form the main points; a Paulinism modified by popular Catholic elements. Thirdly, he constructed another group, in which the Catholic Church is regarded as authority, dispenser of grace, and administrator of the sacraments, and, further, as the means and aim of all God’s ordinances. Here he always constructed, along with a wealth of ideas, a profusion of schemes—not formulas; he re-fashioned Dogmatics proper, and, speaking generally, gave the first impulse to a study which, as an introduction to Dogmatics, has obtained such an immense importance for theology and Science since the Scholastics. 5. On the other hand, Augustine always felt that he was, as regards Dogma, an Epigone, and he submitted himself absolutely to the tradition of the Church. He was wanting in the vigorous energy in Church work shown, e.g., by Athanasius, and in the impulse to force upon the Church in fixed formulas the truths that possessed his soul. Consequently the result of his life-work on behalf of the Church can be described thus. (1) He established more securely in the West the ancient ecclesiastical tradition as authority and law. (2) He deepened and, comparatively speaking, Christianised the old religious tendency. (3) In the thought and life of the Church he substituted a plan of salvation, along with an appropriate doctrine of the sacraments, for the old dogma [4] and the cultus, and instilled into heart and feeling the fundamental conception of his Christianity that divine grace was the beginning, middle, and end; but he himself sought to harmonise the conception with popular Catholicism, and he expressed this in formulas which, because they were not fixed and definite, admitted of still further concessions to traditional views. In a word, he failed to establish without admixture the new and higher religious style in which he constructed theology. Therefore the ancient Greek dogma which aimed at deification, as well as the old Roman conception of religion as a legal relationship, could maintain their ground side by side with it. Precisely in the best of his gifts to the Church, Augustine gave it impulses and problems, but not a solid capital. Along with this he transmitted to posterity a profusion of ideas, conceptions, and views which, unsatisfactorily harmonised by himself, produced great friction, living movements, and, finally, violent controversies. 6. As at the beginning of the history of the Latin Church Cyprian followed Tertullian, and stamped the character of ancient Latin Christianity, so Gregory the Great succeeded Augustine, and gave expression to the mediæval character of Latin Christianity, a form which, under Augustinian formulas, often differs in whole and in details from Augustine. Dogma remains almost throughout, in the Middle Ages, the complex of Trinitarian and Christological doctrines which was handed down with the Symbol. But, besides this, an immense series of theological conceptions, of church regulations and statutes, already possessed a quasi-dogmatic authority. Yet, in acute cases, he could alone be expelled as a heretic who could be convicted of disbelieving one of the twelve articles of the Symbol, or of sharing in the doctrines of heretics already rejected, i.e., of Pelagians, Donatists, etc. Thus it remained up to the time of the Reformation, although the doctrines of the Church—the Pope, and the sacraments, the ecclesiastical sacrament of penance, and the doctrine of transubstantiation—claimed almost dogmatic authority, though only by being artificially connected with the Symbol. 7. The consolidation of the ecclesiastical and dogmatic system into a legal order, in harmony with the genius of Western Christianity, was almost rendered perfect by the political history of the Church in the period of the tribal migrations. The Germans who entered the circle of the Church, and partly became fused with the Latins, partly, but under the leadership of Rome, remained independent, received Christianity in its ecclesiastical form, as something absolutely complete. Therefore, setting aside the Chauvinistic contention that the Germans were predisposed to Christianity, [5] no independent theological movement took place for centuries on purely German soil. No German Christianity existed in the Middle Ages in the sense that there was a Jewish, Greek, or Latin form. [6] Even if the Germans may have attempted to make themselves more thoroughly familiar with Latin Christianity, as e.g., the Slays did with the Greek—we may recall the old Saxon harmony of the Gospels, etc.— [7] yet there was a complete absence of any independence in consciously appropriating it, up to the settlement of the Begging orders in Germany, properly speaking, indeed, up to the Reformation. Complaints of Papal oppressions, or of external ceremonies, cannot be introduced into this question. The complainers were themselves Roman Christians, and the never-failing sectaries paid homage, not to a “German” Christianity, but to a form of Church which was also imported. If up to the thirteenth century there existed in Germany no independent theology or science, still less was there any movement in the history of dogma. [8] But as soon as Germans, in Germany and England, took up an independent part in the inner movement of the Church, they prepared the way, supported indeed by Augustine, for the Reformation. The case was different on Roman territory. We need not, of course, look at Italy, for the land of the Popes steadily maintained its characteristic indifference to all theology as theology. Apocalyptic, socialistic, and revolutionary movements were not wanting; Hippocrates and Justinian were studied; but the ideals of thinkers seldom interested Italians, and they hardly ever troubled themselves about a dogma, if it was nothing more. Spain, also, very soon passed out of the intellectual movement, into which, besides, it had never thrown any energy. For eight centuries it was set the immense practical task of protecting Christendom from Islam: in this war it transformed the law of the Catholic religion into a military discipline. The Spanish history of dogma has been a blank since the days of Bishop Elipandus. Thus France alone remains. In so far as the Middle Ages, down to the thirteenth century, possessed any dogmatic history, it was to a very large extent Frankish or French. [9] Gaul had been the land of culture among Latin countries as early as the fourth and fifth centuries. ’Mid the storms of the tribal migrations, culture maintained its ground longest in Southern Gaul, and after a short epoch of barbarism, during which civilisation seemed to have died out everywhere on the Continent, and England appeared to have obtained the leadership, France under the Carlovingians—of course, France allied with Rome through Boniface—came again to the front. There it remained, but with its centre of gravity in the North, between the Seine and the Rhine. Paris was for centuries only second to Rome, as formerly Alexandria and Carthage had been. [10] The imperial crown passed to the Germans; the real ruler of the world sat at Rome; but the “studium”—in every sense of the term—belonged to the French. Strictly speaking, even in France, there was no history of dogma in the Middle Ages. If the Reformation had not taken place, we would have been as little aware of any mediæval history of dogma in the West as in the East; for the theological and ecclesiastical movements of the Middle Ages, which by no means professed to be new dogmatic efforts, only claim to be received into the history of dogma because they ended in the dogmas of Trent on the one hand, and in the symbols of the Reformed Churches and Socinian Rationalism on the other. The whole of the Middle Ages presents itself in the sphere of dogmatic history as a transition period, the period when the Church was fixing its relationship to Augustine, and the numerous impulses originated by him. This period lasted so long, (1) because centuries had to elapse before Augustine found disciples worthy of him, and men were in a position even to understand the chain of ecclesiastical and theological edicts handed down from antiquity; (2) because the Roman genius of the Western Church and the Augustinian spirit were in part ill-assorted, and it was therefore a huge task to harmonise them; and (3) because at the time when complete power had been gained for the independent study of Church doctrine and Augustine, a new authority, in many respects more congenial to the spirit of the Church, appeared on the scene, viz., Augustine’s powerful rival, [11] Aristotle. The Roman genius, the superstition which, descending from the closing period of antiquity, was strengthened in barbarous times, Augustine, and Aristotle—these are the four powers which contended for their interpretation of the gospel in the history of dogma in the Middle Ages. 8. The Middle Ages experienced no dogmatic decisions like those of Nicaea or Chalcedon. After the condemnation of Pelagians and Semipelagians, Monothelites, and Adoptians, the dogmatic circle was closed. The actions in the Carlovingian age against images, and against Ratramnus and Gottschalk were really of slight importance, and in the fights with later heretics, so many of whom disturbed the mediæval Church, old weapons were used, new ones being in fact unnecessary. The task of the historian of dogma is here, therefore, very difficult. In order to know what he ought to describe, to be as just to ancient dogma in its continued influence as to the new quasi-dogmatic Christianity in whose midst men lived, he must fix his eyes on the beginning, Augustine, and the close, the sixteenth century. Nothing belongs to the history of dogma which does not serve to explain this final stage, and even then only on its dogmatic side, and this again may be portrayed only in so far as it prepared the way for the framing of new doctrines, or the official revision of the ancient dogmas. If my view is right, there are three lines to which we have to turn our attention. In the first place we must examine the history of piety, in so far as new tendencies were formed in it, based on, or existing side by side with Augustinianism; for the piety which was determined by other influences led also to the construction of other dogmatic formulas. But the history of piety in the Middle Ages is the history of monachism. [12] We may therefore conjecture that if monachism really passed through a history in the Middle Ages, and not merely endless repetitions, it cannot be indifferent for the history of dogma. As a matter of fact, it will be shown that Bernard and Francis were also doctrinal Fathers. We may here point at once to the fact that Augustine, at least apparently, reveals a hiatus in his theology as dominated by piety; he was able to say little concerning the work of Christ in connection with his system of doctrine, and his impassioned love of God was not clearly connected in theory with the impression made by Christ’s death, or with Christ’s “work.” What a transformation, what an access of fervour, Augustinianism had to experience, when impassioned love to the Eternal and Holy One found its object in the Crucified, when it invested with heavenly glory, and referred to the sinful soul, all traits of the beaten, wounded, and dying One, when it began to reflect on the infinite “merits” of its Saviour, because the most profound of thoughts had dawned upon it, that the suffering of the innocent was salvation in history! Dogma could not remain unaffected by what it now found to contemplate and experience in the “crucified” Saviour of Bernard, the “poor” Saviour of Francis. [13] We may say briefly that, by the agency of the mediæval religious virtuosi and theologians, the close connection between God, the “work” of Christ, and salvation was ultimately restored in the Tridentine and ancient Lutheran dogma. The Greek Church had maintained and still maintains it; but Augustine had loosened it, because his great task was to show what God is, and what salvation the soul requires. In the second place, we have to take the doctrine of the Sacraments into consideration; for great as were the impulses given here also by Augustine, yet everything was incomplete which he transmitted to the Church. But the Church as an institution and training-school required the sacraments above all, and in its adherence to Augustine it was precisely his sacramental doctrine, and the conception connected therewith of gradual justification, of which it laid hold. We shall have to show how the Church developed this down to the sixteenth century, how it idealised itself in the sacraments, and fashioned them into being its peculiar agencies. In the third place, we have to pursue a line which is marked for us by the names of Augustine and Aristotle—fides and ratio, auctoritas and ratio intelligentia and ratio. To investigate this thoroughly would be to write the history of mediæval science in general. Here, therefore, we have only to examine it, in so far as there were developed in it the same manifold fashioning of theological thought, and those fundamental views which passed into the formulas, and at the same time into the contents of the doctrinal creations, of the sixteenth century, and which ultimately almost put an end to dogma in the original sense of the term. But we have also to include under the heading “Augustine and Aristotle” the opposition between the doctrine of the enslaved will and free grace and that of free will and merit. The latter shattered Augustinianism within Catholicism. We cannot trace any dogma regarding the Church in the Middle Ages until the end of the thirteenth century, but this is only because the Church was the foundation and the latent co-efficient of all spiritual and theological movement. [14] Our account has to make this significance of the Church explicit, and in doing so to examine the growth of papal power; for in the sixteenth century the claim of the Pope was in dispute. On this point the Western Church was split up. But further, Augustine had given a central place to the question of the personal position of the Christian, confusing it, however, by uncertain references to the Church and to the medicinal effect of the means of grace. And the mediæval movement, in proportion as the Church and the sacraments came to the front without any diminution of the longing for an independent faith, [15] was led to the question of personal assurance. On this point also—justification—the Western Church was rent asunder. [16] Thus an account of the history of dogma in the Middle Ages will only be complete if it can show how the questions as to the power of the Church (of the Pope, the importance of the Mass and sacraments) and justification came to the front, and how in these questions the old dogma, not indeed outwardly, but really, perished. In Tridentine Catholicism it now became completely, along with its new portions, a body of law; in Protestantism it was still retained only in as far as it showed itself, when compared with the Divine Word, to express the Gospel, to form a bond with the historical past, or to serve as the basis of personal assurance of salvation. There can be no doubt about the division into periods. After an introduction on Western Christianity and Theology before Augustine, Augustinianism falls to be described. Then we have to discuss the epochs of (1) the Semipelagian controversies and Gregory I.; (2) the Carlovingian Renaissance; (3) the period of Clugny and Bernard (the eleventh and twelfth centuries); and (4) the period of the mendicant orders, as also of the so-called Reformers before the Reformation, i.e., of revived Augustinianism (thirteenth and fifteenth centuries). The Middle Ages only reached their climax after the beginning of the thirteenth century and, having grown spiritually equal to the material received from the ancient Church, then developed all individual energies and conceptions. But then at once began the crises which led to the Renaissance and Humanism, to the Reformation, Socinianism and Tridentine Catholicism. It is, therefore, impossible to delimit two periods within the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; for Scholasticism and Mysticism, the development of the authoritative, Nominalist, dogmatics, and the attempts to form new doctrines, are all interwoven. Reformation and Counter-reformation have a common root. _________________________________________________________________ [1] Baur, Vorles. üb. die christl. D.-G., 2nd vol., 1866. Bach, Die Dogmengeschichte des Mittelalters, 2 vols., 1873, 1875. Seeberg, Die Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters (Thomasius, Die christl. Dogmengesch, 2 Ed., 2 vol., Division I.) 1888. All begin in the period after Augustine, as also Schwane, D.-G. der mittleren, Zeit 1882. Loofs, Leitfaden der D.-G., 3 Ed., 1893. Seeberg, Lehrbuch d. D.-G., Division I., 1895. [2] The complete breach with Augustine is indeed marked neither by Luther nor Ignatius Loyola, but first by Leibnitz, Thomasius, and—the Probabilists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [3] Vol. I., § 1. [4] The ancient dogma has thus formed building material in the West since Augustine. It has been deprived—at least in the most important respect—of its ancient purpose, and serves new ones. The stones hewn for a temple, and once constructed into a temple, now serve for the building of a cathedral. Or perhaps the figure is more appropriate that the old temple expanded into a cathedral, and wonderfully transformed, is yet perceptible in the cathedral. [5] Seeberg, (Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, p. 3), has repeated it. [6] Even the influence, which some have very recently sought to demonstrate, of German character on the formation of a few mediæval theologumena is at least doubtful (against Cremer). Die Wurzeln des Anselm’schen Satisfactions-begriffs in the Theol. Stud. u. Kritik., 1880, p. 7 ff., 1893, p. 316 ff., and Seeberg, l.c. p. 123. Fuller details in I., ch. 7, Sect. 4. [7] It was to the advantage, here and there, of simple piety that it had not co-operated in the construction of the Church. [8] Nitzsch, Deutsche Gesch., II., p. 15: “(Up to the middle of the eleventh century) the task of administering property was more important to the German Church than the political and dogmatic debates of the neighbouring French hierarchy.” See also Döllinger Akad. Vorträge, vol. II., Lecture 1, at beginning. [9] See the correct opinion of Jordanus of Osnabrück (about 1285) that the Romans had received the sacerdotium, the Germans the imperium, the French the studium (Lorenz, Geschichtsquellen, 2 ed., vol. II., p. 296). [10] See on the importance of North-Eastern France, Sohm in the Ztschr. d. Savigny-Stiftung. German Division I., p 3 ff., and Schrörs, Hinkmar, p. 3 f. On Rome and Paris see Reuter, Gesch. d. Aufkl. I., p. 181. [11] The derisive title of Augustine—“Aristoteles Pœnorum”—was prophetic. He got this name from Julian of Eclanum, Aug. Op. imperf., III., 199. [12] See Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus, vol. I., p. 7 ff., and my Vortrag über das Monchthum, 3 ed. [13] Bernard prepared the way for transforming the Neoplatonic exercitium of the contemplation of the All and the Deity into methodical reflection on the sufferings of Christ. Gilbert says: “Dilectus meus, inquit sponsa, candidus et rubicundus. In hoc nobis et candet veritas et rubet caritas.” [14] The opposition to a sacerdotal Church which existed at all times, and was already strong in the thirteenth century, left no lasting traces down to the fourteenth. In this century movements began on the soil of Catholicism which led to new forms of the conception of the Church and compelled it to fix definitively its own. [15] In the Middle Ages every advance in the development of the authority and power of the Church was accompanied by the growing impression that the Church was corrupt. This impression led to the suspicion that it had become Babylon, and to despair of its improvement. [16] On this most important point the schism went beyond Augustine; for in the Middle Ages, as regards the ground and assurance of faith, Augustine of the Confessions and doctrine of predestination was played off against Augustine the apologist of the Catholic Church. Luther, however, abandoned both alike, and followed a view which can be shown to exist in Augustine and in the Middle Ages at most in a hidden undercurrent. _________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER II. WESTERN CHRISTIANITY AND WESTERN THEOLOGIANS BEFORE AUGUSTINE. The distinctive character of Western Christianity has been frequently referred to in our earlier volumes. We may now, before taking up Augustine and the Church influenced by him, appropriately review and describe the Christianity into which he entered, and on which he conferred an extraordinarily prolonged existence and new vital energies by the peculiar form and training to which he subjected it. It was the Roman Church that transmitted Christianity to the Middle Ages. But it might almost be named the Augustinian-Gregorian [17] with as much justice as that of the Augsburg Confession is called the Lutheran. If, however, we ascend the history of the Latin Church to as near its origin as we can, we find ourselves confronted by a man in whom the character and the future of this Church were already announced, viz., Tertullian. Tertullian and Augustine are the Fathers of the Latin Church in so eminent a sense that, measured by them, the East possessed no Church Fathers at all. [18] The only one to rival them, Origen, exerted his influence in a more limited sphere. Eminently ecclesiastical as his activity was, his Christianity was not really ecclesiastical, but esoteric. His development and the import of his personal life were almost without significance for the mass; he continued to live in his books and among theologians. But with Tertullian and Augustine it was different. It is true that only a fraction of Tertullian’s teaching was retained, that he was tolerated by posterity only in Cyprian’s reduced version, and that Augustine became more and more a source of uneasiness to, and was secretly opposed by, his Church. Yet both passed into the history of the Western Catholic Church with their personality, with the characteristics of their Christian thought and feeling. The frictions and unresolved dissonances, in which they wore themselves out, were transmitted to the future as well as the concords they sounded, and the problems, which they could not master in their own inner experience, became the themes of world-historical spiritual conflicts. [19] We can exhibit the superiority of Western to Eastern Christianity at many points; we can even state a whole series of causes for this superiority; but one of the most outstanding is the fact that while the East was influenced by a commonplace succession of theologians and monks, the West was moulded by Tertullian and Augustine. Roman Christianity, still (c. 180) essentially Greek in form, but already with important features of its own, [20] had won the Great African to its service. [21] It had already transmitted to him Latin translations of Biblical books; but on this foundation Tertullian laboured, creating both thought and language, because he was able thoroughly to assimilate the new faith, and to express his whole individuality in it. [22] In doing so he adopted all the elements which tradition offered him. First, as a Christian Churchman, he took up the old enthusiastic and rigorous, as well as the new anti-heretical, faith. He sought to represent both, and in his sovereign law to verify the strict lex of the ancient disciplina, founded on eschatological hopes, and allied with unrestrained pneumatic dogmatics, and also the strict lex of the new rule of faith, which seemed ancient, because the heretics were undoubtedly innovators. He sought to be a disciple of the prophets and an obedient son of his Episcopal teachers. While he spent his strength in the fruitless attempt to unite them, [23] he left both forces as an inheritance to the Church of the West. If the history of that Church down to the sixteenth century exhibits a conflict between orthodox clerical and enthusiastic, between biblical and pneumatic elements, if monachism here was constantly in danger of running into apocalyptics and enthusiasm, and of forming an opposition to the Episcopal and world-Church, all that is foreshadowed in Tertullian. A further element, which here comes before us, is the juristic. We know that jurisprudence and legal thought held the chief place in mediæval philosophy, theology, and ethics. [24] Post-apostolic Greek Christians had, indeed, already put Christianity forward as the “law,” and the Roman community may have cultivated this view with peculiar energy; [25] but in and by itself this term is capable of so many meanings as to be almost neutral. Yet through the agency of Tertullian, by his earlier profession a lawyer, all Christian forms received a legal impress. He not only transferred the technical terms of the jurists into the ecclesiastical language of the West, but he also contemplated, from a legal standpoint, all relations of the individual and the Church to the Deity, and vice versâ, all duties and rights, the moral imperative as well as the actions of God and Christ, nay, their mutual relationship. He who was so passionate and fanciful seemed never to be thoroughly satisfied until he had found the scheme of a legal relationship which he could proclaim as an inviolable authority; he never felt secure until he had demonstrated inner compulsions to be external demands, exuberant promises to be stipulated rewards. But with this the scheme of personal rights was applied almost universally. God appears as the mighty partner who watches jealously over his rights. Through Tertullian this tendency passed into the Western Church, which, being Roman, was disposed to favour it; there it operated in the most prejudicial way. If we grant that by it much that was valuable was preserved, and juristic thought did contribute to the understanding of some, not indeed the most precious, Pauline conceptions, yet, on the whole, religious reflection was led into a false channel, the ideas of satisfaction and merit becoming of the highest importance, and the separation of Western from primitive and Eastern Christianity was promoted. [26] Another element is closely connected with the legal, viz., the syllogistic and dialetical. Tertullian has been extolled as a speculative theologian; but this is wrong. Speculation was not his forte; we perceive this very plainly when we look at his relation to Irenaeus. Notice how much he has borrowed from this predecessor of his, and how carefully he has avoided, in doing so, his most profound speculations! Tertullian was a Sophist in the good and bad sense of the term. He was in his element in Aristotelian and Stoic dialectics; in his syllogisms he is a philosophising advocate. But in this also he was the pioneer of his Church, whose theologians have always reasoned more than they have philosophised. The manner in which he rings the changes on auctoritas and ratio, or combines them, and spins lines of thought out of them; the formal treatment of problems, meant to supply the place of one dealing with the matter, until it ultimately loses sight of aim and object, and falls a prey to the delusion that the certainty of the conclusion guarantees the certainty of the premises—this whole method only too well known from mediæval Scholasticism, had its originator in Tertullian. [27] In the classical period of eastern theology men did not stop at auctoritas and ratio; they sought to reach the inner convincing phases of authority, and understood by ratio the reason determined by the conception of the matter in question. In the West, auctoritas and ratio stood for a very long time side by side without their relations being fixed—see the mediæval theologians from Cassian—and the speculation introduced by Augustine was ultimately once more eliminated, as is proved by the triumph of Nominalism. Stoic, or “Aristotelian” rationalism, united with the recognition of empirical authority under cover of Augustinian religious formulas, remained the characteristic of Roman Catholic dogmatics and morality. [28] But the Western type of thought possessed, besides this, an element in which it was considerably superior to the Eastern, the psychological view. The importance due to Augustine in this respect has been better perceived in recent years, and we may look for better results as regards the share of Scholasticism in the development of modern psychology. [29] In Augustine himself Stoic rationalism was thrust strongly into the background by his supreme effort to establish the psychology of the moral and immoral, the pious and impious on the basis of actual observation. His greatness as a scientific theologian is found essentially in the psychological element. But that also is first indicated in Tertullian. As a moralist he indeed follows, so far as he is a philosopher, the dogmatism of the Stoa; but Stoic physics could lead into an empirical psychology. In this respect Tertullian’s great writing, “De anima,” is an extremely important achievement. It contains germs of insight and aspirations which developed afterwards; and another Western before Augustine, Arnobius, also did better work in grasping problems psychologically than the great theologians of the East. [30] This side of Western theology undoubtedly continued weak before Augustine, because the eclecticism and moralism to which Cicero had especially given currency held the upper hand through the reading of his works. [31] Finally, still another element falls to be mentioned which distinguishes the features of Western Christianity from the Eastern, but which it is hard to summarise in one word. Many have spoken of its more practical attitude. But in the East, Christianity received as practical a form as people there required. What is meant is connected with the absence of the speculative tendency in the West. To this is to be attributed the fact that the West did not fix its attention above all on deification, nor, in consequence, on asceticism, but kept real life more distinctly in view; it therefore obtained to a greater extent from the gospel what could rule and correct that life. Thus Western Christianity appears to us from the first more popular and biblical, as well as more ecclesiastical. It may be that this impression is chiefly due to our descent from the Christianity in question, and that we can never therefore convey it to a Greek [32] ; but it is undeniable that as the Latin idiom of the Church was from its origin more popular than the Greek, which always retained something hieratic about it, so the West succeeded to a greater extent in giving effect to the words of the gospel. For both of these facts we have to refer again to Tertullian. He had the gift, granted to few Christian writers, of writing attractively, both for theologians and laymen. His style, popular and fresh, must have been extremely effective. On the other hand, he was able, in writings like De patientia, De oratione, De pænitentia, or De idololatria, to express the gospel in a concrete and homely form; and even in many of his learned and polemical works, which are full of paradoxes, antitheses, rhetorical figures, frigid sentences, and wild exaggerations, we do not fail to find the clear and pertinent application of evangelical sayings, astonishing only by its simplicity, and reminding us, where the thought takes a higher flight, not infrequently of Augustine. [33] The Christianity and theology of Tertullian, whose elements we have here endeavoured to characterise, were above all headed by the primitive Christian hope and morality. In these was comprehended what he felt to be his inmost thought. Both phases recur in a large section of Latin literature of the third and of the first half of the fourth century. [34] There it is hardly possible to find any traces of Antignostic dogmatics; on the contrary, Apocalyptics were developed with extreme vividness, and morality, often Stoic in colouring, received a stringent form. [35] The whole of the abundant literary labours and dogmatic efforts of Hippolytus seem to have been lost on the West from the first and completely. But Tertullian also was deprived by his Montanism of the full influence which he might have exerted on the Church. [36] The results of his work passed to Cyprian, and, though much abbreviated and modified, were circulated by him. For the period from A.D. 260 down to Ambrose—indeed, properly speaking, to Augustine and Jerome—Cyprian became the Latin Church author par excellence. All known and unknown Latin writers of his time, and after him, had but a limited influence: he, as an edifying and standard author, dictated like a sovereign to the Western Church for the next 120 years. His authority ranked close after that of the Holy Scriptures, and it lasted up to the time of Augustine. [37] Cyprian had hardly one original theological thought; for even the work “De unitate ecclesiæ” rests on points of view which are partly derived from the earlier Catholic Fathers, and partly borrowed from the Roman Church, to which they were indigenous. In the extremely authoritative work, “De opere et eleemosynis” the Tertullian conceptions of merit and satisfaction are strictly developed, and are made to serve as the basis of penance, almost without reference to the grace of God in Christ. Cyprian’s chief importance is perhaps due to the fact that, influenced by the consequences of the Decian storm he founded, in union with the Roman bishop Cornelius, what was afterwards called the sacrament of penance; in this, indeed, he was the slave rather than the master of circumstances; and in addition, he was yielding to Roman influences which had been working in this direction since Calixtus. He established the rule of the hierarchy in the Church in the spheres of the sacrament, sacrifice, and discipline; he set his seal on Episcopalianism; he planted firmly the conceptions of a legal relation between man and God, of works of penance as means of grace, and of the “satisfactory” expiations of Christ. He also created clerical language with its solemn dignity, cold-blooded anger, and misuse of Biblical words to interpret and criticise contemporary affairs—a metamorphosis of the Tertullian genius for language. Cyprian by no means inherited the interest taken by Tertullian in Antignostic theology. Like all great princes of the Church, he was a theologian only in so far as he was a catechist. He held all the more firmly by the symbol, and knew how to state in few words its undoubted meaning, and to turn it skilfully even against allied movements like that of Novatian. This had been learnt from Rome, where, since as early as the end of the second century, the “Apostles’” creed had been used with skill and tact against the motley opinions held about doctrine by Eastern immigrants. The Roman Bishops of the third century did not meddle with dogmatic disputes; the only two who tried it, and undoubtedly rendered great services to the Church, Hippolytus and Novatian, could not keep the sympathies of the clergy or the majority. In the West men did not live as Christians upon dogma, but they were obedient to the short law (lex) presented in the Symbol; [38] they impressed the East by the confidence with which, when necessary, they adopted a position in dogmatic questions, following in the doctrine of the Trinity and in Christology an original scheme formed by Tertullian and developed by Novatian; [39] while at the same time they worked at the consolidation of the constitution of the Church, the construction of a practical ecclesiastical moral code, as also the disciplining and training of the community through Divine Service and the rules of penance. [40] The canons of Elvira, which, for the rest, are not lax, but are even distinguished by their stringency, show how strictness and clemency were united, Christendom being marked off from the world, while at the same time a life in the world was rendered possible, and even the grossest sins were still indulged in. The result was a complete ecclesiastical constitution, with an almost military organisation. At its head stood the Roman Bishop, who, in spite of the abstract equality of all Bishops, occupied a unique position, not only as representative, but also as actual defender of the unity of the Church, which, nevertheless, was severely shaken, first by Novatianism, and afterwards by Donatism. When Constantine granted toleration and privileges to the Church, and enabled the provincial Churches to communicate with all freedom, Rome had already become a Latin city, and the Roman community was thoroughly Latinised; elsewhere also in the West the Greek element, once so powerful, had receded. Undoubtedly, Western Christians had no other idea than that they formed a single Church with the East; they were actually at one with the Eastern tendency represented by Athanasius in the fundamental conceptions of the doctrines of God, Christ, and eternal salvation. But their interests were often divided, and, in fact, there was little mutual understanding, particularly after Cappadocian orthodoxy triumphed in the East. From the middle of the third century the weakening of the central power had once more restored their independence to all the provinces, and had thus set free the principle of nationality; and this would have led to a complete reaction and wholesale particularism had not some energetic rulers, the migrations of the tribes, and the Church set up a barrier, which, indeed, ultimately proved too weak in the East. It was the great dogmatic controversies which compelled the provincial Churches to look beyond their own borders. But the sympathy of the West for the East—there never developed any vital interest in the opposite direction [41] —was no longer general or natural. It sprang, as a rule, from temporary necessities or ambitious purposes. Yet it became of incalculable importance for Western theology; for their relations with the East, into which the Western Church was brought by the Arian conflict, led Western Christians to observe more closely two great phenomena of the Eastern Church, the scientific theology (of Origen) and monachism. It may here be at once said that the contact and influence which thus arose did not in the end change the genius and tendency of the Western Church to its depths. In so far as a lasting change was introduced in the fifth century, it is not to be derived from this quarter. But for their suggestiveness, the capital and impulse which were received from the East cannot be highly enough appreciated We need only compare the writings of the Latin theologians who were not influenced by the Greeks, [42] with Hilary, Victorinus Rhetor, Ambrose, Jerome, Rufinus, and the others dependent on them, in order to perceive the enormous difference. The exegetical and speculative science of the Greeks was imported into the West, and, besides monachism and the ideal of a virginity devoted to God, as the practical application of that science. The West was not disposed to favour either of these, and since it is always hardest to carry through changes in the rules of practical life, the implanting of monachism cost embittered conflicts. [43] But the ideal of virginity, as denoting the love-bond with Christ, very soon established itself among the spiritual leaders of the West. (Even before this, Cyprian says, De hab. virg. 22: and you virgins have no husband, your lord and head is Christ in the similitude and place of a man.) [44] It then won through Ambrose the same significance for the West as it had obtained through Origen’s expositions of the Song of Songs and Methodius in the East. Nay, it was in the West that the ideal was first, so to speak, individualised, and that it created a profusion of forms in which it was allied with or excited the impassioned love of Christ. [45] The theological science of the Greeks could not have domesticated itself, even if the time had been less unfavourable; just then its authority was tottering even in the East, after the Cappadocians seemed to have reconciled faith and knowledge for a brief period. Where one has once been accustomed to regard a complex of thoughts as an inviolable law, a legal order, it is no longer possible to awaken for it for a length of time the inner sympathy which clings to spheres in which the spiritual life finds a home; and if it does succeed in obtaining an assured position, its treatment assumes a different character; there is no freedom in dealing with it. As a matter of fact, the West was always less free in relation to dogma proper than the East in the classic period of Church theology. In the West men reflected about, and now and again against, dogma; but they really thought little in it. But how great, nevertheless, were the stores rescued to the West from the East [46] by Greek scholars, especially Hilary, Ambrose, and Jerome, at a time when the Greek sun had already ceased to warm the West! In the philosophical, historical, and theological elements transplanted by them, we have also one of Augustine’s roots. He learned the science of exegetical speculation from Ambrose, the disciple of the Cappadocians, and it was only by its help that he was delivered from Manichæism. He made himself familiar with Neoplatonic philosophy, and in this sphere he was apparently assisted by the works of another Greek scholar, Victorinus Rhetor. He acquired an astonishing amount of knowledge of the Egyptian monks, and the impression thus received became of decisive importance for him. These influences must be weighed if we are to understand thoroughly the conditions under which such a phenomenon as that which Augustine offers us was possible. [47] But, on the other hand, Augustine continues the Western line represented by Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrosiaster, Optatus, Pacian, Prudentius, and also by Ambrose. Extremely characteristic is his relation to the Stoic Christian popular philosophy of Western teachers. We shall see that he retained a remnant of it. But his importance in the history of the Church, and of dogma, consisted essentially in the fact that he gave to the West, in place of Stoic Christian popular morality as that was comprised in Pelagianism, a religious and specifically Christian ethic, and that he impressed this so strongly on the Church that its formulas at least maintain their supremacy up to the present day in the whole of Western Christendom. In getting rid, however, of Stoic morals, he also thrust aside its curious complement, the realistic eschatology in which the ancient Latin Christians had given specific expression to their Christian faith. Ambrose was sovereign among Western Bishops, and at the same time the Greek trained exegete and theologian. In both qualities he acted on Augustine, who looked up to him as Luther did to Staupitz. [48] He comes first to be considered here in the latter respect. His education, his Episcopal chair in Milan, the Arian and Apollinarian conflict into which he had to enter, directed him to Greek theological literature. Philo, Hippolytus, Origen, and Basil were industriously read by him; he made extracts from them, and edited them in Latin. [49] He was united with Basil, not only by similiarity of situation, but above all by agreement in character and attitude. Basil was his real teacher in doctrine, and while the former was met with distrust in Alexandria and Rome, Ambrose highly honoured him, and fully recognised his orthodoxy. The importance of this attitude of the Milanese Bishop for the closing of the Arian controversy, and for the reconciliation of Roman and Alexandrian orthodoxy with that of the Cappadocians, has been described in an earlier volume. [50] It has indeed been recently shown, beyond dispute, that, in spite of his dependence on the Greeks, Ambrose preserved and further developed the Western system in his Christology. [51] Tertullian, Novatian—directly or indirectly—and Hilary influenced him. But on the other hand there is no mistake that he emphasised more strongly than Augustine the fundamental position of the Nicene decision, [52] and that he was confirmed in his doctrine of the Two Substances by the Cappadocians, who had been involuntarily led to something approaching it in their fight against Apollinaris. Further, he treats the Logos in Jesus Christ so much as the subject, the human substance so much as form and matter, that here again Greek influence—as in Hilary, who was similarly dependent on the Greeks—cannot be overlooked; for his own conception of the work of Christ conflicts with this stunted view of his human nature. But the most important influence of the East upon Ambrose does not lie in the special domain of dogmatics. It consists in the reception of the allegorical method of exegesis, and of many separate schemes and doctrines. It is true Ambrose had his own reservations in dealing with Plato and Origen; he did not adopt the consequences of Origen’s theology; [53] he was much too hasty and superficial in the sphere of speculative reflection to appropriate from the Greeks more than fragments. But he, as well as the heavier but more thorough Hilary, raised the West above the “meagreness” of a pedantically literal, and, in its practical application, wholly planless exegesis; and they transmitted to their countrymen a profusion of ideas attached to the text of Holy Scripture. Rufinus and, in his first period, Jerome also completed the work. Manichæism would hardly have been overcome in the West unless it had been confronted by the theosophic exegesis, the “Biblical alchemy” of the Greeks, and the great theme of virginity was praised with new tongues after Western Christians heard of the union of the soul with its bridegroom, Christ, as taught by Origen in his commentary on the Song of Songs. [54] The unity, so far as at all attainable, of ecclesiastical feeling in East and West, was restored in the loftiest regions of theology about A.D. 390. But the fight against Origen, which soon broke out with embittered hatred, had, among other sad consequences, the immediate result that the West refused to learn anything further from the great theologian. The West never attained a strict system in the science of allegorical exegesis. The sacred histories of the Old Testament were also transformed into spiritual narratives for the West by Hilary, [55] Ambrose, Jerome, and Rufinus. [56] In this transformation Western Christians obtained a multitude of separate mystical Neoplatonic conceptions, though they failed to obtain any insight into the system as a whole. Another Western, the rhetorician Victorinus, that “aged man, most learned and skilled in the liberal sciences, who had read and weighed so many works of the philosophers; the instructor of so many noble Senators, who also, as a monument of his excellent discharge of his office, had deserved and obtained a statue in the Roman Forum,” had initiated his fellow-countrymen into Neoplatonism by translations and original works. [57] That happened before he became a Christian. Having gone over to Christianity at an advanced age, and become a prolific ecclesiastical writer, he by no means abandoned Neoplatonism. If I am not mistaken, Augustine made him his model in the crucial period of his life, and although he understood enough Greek to read Neoplatonic writings, yet it was substantially by Victorinus that he was initiated into them. Above all, he here learned how to unite Neoplatonic speculation with the Christianity of the Church, and to oppose Manichæism from this as his starting-point. We do not require to describe in detail what the above combination and polemic meant to him. When Neoplatonism became a decisive element in Augustine’s religious and philosophical mode of thought, it did so also for the whole of the West. The religious philosophy of the Greeks was incorporated in the spiritual assets of the West, along with its ascetic and monachist impulses. [58] But, unless all signs deceive, Augustine received from Victorinus the impulse which led him to assimilate Paul’s type of religious thought; for it appears from the works of the aged rhetorician that he had appropriated Paul’s characteristic ideas, and Augustine demonstrably devoted a patient study to the Pauline epistles from the moment when he became more thoroughly acquainted with Neoplatonism. Victorinus wrote very obscurely, and his works found but a slender circulation. But this is not the only case in history where the whole importance of an able writer was merged in the service he rendered to a greater successor. A great, epoch-making man is like a stream: the smaller brooks, which have had their origin perhaps further off in the country, lose themselves in it, having fed it, but without changing the course of its current. Not only Victorinus, [59] but ultimately also Ambrose himself, Optatus, Cyprian, and Tertullian were lost to view in Augustine; but they made him the proud stream in whose waters the banks are mirrored, on whose bosom the ships sail, and which fertilises and passes through a whole region of the world. For not only the work of those Greek Latins, but also the line of representatives of genuine Western theology and ecclesiasticism ended in Augustine. [60] Augustine studied, above all, very thoroughly, and made himself familiar with Cyprian’s work. Cyprian was to him the “saintly,” the Church Father, kat' exochēn, and his view of heresy and the unity of the Church was dependent on Cyprian. But standing as a Bishop, unassailed, on the foundation which Cyprian had created, Augustine did not find it necessary to state Episcopalianism so uncompromisingly as the former, and being occupied with putting an end to a schism which was different from the Novatian, he learned to take a different view of the nature of schisms from the Bishop whom he venerated as a hero. [61] Cursory remarks show, besides, that Augustine had made himself familiar with the literature of the Novatian controversy, and had learned from it for his notion of the Church. Some works quoted by him we no longer possess—e.g., that of Reticius against the Novatians. [62] What has been preserved to us of this literature, [63] proves that the Western Church was continually impelled, by its opposition to the Novatians in the course of the fourth century, to reflect on the nature of the Church. [64] But even when he entered into the Donatist controversy, Augustine did so as a man of the second or indeed of the third generation, and he therefore enjoyed the great advantage of having at his disposal a fund of conceptions and ideas already collected. In this sphere Optatus had especially wrought before him. [65] This is not the place to describe the rise of Donatism; for the dispute did not originate in a dogmatic controversy. [66] It arose in the first place out of Cæcilian’s action against the exaggerated veneration of martyrs, which disturbed the order and endangered the existence of the Church. Some of the clergy who did not desire a strong episcopal power seem to have made common cause with the discontented and refractory enthusiasts, to whom Cæcilian had been obnoxious even when Deacon. In any case, a point of principle did not immediately emerge in the controversy. But it was soon introduced, and indeed there is no doubt that Cyprian was played off against himself. [67] The Donatist party, which was at the same time, it appears, the African national party, found support both in Cyprian’s conception that the Bishop was only a Bishop if he possessed a certain Christian and moral quality, and in his defence of heretical baptism. The opposition, also carrying out ideas taught by Cyprian, gave such prominence to the official character of the episcopate, and the objective efficacy of the sacrament, that the personal quality of the official or dispenser became indifferent. [68] It may be that those martyrs and relic-worshipping enthusiasts in Carthage were inclined from the first to the conception once held by Cyprian against Calixtus and his successors, and that they thus required a standard of active, personal holiness for bishops, which could no longer be sustained in the great Church and during the devastating storms of the last persecution. But this cannot be proved. On the other hand, it is indisputable that, after the Synod of Arles, the controversy had reached a point where it must be regarded as the last link in the chain of the great phenomena (Encratites Montanists, adherents of Hippolytus and Novatians) in which Christendom strove against the secularisation that was imposed upon it by the removal of the attribute of holiness, and with it of the truth of the Church, from persons to institutions—the office and mysteries; [69] this change being due to the fact that otherwise men would have had to despair of the Christian character of the Church as Catholic. The Donatists denied the validity of any ordination conferred by a traditor, and therefore also of sacraments administered by a bishop who had been consecrated by a traditor. As a last remnant of a much more earnest conception, a minimum of personal worthiness was required of the clergy alone, and received into the notion of the Church itself: it was no longer Christian if this minimum was wanting, if the clergy—nothing being now said of the laity—were not free from every idolatrous stain. Compared with the measure of agreement which prevailed between Catholics and Donatists, the separate thesis of the latter looks like a caprice, and certainly much obstinacy, personal discontent, and insubordination lurked behind it. But we may not overlook the question of principle any more here than in the case of Novatianism. The legend of the Sybilline Books is constantly repeating itself in the history of spiritual conflicts. The remnant saved from the flames stands at as high a price as the whole collection. And what a price the Church has paid in order to escape the exhortations of separatists! The Novatian crisis—after the Decian persecution—drew from it the sacrament of penance, and thereby gave the impulse in general to substitute a system of sacraments for the sacrament that blotted out sin. (The formal establishment of the new sacrament had, indeed, still to be waited for for a long time.) The Donatist crisis—after the Diocletian persecution—taught the Church to value ordination as imparting an inalienable title (character indelebilis) and to form a stringent view of the “objectivity” of the sacraments; or, to use a plainer expression, to regard the Church primarily as an institution whose holiness and truth were inalienable, however melancholy the state of its members. In this thought Catholicism was first complete. By it is explained its later history down to the present day, in so far as it is not a history of piety, but of the Church, the Hierarchy, sacramental magic, and implicit faith (fides implicita). But only in the West did the thought come to be deliberately and definitely expressed. It also made its way in the East, because it was inevitable; but it did so, as it were, unconsciously. This was no advantage; for the very fact that this conception of the Church was definitely thought out in the West, led over and over again to the quest for safeguards, or a form which could be reconciled with living faith, and the requirements of a holy life. Even Augustine, who stated it definitely and fully, aimed at reconciling the Christian conscience with it. But he was not the first to declare it; he rather received it from tradition. The first representative of the new conception known to us, and Augustine also knew him, was Optatus. The work of Optatus, “De schismate Donatistarum,” was written in the interests of peace, and therefore in as friendly and conciliatory a tone as possible. This did not, indeed, prevent violent attacks in detail, and especially extremely insulting allegorical interpretations of texts from Scripture. But the author every now and then recalls the fact that his opponents are after all Christian brethren (IV., I., 2), who have disdainfully seceded from the Church, and only decline to recognise what is gladly offered them, Church fellowship. At the very beginning of his book, which, for the rest, is badly arranged, because it is a reply point by point to a writing by the Donatist, Parmenian, Optatus (I., 10 sq.)—differing from Cyprian—indicates the distinction in principle between heretics and schismatics, and he adheres firmly to the distinction—already drawn by Irenæus—to the end of his statement. [70] Heretics are “deserters from or falsifiers of the Symbol” (I., 10, 12; II., 8), and accordingly are not Christians; the Donatists are seditious Christians. Since the definition holds (I., 11) that “a simple and true understanding in the law (scil. the two testaments), the unique and most true sacrament, and unity of minds constitute the Catholic (scil. Church),” [71] the Donatists only want the last point to be genuinely Catholic Christians. The heretics have “various and false baptisms,” no legitimate office of the keys, no true divine service; “but these things cannot be denied to you schismatics, [72] although you be not in the Catholic Church, because you have received along with us true and common sacraments” (I., 12). He says afterwards (III., 9): “You and we have a common ground in the Church (ecclesiastica una conversatio), and if the minds of men contend, the sacraments do not.” Finally, we also can say: “We equally believe, and have been stamped with one seal, nor did we receive a different baptism from you; nor a different ordination. We read equally the Divine Testament; we pray to one God. Among you and us the prayer of our Lord is the same, but a rent having been made, with the parts hanging on this side and on that, it was necessary that it should be joined.” And (III., 10) he remarks very spiritually, founding on a passage in Ezechiel: “You build not a protecting house, like the Catholic Church, but only a wall; the partition supports no corner-stone; it has a needless door, nor does it guard what is enclosed; it is swept by the rain, destroyed by tempests, and is unable to keep out the robber. It is a house wall, but not a home. And your part is a quasi ecclesia, but not Catholic.” V., 1: “That is for both which is common to you and us: therefore it belongs also to you, because you proceed from us;” that is the famous principle which is still valid in the present day in the Catholic Church. “Finally, both you and we have one ecclesiastical language, common lessons, the same faith, the very sacraments of the faith, the same mysteries.” Undoubtedly Optatus also held ultimately that those things possessed by the schismatics were in the end fruitless, because their offence was especially aggravated. They merely constituted a “quasi ecclesia.” For the first mark of the one, true, and holy Church was not the holiness of the persons composing it; but exclusively the possession of the sacraments. II., 1: “It is the one Church whose sanctity is derived from the sacraments, and not estimated from the pride of persons. This cannot apply to all heretics and schismatics; it remains that it is (found) in one place.” The second mark consists in territorial Catholicity according to the promise: “I will give the heathen for an inheritance, and the ends of the world for a possession.” II., 1: “To whom, then, does the name of Catholic belong, since it is called Catholic because it is reasonable and diffused everywhere?” [73] Optatus did not succeed in clearly describing the first mark in its negative and exclusive meaning; we could indeed easily charge him with contradicting himself on this point. The second was all the more important in his eyes, [74] since the Donatists had only taken hold in Africa and, by means of a few emigrants, in Rome. In both signs he prepared the way for Augustine’s doctrine of the Church and the sacraments, in which Optatus’ thought was, of course, spiritualised. Optatus has himself shown, in the case of Baptism (V., 1-8), what he meant by the “sanctity of the sacraments.” In Baptism there were three essentials: the acting Holy Trinity (“confertur a trinitate”), the believer (“fides credentis”), and the administrator. These three were not, however, equally important; the two first rather belonged alone to the dogmatic notion of Baptism (“for I see that two are necessary, and one as if necessary [quasi necessariam] [75] ”), for the baptisers are not “lords” (domini), but “agents or ministers of baptism” (operarii vel ministri baptismi). (Ambrosiaster calls them advocates who plead, but have nothing to say at the end when sentence is passed.) They are only ministering and changing organs, and therefore contribute nothing to the notion and effect of Baptism; for “it is the part of God to cleanse by the sacrament.” But if the sacrament is independent of him who, by chance, dispenses it, because the rite presupposes only the ever the same Trinity and the ever the same faith, [76] then it cannot be altered in its nature by the dispenser (V. 4: “the sacraments are holy in themselves, not through men: sacramenta per se esse sancta, non per homines”). That is the famous principle of the objectivity of the sacraments which became so fundamental for the development of the dogmatics of the Western Church, although it never could be carried out in all its purity in the Roman Church, because in that case it would have destroyed the prerogatives of the Clergy. It is to be noticed, however, that Optatus made the holiness of the sacraments to be effective only for the faith of the believer (fides credentis), and he is perfectly consistent in this respect, holding faith to be all important, to the complete exclusion of virtues. Here again he prepared the way for the future theology of the West by emphasising the sovereignty of faith. [77] It is all the more shocking to find that even Optatus uses the whole reflection to enable him to depreciate claims on the life of the members of the Church. We see clearly that the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments grew out of the desire to show that the Church was holy and therefore true, in spite of the irreligion of the Christians belonging to it. But in aiming at this, men lit, curiously, upon a trace of evangelical religion. Since it was impossible to point to active holiness, faith and its importance were called to mind. A great crisis, a perplexity, in which, seeing the actual condition of matters, the Catholic Church found itself involved with its doctrine of Baptism, virtue, and salvation, turned its attention to the promise of God and faith. Thus the most beneficent and momentous transformation experienced by Western Christianity before Luther was forced upon it by circumstances. But it would never have made its way if it had not been changed by the spiritual experiences of a Catholic Christian, Augustine, from an extorted theory [78] into a joyful and confident confession. Parmenian gave Optatus occasion to enumerate certain “endowments” (dotes) of the Church, i.e., the essential parts of its possession. Parmenian had numbered six, Optatus gives five: (1) cathedra (the [Episcopal] chair); (2) angelus; (3) spiritus; (4) fons; (5) sigillum (the symbol). The enumeration is so awkward that one can only regret that it is adapted to the formula of an opponent. But we learn, at least, in this way that Cyprian’s ideal of the unity of the Episcopate, as represented in Peter’s chair, had been received and fostered unsuspiciously in Africa. “Peter alone received the keys” (I., 10, 12). “You cannot deny your knowledge that on Peter, in the city of Rome, was first conferred the Episcopal chair, in which he sat, the head of all the Apostles, whence he was also called Cephas, in which one chair unity might be observed by all, lest the rest of the Apostles should severally defend one, each for himself, in order that he might now be a schismatic and sinner, who should appoint a second as against the one unique chair” (II., 2). The connection with Peter’s chair was of decisive importance, not only for Optatus, but also for his opponent (II., 4), who had appealed to the fact that Donatists had also possessed a Bishop in Rome. Optatus, besides, discusses the second point, the angelus, who is the legitimate Bishop of the local community, the chair (cathedra) guaranteeing the œcumenical unity, and he emphasises the connection of the African Catholic Churches with the Oriental, and especially the seven-fold ecclesia of Asia (Rev. II., 3), almost as strongly as that with the Roman Church (II., 6; VI., 3). His disquisitions on spiritus, [79] fons, and sigillum, are devoid of any special interest (II., 7-9). On the other hand, it is important to notice that he expressly subordinates the consideration of the endowments (dotes) of the Church, to the verification of “its sacred members and internal organs” (sancta membra ac viscera ecclesia), about which Parmenian had said nothing. These consisted in the sacraments and the names of the Trinity “in which meet the faith and profession of believers” (cui concurrit fides credentium et professio). Thus he returns to his natural and significant line of thought. [80] If Ambrosiaster and Optatus prepared the way for Augustine’s doctrines of the sacraments, faith, and the Church, [81] Ambrose did so for those of sin, grace, and faith. We have endeavoured above to estimate his importance to Augustine as a disciple of the Greeks; we have now to regard him as a Western. [82] But we have first of all to consider not the theologian, but the Bishop. It was the royal priest who first opened Augustine’s eyes to the authority and majesty of the Church. Only a Roman Bishop—even if he did not sit in the Roman chair—could teach him this, and perhaps the great work, De civitate Dei, would never have been written had it not been for the way in which this majesty had been impressed on Augustine by Ambrose; for great historical conceptions arise either from the fascinating impression made by great personalities or from political energy; and Augustine never possessed the latter. It was, on the contrary, in Ambrose, the priestly Chancellor of the State, that the imperial power (imperium) of the Catholic Church dawned upon him, [83] and his experiences of the confusion and weakness of the civil power at the beginning of the fifth century completed the impression. Along with this Ambrose’s sermons fall to be considered. [84] If, on one side, they were wholly dependent on Greek models, yet they show, on the other hand, in their practical tone, the spirit of the West. Augustine’s demand that the preacher should “teach, sway, and move” (docere, flectere, movere) is as if drawn from those sermons. in spite of the asceticism and virginity which he also mainly preached, he constantly discussed all the concrete affairs of the time and the moral wants of the community. [85] Thus Ambrose represents the intimate union of the ascetic ideal with energetic insistence on positive morality, a union which the Western mediæval Church never lost, however much practical life was subordinated to the contemplative. Three different types of thought are interwoven in Ambrose’s doctrine of sin and grace. First, he was dependent on the Greek conception that regarded evil as not-being, but at the same time as necessary. [86] Secondly, he shows that he was strongly influenced by the popular morality of Ciceronian Stoicism, [87] which was widespread among cultured Western Christians, and which had, by its combination with monastic morality, brought about, in Pelagianism, the crisis so decisive for the dogmatics of the West. Thirdly and finally, he carried very much further that view taken by Tertullian of the radical nature of evil and the guiltiness of sin which was made his fundamental principle by Augustine. Evil was radical, and yet its root was not found in the sensuous, but in “pride of mind” (superbia animi); it sprang from freedom, and was yet a power propagating itself in mankind. The Greeks had looked on the universal state of sinfulness as a more or less accidental product of circumstances; Ambrose regarded it as the decisive fact, made it the starting-point of his thought, and referred it more definitely than any previous teacher—Ambrosiaster excepted—to Adam’s Fall. [88] Passages occur in his works which in this respect do not fall a whit behind the famous statements of Augustine. [89] But important as this phase was, in which thought was no longer directed primarily to sin’s results, or to the single sinful act, but to the sinful state which no virtue could remove, yet it is just in this alone that we can perceive the advance made by Ambrose. As regards religion, none is to be found in his works; for his doctrine of the traducian character and tenacity of sin was in no way connected with the heightened consciousness of God and salvation. Ambrose did not submit evil to be decided upon in the light of religion. Therefore he merely groped his way round the guilty character of sin, without hitting upon it; he could once more emphasise the weakness of the flesh as an essential factor; and he could maintain the proposition that man was of himself capable of willing the good. For this reason, finally, his doctrine of sin is to us an irreconcilable mass of contradictions. But we must, nevertheless, estimate very highly the advance made by Ambrose in contemplating the radical sinful condition. It was undoubtedly important for Augustine. And to this is to be added that he was able to speak in a very vivid way of faith, conceiving it to be a living communion with God or Christ. The religious individualism which shines clearly in Augustine already does so faintly in Ambrose: “Let Christ enter thy soul, let Jesus dwell in your minds. . . . What advantage is it to me, conscious of such great sins, if the Lord do come, unless He comes into my soul, returns into my mind, unless Christ lives in me?” [90] And while in many passages he distinctly describes the merit gained by works, and love as means of redemption, yet in some of his reflections, on the other hand, he rises as strongly to the lofty thought that God alone rouses in us the disposition for what is good, and that we can only depend on the grace of God in Christ. [91] St. Paul’s Epistles occupied the foreground in Ambrose’s thought, [92] and from them he learned that faith as confidence in God is a power by itself, and does not simply fall into the realm of pious belief. However much he adds that is alien, however often he conceives faith to be an act of obedience to an external authority, he can speak of it in different terms from his predecessors. Faith is to him the fundamental fact of the Christian life, not merely as belief in authority (“faith goes before reason,” fides prævenit rationem), [93] but as faith which lays hold of redemption through Christ, and justifies because it is the foundation of perfect works, and because grace and faith are alone valid before God. “And that benefits me because we are not justified from the works of the law. I have no reason, therefore, to glory in my works, I have nothing to boast of; and therefore I will glory in Christ. I will not boast because I am just, but because I am redeemed. I will glory, not because I am without sins, but because my sins have been remitted. I will not glory because I have done good service, or because anyone has benefited me, but because the blood of Christ was shed for me.” [94] That is Augustinianism before Augustine, nay, it is more than Augustinianism. [95] In the dogmatic work of Western theologians of the fourth century, the genius of Western Christianity, which found its most vigorous expression in Cyprian’s De opere et eleemosynis, fell away to some extent. But it only receded, remaining still the prevailing spirit. The more vital notion of God, the strong feeling of responsibility to God as judge, the consciousness of God as moral power, neither restricted nor dissolved by any speculation on nature—all that constituted the superiority of Western to Eastern Christianity is seen in its worst form under the deteriorating influence of the legal doctrine of retribution, and the pseudo-moral one of merit. [96] In view of this, the inrush of Neoplatonic mysticism was highly important; for it created a counterpoise to a conception which threatened to dissolve religion into a series of legal transactions. But the weightiest counterpoise consisted in the doctrine of faith and grace as proclaimed by Augustine. However, it will be shown that Augustine taught his new conception in such a form that it did not shatter the prevailing system, but could rather be admitted into it; perhaps the greatest triumph ever achieved in the history of religion by a morality of calculations over religion. The conception of religion as a legal relationship, which was concerned with the categories lex (law) delictum (fault) satisfactio, pœna (punishment) meritum, præmium, etc., was not destroyed by Augustine. Grace was rather inserted in a legal and objective form into the relationship, yet in such a way that it remained possible for the individual to construe the whole relationship from the point of view of grace. We have attempted, in the above discussion, to exhibit the different lines existing in the West which meet in Augustine. Let us, in conclusion, emphasise further the following points. 1. Along with Holy Scripture, the Symbol, the Apostolic “law” (lex), was placed in the West on an unapproachable height. This law was framed in opposition to Marcionitism, Sabellianism, Arianism, and Apollinarianism, without essential variations, and without any process of reasoning, as a confession of faith in the unity of God in three persons, as also in the unity of Christ in two substances. The Western Church, therefore, apparently possessed a lofty certitude in dealing with Trinitarian and Christological problems. But with this certitude was contrasted the fact, of which we have many instances, that under cover of the official confession many more Christological heresies circulated, and were maintained in the West than in the Churches of the East, and that in particular the Christological formula, where it was not wholly unknown, was, for the laity and for many of the clergy, simply a noumenon. [97] This fact is further confirmed when we observe that Western theologians, as long as they were not directly involved in Eastern controversies, did not turn their attention to the principles contained in the above “law,” but to quite different questions. Augustine was not the first to write “expositions of the Symbol,” in which questions, wholly different from what his text would lead us to expect, were discussed. On the contrary, Western theologians from Cyprian show that they lived in a complex of ideas and questions which had little to do with the problems treated by Antignostics and Alexandrians, or with dogma. 2. In connection with the development of penance on the basis of works and merits (in the sense of satisfactions), and in harmony with the legal spirit characteristic of Western theological speculation, Christ’s expiatory work came now to the front. It was not so much the Incarnation—that was the antecedent condition—as the death of Christ, which was regarded as the salient point (punctum saliens); [98] and it was already treated from all conceivable points of view as a sacrificial death, atonement, ransom, and vicarious consummation of the crucifixion. At the same time, Ambrose discussed its relationship (reconciliatio, redemptio, satisfactio, immolatio, meritum) to sin as guilt (reatus). In such circumstances the accent fell on the human nature of Christ; the offerer and offering was the mediator as man, who received his value through the divine nature, though quite as much so by his acceptance on the part of the Deity. Thus the West had a Christological system of its own, which, while the formula of the two natures formed its starting-point, was pursued in a new direction: the mediator was looked on as the man whose voluntary achievement possessed an infinite value in virtue of the special dispensation of God. [99] (Optat I., 10: “the world [was] reconciled to God by means of the flesh of Christ”: mundus reconciliatus deo per carnem Christi.) From this we can understand how Augustine, in not a few of his arguments, opposed, if in a veiled fashion, the doctrine of the divine nature of Christ, discussing the merits of the historical Christ as if that nature did not exist, but everything was given to Christ of grace. [100] The same reason further explains why afterwards modified Adoptianism was constantly re-emerging in the West, [101] it being from the stand-point of the consistent Greek Christology the worst of heresies because it dislocated the whole structure of the latter, and threw its purpose into confusion. Finally, the same fact also explains why, in later times, Western Christians, particularly such as had acquired the mystical monachist observance of intercourse with Christ, the chaste bridegroom, substantially reduced the Christological conception to “Ecce homo.” The vividness and thrilling power which this figure possessed for them, raising them above sorrow and suffering, cannot deceive us as to the fact that the Church Christology was no longer anything to them but a formula. But while the ancient Western form had become the basis of a view which left fancy and disposition to fix the significance of Christ’s Person, that must not be described as a necessary deduction from it. That form—in which Christ was the object of the Father’s grace, carried out what the Father entrusted him with, and by Him was exalted—rather corresponded to the clearest passages of the New Testament, and was the only protection against the superstitious conceptions of the Greeks which emptied the Gospel of all meaning. Of decisive value, however, are not the various mediæval attempts to appraise Christ’s work, but rather the whole tendency to understand Christianity as the religion of atonement; for in this tendency is expressed characteristically the fear of God as judge, which, in the East, disappeared behind mystic speculations. [102] 3. An acute observer perceives that the soteriological question—How does man get rid, and remain rid, of his sins and attain eternal life?—had already, in the fourth century, actively engaged the earnest attention of thinkers in the Western Church, and, indeed, in such a way that, as distinguished from the East, the religious and moral sides of the problem are no longer found separate. But the question was not clearly put before the Pelagian conflict, since the controversies with Heraclius and Jovinian were not followed by a lasting movement. Opinions were still jumbled together in a motley fashion, sometimes in one and the same writer. If I see aright, five different conceptions can be distinguished for the period about 400 A.D. First we have the Manichæan which insinuated its way in the darkness, but was widely extended, even among the clergy; according to it evil was a real physical power, and was overcome in the individual by goodness, equally a physical force which was attached to natural potencies and Christ. [103] Secondly, we have the Neoplatonic and Alexandrian view which taught that evil was not-being, that which had not yet become, the necessary foil of the good, the shadow of the light, the transitoriness cleaving to the “many” in opposition to the “one.” It held that redemption was the return to the one, the existent, to God; that it was identification with God in love; Christ was the strength and crutches for such a return; for “energies and crutches come from one hand.” [104] Thirdly, there was the rationalistic Stoic conception; this held that virtue was the supreme good; sin was the separate evil act springing from free will; redemption was the concentration of the will and its energetic direction to the good. Here again the historical and Christological were really nothing but crutches. [105] All these three conceptions lay the greatest stress on asceticism. Fourthly, there was the sacramental view, which may be characterised partly as morally lax, partly as “evangelical”; we find it, e.g., in Heraclius [106] on the one hand, and in Jovinian [107] on the other. According to it he who was baptised possessing genuine faith obtained the guarantee of felicity; sin could not harm him; no impeachment of sin (reatus peccati) could touch him. It is proved that really lax and “evangelical” views met: a man could always rely as a Christian on the grace of God; sin did not separate him from God, if he stood firm in the faith. Nay, from the second century, really from Paul, there existed in the Gentile Church movements which deliberately defended reliance on faith alone (the “sola fide”) and “the most assured salvation through grace granted in baptism” (salus per gratiam in baptismo donatam certissima.) [108] A fifth conception was closely related to, yet different from, the last. We can call it briefly the doctrine of grace and merit. We have pointed out strong traces of it in Victorinus, Optatus, and Ambrose. According to it, evil as the inherent sin of Adam was only to be eradicated by divine grace in Christ; this grace produced faith to which, however, redemption was only granted when it had advanced and become the habitual love from which those good works spring that establish merit in the sight of God. Evil is godlessness and the vice that springs from it; goodness is the energy of grace and the good works that flow from it. Here, accordingly, nature and grace, unbelief and faith, selfishness and love of God are the antitheses, and the work of the historical Christ stands in the centre. Nevertheless, this view did not exclude asceticism, but required it, since only that faith was genuine and justified men which evinced itself in sanctification, i.e., in world-renouncing love. Thus a middle path was here sought between Jovinian on the one side and Manichæan and Priscillian asceticism on the other. [109] These different conceptions met and were inextricably mingled. The future of Christianity was necessarily to be decided by the victory of one or other of them. 4. In the West, interest in the question of the relation of grace and means of grace to the Church was awakened by the Novatian, heretical baptism, and Donatist controversy. This interest was, however, still further strengthened by the fact that the Church detached itself more forcibly from the State than in the East. The fall of the West Roman Empire, opposition to the remains of a still powerful heathen party in Rome, and finally dislike to the new Arian German forms of government all contributed to this. One perhaps expects to find here by way of conclusion a characterisation of the different national Churches of the West; but little can be said from the standpoint of the history of dogma. The distinctive character of the North African Church was strongly marked. A darkness broods over the Churches of Spain, Gaul, and Britain, in which the only clear spot is the conflict of the priests with the monachism that was establishing itself. The conflict with Priscillianism in Spain, the attacks on Martin of Tours in Gaul, and, on the other hand, Vigilantius, come in here. It is not unimportant to notice that Southern Gaul was distinguished by its culture and taste for aesthetics and rhetoric about A.D. 360 (see Julian’s testimony) and A.D. 400 (see Sulp. Severus, Chron. init.). Rome only became a Christian city in the fifth century, but even in the time of Liberius and Damasus the Roman Bishop was the foremost Roman. What was wrested by Damasus, that unsaintly but sagacious man, from the State and the East, was never again abandoned by his energetic successors; they also tried vigorous intervention in the affairs of the provincial Churches. Holding faithfully to its confession, the Roman Church was, not only from its position, but also by its nature, the connecting link between East and West, between the monachist leanings of the former, and the tendency to ecclesiastical politics and sacramentarianism of the latter. It also united South and North in the West. Rome, again, from the time of Liberius pursued and explained that religious policy towards paganism, “by which the Catholic Church gained the means not only of winning but of satisfying the masses of the people who were, and, in spite of the confession, remained heathen” (Usener, Relig. Unters., I., p. 293): “it rendered heathenism harmless by giving its blessing to it, i.e., to all that belonged to the pagan cultus.” But that magnanimous way of opposing paganism, which has been rightly adduced, and which Usener (op. cit.) has begun to exhibit to us so learnedly and instructively, concealed within it the greatest dangers. In such circumstances it was of supreme value both for the contemporary and future fortunes of the Church that, just when the process of ethnicising was in full swing, Augustine, equally at home in North Africa, Rome, and Milan, appeared and reminded the Church what Christian faith was. _________________________________________________________________ [17] After Gregory I. [18] Möhler says very justly, from the Catholic standpoint (Patrologie, p. 737): “We are often surprised for a moment, and forget that in Tertullian we have before us a writer of the beginning of the third century, we feel so mush at home in reading the language, often very familiar to us, in which he discusses difficult questions concerning dogmatics, morals, or even the ritual of the Church.” [19] Ultimately men were content, indeed, with preserving the inconsistencies, treating them as problems of the schools, and ceasing to attempt to solve them; for time makes even self-contradictions tolerable, and indeed to some extent hallows them. [20] See the 1 Ep. of Clement, also the tractate on The Players, and the testimonies of Ignatius, Dionysius of Corinth and others as to the old Roman Church. [21] De præscr. 36: “Si Italiæ adjaces habes Romam, unde nobis auctoritas quoque praesto est.” [22] On Church Latin, see Koffmane’s work, which contains much that is valuable, Gesch. des Kirchenlateins, 1879-1881. [23] See our expositions of this in Vol. II., p. 67 ff., 108 ff., 128 f., 311 f. [24] See v. Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen and Lit. d. kanonischen Rechts, Vol. I., pp. 92-103, Vol. II., p. 512 f. Also his Gedanken über Aufgabe and Reform d. jurist. Studiums, 1881: “The science of law was in practice the leading factor in Church and State from the twelfth century.” That it is so still may, to save many words, be confirmed by a testimony of Döllinger’s. In a memorable speech on Phillips he says, (Akad. Vorträge, Vol. II., p. 185 f.): “Frequent intercourse with the two closely-allied converts, Iarcke and Phillips, showed me how an ultramontane and papistical conception of the Christian religion was especially suggested and favoured by legal culture and mode of thought, which was dominated, even in the case of German specialists like Phillips, not by ancient German, but Roman legal ideas.” [25] On the designation of Holy Scripture as “lex” in the West, see Zahn, Gesch. d. neutestamentlichen Kanous, I. 1, p. 95 f. [26] Consider, e.g., a sentence like this of Cyprian De unit. 15: “Justitia opus est, ut promereri quis possit deum judicem.” [27] A series of legal schemes framed by Tertullian for his dogmatics and ethics have been given in Vol. II., 279 f., 294 f., Vol. IV. pp. 110, 121. In addition to his speculation on substantia, persona, and status, the categories offendere, satisfacere, promereri, acceptare, and rependere, etc., play the chief part in his system. Most closely connected with the legal contemplation of problems is the abstract reference to authority; for one does not obey a law because he finds it to be good and just, but because it is law. (Tertullian, indeed, knows very well, when defending himself against heathen insinuations, that the above dictum is not sufficient in the sphere of religion and morals, see e.g., Apolog. 4.) This attitude of Tertullian, led up to by his dialectical procedure and his alternations between auctoritas and ratio, produces in many passages the impression that we are listening to a mediæval Catholic. In regard to the alternation above described, the work De corona is especially characteristic; but so is Adv. Marc. I., 23 f. He writes, De pænit. 4: “Nos pro nostris angustiis unum inculcamus, bonum atque optimum esse quod deus præcipit. Audaciam existimo de bono divini præcepti disputare. Neque enim quia bonum est, idcirco auscultare debemus, sed quia deus præcepit. Ad exhibitionem obsequii prior est majestas divinæ potestatis, prior est auctoritas imperantis quam utilitas servientis.” (Compare Scorp. 2, 3; De fuga, 4; De cor. 2.) But the same theologian writes, De pæn. 1: “Res dei ratio, quia deus nihil non ratione providit, nihil non ratione tractari intellegique voluit.” The work De pænit. is in general peculiarly fitted to initiate us into Tertullian’s style of thought. I shall in the sequel pick out the most important points, and furnish parallels from his other writings. Be it noticed first that the work emphasises the three parts, vera poenitentia (deflere, metus dei), confessio and satisfactio, and then adds the venia on the part of the effensus deus. In chap. II. we already meet with the expression “merita pænitentiæ.” There we read: “ratio salutis certam formam tenet, ne bonis umquam factis cogitatisve quasi violenta aliqua manus injiciatur. Deus enim reprobationem bonorum ratam non habens, utpote suorum, quorum cum auctor et defensor sit necesse est, proinde et acceptator, si acceptator etiam remunerator bonum factum deum habet debitorem, sicuti et malum, quia judex omnis remunerator est causæ.” (De orat. 7: “pænitentia demonstratur acceptabilis deo;” we have also “commendatior”). Chap. III.; “Admissus ad dominica præcepta ex ipsis statim eruditur, id peccato deputandum, a quo deus arceat.” (The distinction between præcepta and consilia dominica is familiar in Tertullian; see Ad. uxor. II. 1; De coron. 4; Adv. Marc. II. 17. In Adv. Marc. I. 29, he says that we may not reject marriage altogether, because if we did there would be no meritorious sanctity. In Adv. Marc. I. 23, the distinction is drawn between “debita” and “indebita bonitas”). Chap. III.: as “Voluntas facti origo est;” a disquisition follows on velle, concupiscere, perficere. Chap. V.: “Ita qui per delictorum pænitentiam instituerat dominus satisfacere, diabolo per aliæ pænitentié pænitentiam satisfaciet, eritque tanto magis perosus deo, quanto æmulo ejus acceptus.” (See De orat. 11; “fratri satisfacere,” 18; “disciplinæ satisfacere,” 23; “satisfacimus deo domino nostro”; De jejun. 3; De pud. 9, 13; De pat. 10, 13, etc., etc.: “peccator patri satisfacit,” namely, through his penances; see De pud. 13: “hic jam carnis interitum in officium pænitentiæ interpretantur, quod videatur jejuniis et sordibus et incuria omni et dedita opera malæ tractationis carnem exterminando satis deo facere”). In ch. V. it is explained quite in the Catholic manner that timor is the fundamental form of the religious relation. Here, as in countless other passages, the “deus offenses” moves Tertullian’s soul (see De pat. 5: “hinc deus irasci exorsus, unde offendere homo inductus.”) Fear dominates the whole of penitence. (De pænit. 6: “metus est instrumentum pænitentiæ.” In general “offendere deum” and “satisfacere deo” are the proper technical terms; see De pæn. 7: “offendisti, sed reconciliari adhuc potes; habes cui satisfacias et quidem volentem.” Ch. X.: “intolerandum scilicet pudori, domino offenso satisfacere.” Ch. XI.: “castigationem victus atque cultus offenso domino præstare.” Along with satisfacere we have “deum iratum, indignatum mitigare, placare, reconciliare.” Ch. VI: “omnes salutis inpromerendo deo petitores sumus.” Compare with this “promereri deum” Scorp. 6: “quomodo multæ mansiones apud patrem, si non pro varietate meritorum . . . porro et si fidei propterea congruebat sublimitati et claritatis aliqua prolatio, tale quid esse opportuerat illud emolumenti, quod magno constaret labore, cruciatu, tormento, morte . . . eadem pretia quæ et merces.” De orat. 2: “meritum fidei.” 3: “nos angelorum, si meruimus, candidati”; 4: “merita cujusque.” De pænit. 6: “catechumenus mereri cupit baptismum, timet adhuc delinquere, ne non mereretur accipere.” De pat. 4: “artificium promerendi obsequium est, obsequii vero disciplina morigera subjectio est.” De virg. vel., 13: “deus justus est ad remuneranda quæ soli sibi fiunt.” De exhort. 1: “nemo indulgentia dei utendo promeretur, sed voluntati obsequendo;” 2: “deus quæ vult præcipit et accepto facit et æternitatis mercede dispungit.” De pud. 10: “pænitentiam deo immolare . . . magis merebitur fructum pænitentiæ qui nondum ea usus est quam qui jam et abusus est.” De jejun. 3: “ratio promerendi deum” [jejunium iratum deum homini reconciliat, ch. VII.]; 13: “ultro officium facere deo.” How familiar and important in general is to Tertullian the thought of performing a service, a favour to God, or of furnishing him with a spectacle! He indeed describes as a heathen idea (Apolog. 11) the sentence: “conlatio divinitatis meritorum remunerandorum fuit ratio”; but he himself comes very near it; thus he says (De exhortat. 10): “per continentiam negotiaberis magnam substantiam sanctitatis, parsimonia carnis spiritum acquires.” He sternly reproves, Scorp. 15, the saying of the “Lax”: Christus non vicem passionis sitit; he himself says (De pat. 16): “rependamus Christi patientiam, quam pro nobis ipse dependit.” De pænit. 6: “Quam porro ineptum, quam pænitentiam non adimplere, ei veniam delictorum sustinere? Hoc est pretium non exhibere, ad mercem manum emittere. Hoc enim pretio dominus veniam addicere instituit; hac pænitentiæ compensatione redimendam proponit impunitatem,” (see Scorp. 6: “nulli compensatio invidiosa est, in qua aut gratiæ aut injuriæ communis est ratio”). In Ch. VI. Tertullian uses “imputare,” and this word is not rarely found along with “reputare”; in Ch. VII. we have “indulgentia” (indulgere), and these terms are met somewhat frequently; so also “restituere” (ch. VII. 12: “restitutio peccatoris”). De pat. 8: “tantum relevat confessio delictorum, quantum dissimulatio exaggerat; confessio omni satisfactionis consilium est.” Further, ch. IX.: “Hujus igitur pænitentiæ secundæ et unius quanto in arte negotium est, tanto operosior probatio (that sounds quite mediæval), ut non sola conscientia præferatur, sed aliquo etiam actu administretur. Is actus, qui magis Græco vocabulo exprimitur et frequentatur, exomologesis est, qua delictum domino nostro confitemur, non quidem ut ignaro, sed quatenus satisfactio confessione disponitur, confessione pænitentia nascitur, pænitentia deus mitigator. Concerning this exhomologesis, this tearful confession, he goes on: “commendat pænitentiam deo et temporali afflictatione æterna supplicia non dicam frustratur sed expungit.” (“Commendare” as used above is common, see e.g., De virg. vel. 14, and De pat. 13: “patientia corporis [penances] precationes commendat, deprecationes affirmat; hæc aures Christi aperit, clementiam elicit.”). The conception is also distinctly expressed by Tertullian that in the ceremony of penance the Church completely represents Christ himself, see ch. X.: “in uno et altero ecclesia est, ecclesia vero Christus. Ergo cum te ad fratrum genua protendis, Christum contrectas, Christum exoras.” De pudic. 10, shows how he really bases pardon solely on the “cessatio delicti”; “etsi venia est pænitentiæ fructus, hanc quoque consistere non licet sine cessatione delicti. Ita cessatio delicti radix est veniæ ut venia sit pænitentiæ fructus.” Further ch. II.: “omne delictum aut venia dispungit aut poena, venia ex castigatione, poena ex damnatione”; but “satisfactio” is implied in the “castigatio.” In De pudic. 1 the notorious lax edict of Calixtus is called “liberalitas” (venia) i.e., “indulgence.” Let us further recall some formulas which are pertinent here. Thus we have the often-used figure of the “militia Christi,” and the regimental oath—sacramentum. So also the extremely characteristic alternation between “gratia” and “voluntas humana,” most clearly given in De exhort. 2: “non est bonæ et solidæ fidei sic omnia ad voluntatem dei referre et ita adulari unum quemque dicendo nihil fieri sine nutu ejus, ut non intellegamus, esse aliquid in nobis ipsis. . . . Non debemus quod nostro expositum est arbitrio in domini referre voluntatem”; Ad uxor. 1, 8: “quædam enim sunt divinæ liberalitatis, quædam nostræ operationis.” Then we have the remarkable attempt to distinguish two wills in God, one manifest and one hidden, and to identify these with præcepta and consilia, in order ultimately to establish the “hidden” or “higher” alone. De exhort. 2 f.: “cum solum sit in nobis velle, et in hoc probatur nostra erga deum mens, an ea velimus quæ cum voluntate ipsius faciunt, alte et impresse recogitandum esse dico dei voluntatem, quid etiam in occulto velit. Quæ enim in manifesto scimus omnes.” Now follows an exposition on the two wills in God, the higher, hidden, and proper one, and the lower: “Deus ostendens quid magis velit, minorem voluntatem majore delevit. Quantoque notitiæ tuæ utrumque proposuit, tanto definiit, id te sectari debere quod declaravit se magis velle. Ergo si ideo declaravit, ut id secteris quod magis vult, sine dubio, nisi ita facis, contra voluntatem ejus sapis, sapiendo contra potiorem ejus voluntatem, magisque offendis quam promereris, quod vult quidem faciendo et quod mavult respuendo. Ex parte delinquis; ex parte, si non delinquis, non tamen promereris. Non porro et promereri nolle delinquere est? Secundum igitur matrimonium, si est ex illa dei voluntate quæ indulgentia vocatur, etc., etc.” On the other hand, see the sharp distinction between sins of ignorance (“natural sins”) and sins of “conscientia et voluntas, ubi et culpa sapit et gratia,” De pud. 10. [28] Augustine has also employed both notions in countless places since the writings De Ordine (see II. 26: ad discendum necessarie dupliciter ducimur, auctoritate atque ratione) and De vera religione (45: animae medicina distribuitur in auctoritatem atque rationem). [29] See Kahl, Die Lehre vom Primat des Willens bei Augustin, Duns Scotus and Descartes 1886, as also the works of Siebeck; cf. his treatise “Die Anfänge der neueren Psychologie in der Scholastik” in the Ztschr. f. Philos. u. philosoph. Kritik. New series. 93 Vol., p. 161 ff., and Dilthey’s Einl. in d. Geisteswiss. Vol. I. [30] See Franke, Die Psychologie and Erkenntnisslehre des Arnobius, 1878, in which the empiricism and criticism of this eclectic theologian are rightly emphasised. The perception that Arnobius was not original, but had taken his refutation of Platonism from Lucretius, and also that he remained, after becoming a Christian, the rhetorician that he had been before (see Röhricht Seelenlehre des Arnobius, Hamburg, 1893), cannot shake the fact that his psychology is influenced by the consciousness of redemption. [31] Compare especially Minucius Felix and Lactantius. [32] Conversely it is quite intelligible that he who has started with the ideals of classic antiquity, and has assimilated them, should derive more pleasure from men like Clemens Alex. Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus than from Tertullian and Augustine. But this sympathy is less due to the Christianity of the former scholars. We are no longer directly moved by the religious emotions of the older Greeks, while expressions of Tertullian and Augustine reach our heart. [33] Not only is the distinction between “natura” and “gratia” (e.g., De anima 21), or between “gratia” and “virtus” common in Tertullian, not only has he—in his later writings—laid great stress on the continued effect of Adam’s sin and the transmission of death, but there also occur many detached thoughts and propositions which recall Augustine. (For the transmission of sin and death see De exhort. 2; Adv. Marc. I., 22; De pud. 6, 9; De jejun. 3, 4: “mors cum ipso genere traducto,” “primordiale delictum expiare,” cf. the expression “vitium originis”; further, also, the writing De pascha comput. 12, 21.)—De orat. 4: “summa est voluntatis dei salus eorum, quos adoptavit.” De pat. 1: “Bonorum quorundam intolerabilis magnitudo est, ut ad capienda et præstanda ea sola gratia divinæ inspirationis operetur. Nam quod maxime bonum, id maxime penes deum, nec alius id, quam qui possidet, dispensat, ut cuique dignatur.” De pænit. 2: “Bonorum unus est titulus salus hominis criminum pristinorum abolitione præmissa.” De pat. 12: “Dilectio summum fidei sacramentum, Christiani nominis thesaurus.” De orat. 4: In order to fulfil the will of God “opus est dei voluntate . . . Christus erat voluntas et potestas patris.” 5; “quidquid nobis optamus, in illum auguramur, et illi deputamus, quod ab illo exspectamus.” 9: “Deus solus docere potuit, quomodo se vellet orari.” De pænit. 2: “Quod homini proficit, deo servit.” 4: “Rape occasionem inopinatæ felicitatis, ut ille tu, nihil quondam penes deum nisi stilla situlæ et areæ pulvus et vasculum figuli, arbor exinde fias ills quæ penes aquas seritur, etc.” 4: “Obsequii ratio in similitudine animorum constituta est.” De orat. 7: “debitum in scripturis delicti figura est.” De bapt. 5: exempto reatu eximitur et poena. De pud. 22: “Quis alienam mortem sua solvit nisi solus dei filius.” Tertullian imputed the proposition “peccando promeremur” (De pud. 10) to his ecclesiastical opponents. The religious elements in his mode of thought seem to have been decided—apart from the New Testament books—by the reading of Seneca’s writings. In these Stoic morality seems to have been deepened, and in part transcended, by a really religious feeling and reflection, so that it was possible to pass from them to Pauline Christianity. Seneca, however, influenced Western thinkers generally: see Minucius Felix, Novatian, and Jerome De inl. vir. 12. Even in Cyprian there occur traits that might be termed Augustinian: notice how he emphasises the immanence of Christ in believers, e.g., Ep. 10, 3, and cf. the remarkable statement Ep. 10, 4: “Christus in certamine agonis nostri et coronat pariter et coronatur.” Add Ep. 58, 5: “Spiritus dei, qui cum a confitentibus non discedit neque dividitur, ipse in nobis loquitur et coronatur.” See also the Roman epistle Ep. 8, 3. [34] Compare especially also the writings which are falsely headed with the name of Cyprian, and have begun to be examined in very recent years. [35] Compare the characteristics of the Christianity taught by Commodian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, vol. III. p. 77 ff. Novatian was accused of Stoicism by his opponents. Several of the writings headed by the name of Cyprian are very old and important for our knowledge of ancient Latin Christianity. I have verified that in the tractates De aleatoribus (Victor), Ad Novatianum (Sixtus), and De laude mart. (Novatian) (Texte and Unters, VI., 1; XIII., 1 and 4; see also the writings, to be attributed to Novatian, De spectac, and De bono pudic.); but let anyone read also “De duobus montibus” in order to gain an idea of the theological simplicity and archaic quality of these Latins. And yet the author of the above treatise succeeded in formulating the phrase (c. 9): “Lex Christianorum crux est sancta Christi filii dei vivi.” Most instructive are the Instructiones of Commodian. The great influence of Hermas’ Pastor, and the interest directed accordingly to the Church, are characteristic of this whole literature. Even unlearned authors continued to occupy themselves with the Church, see the Symbol of Carthage: “credo remissionem peccatorum per sanctam ecclesiam.” [36] See my treatise on “Tertullian in der Litteratur der alten Kirche” in the Sitzungsber. d. K. Preuss. Akad. d. Wissensch, 1895, p. 545 ff. [37] See a short demonstration of this in my Texten und Unters, V 1, p. 2, and elaborated in my Altchristl. Litt.-Gesch., Part I., p. 688 ff. Pitra has furnished new material for the acquaintance also of the East with Cyprian in the Analecta Sacra. Cyprian’s unparalleled authority in the West is attested especially by Lucifer, Prudentius, Optatus, Pacian, Jerome, Augustine, and Mommsen’s catalogue of the Holy Scriptures. The see of Carthage was called in after times “Cathedra Cypriani,” as that of Rome “Cathedra Petri.” Optat. I., 10. [38] The perversions adopted in order to represent the Christians as being bound to the “lex” are shown, e.g., by the argument in the, we admit, late and spurious writing attributed to Cyprian De XII., abusivis sæculi, chap. 12: “Dum Christus finis est legis, qui sine lege sunt sine Christo sunt; igitur populus sine lege populus sine Christo est.” As against this, verdicts such as that cursorily given by Tertullian (De spect. 2), that the natural man “deum non novit nisi naturali jure, non etiam familiari,” remained without effect. [39] See on this Vol. II., p. 279 f., 312 f., and Vol. III. and IV. in various places; cf. Reuter, Augustin. Studien, pp. 153-230. Since the West never perceived clearly the close connection between the result of salvation (aphtharsia) and the Incarnation, there always existed there a rationalistic element as regards the person of Christ, which afterwards disclosed itself completely in Pelagianism. The West only completed its own theory as to Christ after it had transferred to His work conceptions obtained in the discipline of penance. But that took place very gradually. [40] Here again the Instructiones of Commodian are very instructive. [41] An exception of short duration is formed by the interest taken by the Antiochenes in the Western scheme of Christology during the Eutychian controversy: see the epistolary collection of Theodoret and his Eranistes, as also the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia. [42] E.g. Lucifer, so far as he does not simply imitate the Greeks. See on his “theology” Krüger’s Monograph, 1886. [43] See Jovinian and Vigilantius, as also the conflicts of monachism in Spain and Gaul (cf. the works of Sulpicius Severus). [44] “Virginibus nec maritus dominus, dominus vester ac caput Christus est ad instar et vicem masculi.” Before this he says of the Church (Cypr., de unit. 6): “sponsa Christi, unius cubiculi sanctitatem casto pudore custodit.” Afterwards this far from beautiful thought was transferred to the individual soul, and thus erotic spiritualism was produced. [45] See details in Vol. III., p. 129 f. The conception of Methodius was quite current in Latin writers at the end of the fourth century, viz., that Christ must be born in every Christian, and that only so could redemption be appropriated. Thus Prudentius sings, “Virginitas et prompta fides Christum bibit alvo cordis et intactis condit paritura latebris.” Ambrose, Expos. in ev. sec. Luc. I. II., c. 26: “Vides non dubitasse Mariam, sed credidisse et ideo fructum fidei consecutam. . . . Sed et vos beati, qui audistis et credidistis; quæcunque enim crediderit anima et concipit et generat dei verbum et opera ejus agnoscit. Sit in singulis Mariæ anima, ut magnificet dominum; sit in singulis spiritus Mariæ, ut exultet in deo. Si secundum carnem una mater est Christi, secundum fidem tamen omnium fructus est Christus. Omnis enim anima accipit dei verbum, si tamen immaculata et immunis a vitiis intemerato castimoniam pudore custodiat.” [46] We must pass by the older importer of Greek exegesis, Victorinus of Pettau, since, in spite of all his dependence on Origen, the Latin spirit held the upper hand, and his activity seems to have been limited. [47] We may disregard Jerome; he had no importance for Augustine, or if he had any, it was only in confirming the latter in his conservative attitude. This, indeed, does not refer to Jerome’s learning, which to Augustine was always something uncanny and even suspicious. Jerome’s erudition, acquired from the Greeks, and increased with some genius for learned investigations, became a great storehouse of the mediæval Church; yet Jerome did not mould the popular dogmatics of the Church, but confirmed them, and as a rhetorician made them eloquent, while his ascetic writings implanted monachism, and held out to it ideals which were in part extremely questionable. At the first glance it is a paradoxical fact that Jerome is rightly regarded as the doctor ecclesiæ Romanæ katexochēn, and that we can yet pass him over in a history of dogma. The explanation of the paradox is that after he threw off the influence of Origen, he was exclusively the speaker and advocate of vulgar Catholicism, and that he possessed a just instinct for the “ecclesiastical mean” in controversies which were only to reveal their whole significance after his time (see the Semipelagian question and his relation to Augustinianism.) If that is a compliment to him, it is none to his Church. After Augustine’s time influences from the East were very scanty; yet we have to recall Junilius and Cassiodorus. [48] See Augustine’s testimony as to Ambrose in the Ballerinis’ ed. of the latter’s works. Contra Jul. I. 4, 10: “Audi excellentem dei dispensatorem, quem veneror ut patrem; in Christo Jesu enim per evangelium me genuit et eo Christi ministro lavacrum regenerationis accepi. Beatum loquor Ambrosium cujus pro Catholica fide gratiam, constantiam, labores, pericula sive operibus sive sermonibus et ipse sum expertus et mecum non dubitat orbis prædicare Romanus.” Op. imperf. c. Julian. I., 2: “Quem vero judicem poteris Ambrosio reperire meliorem? De quo magister tuus Pelagius ait, quod ejus fidem et purissimum in scripturis sensum ne inimicus quidem ausus est reprehendere.” Pelagius’ own words in De gratia Christi et lib. arb. 43 (47): “Beatus Ambrosius episcopus, in cujus præcipue libris Romana elucet fides, qui scriptorum inter Latinos flos quidam speciosus enituit, cujus fidem et purissimum in scripturis sensum ne inimicus quidem ausus est reprehendere” (see c. Jul. I., 30). The fame of Ambrose is also proclaimed by Rufinus, who defends him against Jerome, “who, as an envious Augur, censured Ambrose’s plagiarisms from the Greeks, while he himself was much more culpable since he always posed as original.” [49] See detailed references in Förster, Ambrosius, p. 99 ff. [50] See Vol. IV., p. 93. [51] See Reuter, August. Studien, pp. 207-227. [52] See Ambrose de fid. I. prol et al. loc. in Reuter, 1.c. p. 185; on Augustine’s neutral position, id. p. 185 f. [53] Not a few passages might here he quoted from Ambrose’s works. He rejects questionable principles held by Origen with tact and without judging him a heretic, always himself holding to the common Christian element. In a few important questions, the influence of Origen—Plato—is unmistakable; as in the doctrine of souls and the conception of hell. Greek influence appears to me to be strongest in the doctrine of the relative necessity and expediency of evil (“amplius nobis profuit culpa quam nocuit”). Therefore, I cannot see in this doctrine a bold theory of evil peculiar to Ambrose, like Deutsch (Des Ambrosius Lehre von der Sünde, etc., 1867, p. 8) and Förster (l.c. pp. 136, 142, 300). The teleological view from the standpoint of the fuller restoration is alone new perhaps. [54] Ambrose, De Isaac et anima. [55] On Hilary’s exile in the East, epoch-making as it was for the history of theology, and his relation to Origen, see Reinken’s IIilarius, p. 128, 270, 281 ff. Augustine held him in high honour. [56] In the interpretation of the New Testament, Ambrose kept more faithfully to the letter, following the Western tradition, and declining the gifts of the Greeks. He describes Origen (Ep. 75) as “Longe minor in novo quam in veteri testamento.” But Western Christians were first made familiar with the Old Testament by the Greeks. [57] Aug. Confess. VIII., 2. See there also the story of his conversion. [58] If we disregard the fragments which reached the West through translations of Origen’s works, and plagiarisms from the Cappadocians, Neoplatonism, and with it Greek speculation in general, were imparted to it in three successive forms:—(1) By Victorinus and Augustine, and by Marius Mercator in the fourth and fifth centuries; (2) by Boethius in the sixth; (3) by the importation of the works of the Pseudo-Areopagite in the ninth century. Cassiodorus praises Boethius (Var. epp. 1, 45) for having given the Latins by translations the works of Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Nicomachus, Euclid, Plato the theologian, Aristotle the logician, Archimedes, and other Greeks. It seems now to me proven (Usener, Anecdoton Holderi, 1877) that Boethius was a Christian, and that he also wrote the frequently-suspected writings De sancta trimitate, Utrum pater et filius et spiritus s. de divinitate substantialiter prædicentur, Quomodo substantiæ in eo quod sint bonæ sint, cum non sint substantialia bona, De fide Catholica and Contra Eutychen et Nestorium. But he has influenced posterity, not by his Christian writings, but by his treatise, wholly dependent on Aristotle, “De consolatione philosophiæ.” which for that very reason could have been written by a heathen, and by his commentaries on Aristotle. He was really, along with Aristotle, the knowledge of whom was imperfect enough, the philosopher of the early Middle Ages. On the system of Boethius, see Nitzsch’s monograph, 1860. Many of his ideas recall Seneca and Proclus; an examination of his relation to Victorious would be desirable. “In his system the foundation is formed by Platonism, modified by certain Aristotelian thoughts; besides this we have unmistakably a Stoic trait, due to the Roman and personal character of the philosopher and the reading of Roman thinkers. In this eclecticism Christianity occupies as good as no position. For that reason we must renounce the attempt to give a place to the system of Boethius among those which represent or aim at a harmonising or fusion of Christianity with Platonism (e.g., Synesius, Pseudo-Dionysius)”; compare Nitzsch, l.c. p. 84 f. The fact that this man, who, in view of death, consoled himself with the ideas of heathen philosophers, wrote treatises on the central dogma of the Church, affords us the best means of observing that the dogma of Christ presented a side on which it led to the forgetting of Christ himself. [59] It is to the credit of Ch. Gore that he has described, in his article “Victorinus” (Dict. of Christ. Biog. IV., pp. 1129-1138), the distinctive character of the theology of Victorinus and its importance for Augustine. He says rightly: “His theology is Neoplatonist in tone . . . he applied many principles of the Plotinian philosophy to the elucidation of the Christian mysteries. His importance in this respect has been entirely overlooked in the history of theology. He preceded the Pseudo-Dionysius. He anticipated a great deal that appears in Scotus Erigena.” In fact, when we study the works of Victorinus (Migne T. VIII., pp. 999-1310), we are astonished to find in him a perfect Christian Neoplatonist, and an Augustine before Augustine. The writings “Ad Justinum Manichæum,” and “De generatione verbi divini, and the great work against the Arians, read like compositions by Augustine, only the Neoplatonic element makes a much more natural appearance in him than in Augustine, who had to make an effort to grasp it. If we substitute the word “natura” for “deus” in the speculation of Victorinus, we have the complete system of Scotus Erigena. But even this exchange is unnecessary; for in Victorinus the terminology of the Church only rests like a thin covering on the Neoplatonic doctrine of identity. God in himself is “motus”—not mutatio: “moveri ipsum quo est esse”; but without the Son he is conceived as ho mē ō (speculation on the four-fold sense of the mē einai as in the later mystics). The Son is ho ōn. It appears clearly in the speculation on the relation of Father and Son, that consequent—pantheistic—Neoplatonism is favourable to the doctrine of the Homoousia. Because the Deity is movere, the Father finds himself in a “semper generans generatio.” So the Son proceeds from him, “re non tempore posterior.” The Son is the “potentia actuosa”; while the Father begets him, “ipse se ipsum conterminavit.” The Son is accordingly the eternal object of the divine will and the divine self-knowledge; he is the form and limitation of God, very essence of the Father; the Father in perceiving the Son perceives himself (“alteritas nata”). “In isto sine intellectu temporis, tempore . . . est alteritas nata, cito in identitatem revenit;” therefore the most perfect unity and absolute consubstantiality, although the Son is subordinate. Victorinus first designated the Spirit as the copula of the Deity (see Augustine); it is he who completes the perfect circle of the Deity; “omnes in alternis exsistentes et semper simul homoousioi divina affectione, secundum actionem (tantummodo) subsistentiam propriam habentes.” This is elaborated in speculations which form the themes of Augustine’s great work “De trinitate.” The number three is in the end only apparent; “ante unum quod est in numero, plane simplex.” “Ipse quod est esse, subsistit tripliciter.” While anyone who is at all sharp-sighted sees clearly from this that the “Son” as “potentia actuosa” is the world-idea, that is perfectly evident in what follows. All things are potentially in God, actually in the Son; for “filius festinat in actionem.” The world is distinguished from God, as the many from the one, i.e., the world is God unfolding himself and returning to unity sub specie æternitatis. That which is alien and God-resisting in the world is simply not-being, matter. This is all as given by Proclus, and therefore, while the word “cream” is indeed retained, is transformed, in fact, into an emanation. The distinction between deus ipse and quæ a deo is preserved; but, in reality, the world is looked at under the point of view of the Deity developing himself. Ad Justinum 4: “Aliter quidem quod ipse est, aliter quæ ab ipso. Quod ipse est unum est totumque est quidquid ipse est; quod vero ab ipso est, innumerum est. Et hæc sunt quibus refletur omne quod uno toto clauditur et ambitur. Verum quod varia sunt quæ ab ipso sunt, qui a se est et unum est, variis cum convenit dominare. Et ut omnipotens apparet, contrariorum etiam origo ipse debuit inveniri.” But it is said of these “varia,” that “insubstantiata sunt omnia onta in Jesu, hoc est, en tō logō. He is the unity of nature, accordingly elementum, receptaculum, habitaculum, habitator, locus naturæ. He is the “unum totum” in which the universum presents itself as a unity. And now follows the process of emanation designated as “creation,” in whose description are employed the Christian and Neoplatonic stages: deus, Jesus, spiritus, nous, anima (as world-soul) angeli et deinde corporalia omnia subministrata.” Redemption through Christ, and the return ad deum of all essences, in so far as they are a deo, is Neoplatonically conceived, as also we have then the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls and their pre-temporal fall. The Incarnation is admitted, but spiritualised, inasmuch as side by side with the conception of the assumption of a human form, which occurs once, the other prevails that Christ appears as burdened with humanity in its totality; “universalis caro, universalis anima; in isto omnia universalia erant” (Adv. Arian. III., 3). “Quia corpus ille catholicum ad omnem hominem habuit, omne quod passus est catholicum fecit; id est ut omnis caro in ipso crucifixa sit” (Ad Philipp, pp. 1196-1221; Adv. Arian. III., 3). But the most interesting features, because the most important for Augustine are (1), that Victorinus gives strong expression to the doctrine of Predestination—only he feels compelled in opposition to Manichæism to maintain the freedom of the will; and (2), that, especially in his commentaries, he places the highest value on justification by faith alone in opposition to all moralism. Neoplatonism had won his assent, or had prepared him in some measure to assent, to both these doctrines; we know, indeed, from other sources, that heathen Neoplatonists felt attracted to John and Paul, but not to the Synoptics or James. Thus Victorinus writes: “non omnia restaurantur sed quæ in Christo sunt” (p. 1245), “quæ salvari possent” (p. 1274), “universos sed qui sequerentur” (p. 1221). In a mystical way Christ is believing humanity (the Church), and believing humanity is humanity in general. Everything undergoes a strictly necessary development; therefore Victorious was a predestinationist. The passages in which Victorinus expresses himself in a strictly Pauline, and, so to speak, Antipelagian sense, are collected by Gore, p. 1137; see Ad Gal. 3, 22; Ad Philipp, 3, 9; “‘non meam justitiam’ tunc enim mea est vel nostra, cum moribus nostris justitiam dei mereri nos putamus perfectam per mores. At non, inquit, hanc habens justitiam, sed quam? Illam ex fide. Non illam quæ ex lege; væ in operibus est et carnali disciplina, sed hanc quæ ex deo procedit ‘justitia ex fide;’” Ad Phil. 4, 9; Ad Ephes. 2, 5: “non nostri laboris est, quod sæpe moneo, ut nos salvemus; sed sola fides in Christum nobis salus est . . . nostrum pene jam nihil est nisi solum credere qui superavit omnia. Hoc est enim plena salvatio, Christum hæc vicisse. Fidem in Christo habere, plenam fidem, nullus labor est, nulla difficultas, animi tantum voluntas est . . . justitia non tantum valet quantum fides”; Ad Ephes. 1, 14; 3, 7; Ad Phil. 2, 13: “quia ipsum velle a deo nobis operatur, fit ut ex deo et operationem et voluntatem habeamus.” Victorinus has been discussed most recently by Geiger (Programme von Metten, 1888, 1889), and Reinhold Schmid (Marius Victorinus Rhetor u. s. Bez. z. Augustin. Kiel, 1895)—compare also the dissertation by Koffmane, De Mario Victorino, philosopho Christiano, Breslau, 18So. Geiger has thoroughly expounded the complete Neoplatonic system of Victorious; Schmid seeks, after an excellent statement of his theological views, to show (p. 68 ff.), that he exerted no, or, at least, no decisive influence on Augustine. I cannot see that this proof has really been successful; yet I admit that Schmid has brought forward weighty arguments in support of his proposition. The name of Victorinus is not the important point for the history of dogma, but the indisputable fact that the combination of Neoplatonism and highly orthodox Christianity existed in the West, in Rome, before Augustine, under the badge of Paulinism. Since this combination was hardly of frequent occurrence in the fourth century, and since Augustine gives a prominent place to Victorinus in his Confessions, it will remain probable that he was influenced by him. The facts that he was less Neoplatonic than Victorine, and afterwards even opposed him, do not weigh against the above contention. But it is positively misleading to argue like Schmid (p. 68) against Augustine’s Neoplatonism by appealing to the fact that from the moment of his rejection of Manichæism and semi-scepticism, he was a “decided Christian.” [60] Little is yet known regarding the history of ecclesiastical penance in the East; but I believe I can maintain that in the West the shock was less violent in its effect, which all official Church discipline received through the rapid extension of Christianity after Constantine. Here confidence in the Church was greater, the union of “sancta ecclesia” and “remissio peccatorum” closer (“credo remissionem peccatorum per sanctam ecclesiam”: Symbol. Carthag. ), and the sense of sin as guilt, which was to be atoned for by public confession and satisfactio, more acute. Whence this came, it is hard to say. In the East it would appear that greater stress was laid on the operations of the cultus as a collective institution, and on the other hand on private self-education through prayer and asceticism; while in the West the feeling was stronger that men occupied religious legal relationships, in which they were responsible to the Church, being able, however, to expect from the Church sacramental and intercessory aid in each individual case. The individual and the Church thus stood nearer each other in the West than in the East. Therefore, ecclesiastical penance asserted a much greater importance in the former than in the latter. We can study this significance in the works of the Africans on the one hand, and of Ambrose on the other. They have little else in common, but they agree in their view of penance (Ambrose, De pænitentia). The practice of penance now acquired an increasing influence in the West on all conditions of the ecclesiastical constitution and of theology, so that we can ultimately construct from this starting-point the whole of Western Catholicism in the Middle Ages and modern times, and can trace the subtle workings of the theory of penance to the most remote dogmas. But Augustine once more marks the decisive impetus in this development. With him began the process by which what had long existed in the Church was elevated into theory. He indeed created few formulas, and has not even once spoken of a sacrament of penance; but, on the one hand, he has clearly enough expressed the thing itself, and, on the other, where he has not yet drawn the theoretical consequences of the practice of penance, he has left such striking gaps (see his Christology) that they were filled up by unostentatious efforts, as if inevitably, in after times. [61] See Reuter, August. Studien, pp. 232 ff., 355. [62] Lib I. c. Julian. 3 Op. imperf. c. Jul I., 55; Jerome de vir. inl., 82. [63] Pseudo-Cyprian = Sixtus II. ad Novatianum, Ambrosiaster in the Quæst. ex Vet. et Novo Testam. [the inserted tractate against Novatian] Pacianus c. Novat. [64] From Pacian’s Ep. I. ad Sempron. comes the famous sentence: “Christianus mihi nomen est, catholicus cognomen.” In the tractate of Ambrosiaster against Novatian, the objectivity of the Divine Word and of baptism, and their independence in their operation of the moral character of the priest, are consistently argued. In some of the sentences we imagine that we are listening to Augustine. On the whole, there is not a little in Ambrosiaster’s commentary and questions which must be described as leading up to Augustine, and is therewith genuinely Western. [65] Aug adv. Parmen. 1, 3: “Venerabilis memoriæ Milevitanus episcopus catholicæ communionis Optatus.” Fulgentius ranks Optatus along with Ambrose and Augustine. [66] See Deutsch, Drei Actenstücke z. Gesch. des Donatismus, 1875, P. 40 f. Völter, Der Ursprung des Donatismus, 1882; Harnack, Theol. Lit-Zeit., 1884, No. 4; on the other side, Reuter l.c. 234 ff. whose contradiction, however, partly rests on a misunderstanding of my view. Seeck. Zitschr. für K.-Gesch. X. 4. Duschesne gives the best account, Le doissier du Donatisme, 1890. [67] See Vol. II., p. 114 ff. [68] Here these Africans abandoned the position, in the question of heretical baptisms, taken up by Cyprian; see the 8th Canon of Arles (A.D. 316): “De Afris quod propria lege sua utuntur, ut rebaptizent, placuit, ut si ad ecclesiam aliquis de hæresi venerit, interrogent eum symbolum; et si perviderint eum in patre et filio et spiritu sancto esse baptizatum, manus ei tantum imponatur ut accipiat spiritum sanctum. Quod si interrogatus non responderit hanc trinitatem, baptizetur.” Can. 13: “De his, qui scripturas s. tradidisse dicuntur vel vasa dominica vel nomina patrum suorum, placuit nobis, ut quicumque eorum ex actis publicis fuerit detectus, non verbis nudis, ab ordine cleri amoveatur. Nam si iidem aliquos ordinasse fuerint deprehensi et hi quos ordinaverunt rationales (able? capable?) subsistunt, non illis obsit ordinatio” (that is the decisive principle; even ordination by a traditor was to be valid). [69] Crises, similar to that of the Donatists, also arose elsewhere—as in Rome and Alexandria—at the beginning of the fourth century; but our information regarding them is wholly unsatisfactory; see Lipsius, Chronologie der römischen Bischöfe, p. 250 ff., where the epitaphs by Damasus on Marcellus and Eusebius are copied, and rightly compared with the passage in the Liber praedest., c. 16 on Heracleon (who is really Heraclius). Heraclius appears already (A.D. 307-309) to have exaggerated the view of the “objectivity” and power of the sacraments to such an extent as to declare all sins by baptised persons to be “venial,” and to hold a severe public penance to be unnecessary. Therefore it was said of him, “Christus in pace negavit” and “vetuit lapsos peccata dolere”; more precisely in Lib. prædest.: “Baptizatum hominem sive justum sive peccatorem loco sancti computari docebat nihilque obesse baptizatis peccata memorabat, dicens, sicut non in se recipit natura ignis gelu ita baptizatus non in se recipit peccatum. Sicut enim ignis resolvit aspectu suo nives quantæcunque juxta sint, sic semel baptizatus non recipit peccatorum reatum, etiam quantavis fuerint operibus ejus peccata permixta.” In this we can truly study the continuity of Western Christianity! How often this thought has cropped up on into the nineteenth century, and that precisely among evangelicals! It marks positively the “concealed poison,” which it is hard to distinguish from the wholesome medicine of evangelic comfort. But it is very noteworthy that this phase in the conception of the favoured position of the baptised can he first proved as existing in Rome. Developments always went furthest there, as the measures taken by Calixtus also show. Yet this one was rejected, after a schism had broken out in the community, and that is perfectly intelligible; for apart from the ruinous frivolity which had come in with the above view, what importance could the priestly class retain if every baptised person might, without further ceremony, and if he only willed it, feel and assert himself to be a member of the congregation even after the gravest sin? It is not very probable that Heraclius developed his ecclesiastical attitude on the basis of the Pauline theory of baptism and of the faith that lays hold of Christ. If we were to understand the matter so, he would have been a Luther before Luther. We have probably to suppose that he saw in baptism the magical bestowal of a stamp, as in the conception taken of certain heathen mysteries. In the Meletian schism in Egypt, the difference in principles as to the renewed reception of the lapsed, co-operated with opposition to the monarchial position of the Alexandrian Bishop. The dispute, which thus recalls the Donatist controversy, soon became one of Church politics, and personal. (Compare Meletius and the later Donatists; the limitation of the whole question to the Bishops is, however, peculiar to the Donatists.) See Walch, Ketzerhistorie, Vol. IV., and Möller in Herzog’s R.-E. IX., p. 534 ff. [70] Parmenian denied this distinction. [71] “Catholicam (scil. ecclesiam) facit simplex et verus intellectus in lege (scil. duobus testamentis) singulare ac verissimum sacramentum et unitas animorum.” [72] Cyprian would never have admitted that. He accused the Novatians (Ep. 68) of infringing the Symbol like other heretics, by depriving the “remissio peccatorum” of its full authority; and he commanded all who had not been baptised in the Catholic Church to be re-baptised. Cyprian had on his side the logical consequence of the Catholic dogma of the Church; but since this consequence was hurtful to the expansion of the Church, and the development of its power, it was rejected with a correct instinct in Rome (see Ambrosiaster), and afterwards in Africa. [73] Compare l.c.: “Ecclesiam tu, frater Parmeniane, apud vos solos esse dixisti; nisi forte quia vobis specialem sanctitatem de superbia vindicare contenditis, ut, ubi vultis, ibi sit ecclesia, et non sit, ubi non vultis. Ergo ut in particula Africæ, in angulo parvæ regionis, apud vos esse possit, apud nos in alia parte Africa non erit?” [74] In connection with the territorial catholicity of the Church, Optatus always treats the assertion of its unity. Here he is dependent on Cyprian; see besides the details in Book 2 those in Book 7: “Ex persona beatissimi Petri forma unitatis retinendæ vel faciendæ descripta recitatur;” ch. 3 “Malum est contra interdictum aliquid facere; sed pejus est, unitatem non habere, cum possis . . . ” “Bono unitatis sepelienda esse peccata hinc intellegi datur, quod b. Paulus apostolus dicat, caritatem posse obstruere multitudinem peccatorum” (here, accordingly, is the identification of unitas and caritas). . . . “Hæc omnia Paulus viderat in apostolis ceteris, qui bono unitas per caritatem noluerunt a communione Petri recedere, ejus scil. qui negaverat Christum. Quod si major esset amor innocentiæ quam utilitas pacis unitatis, dicerent se non debere communicare Petro, qui negaverat magistrum.” That is still a dangerous fundamental thought of Catholicism at the present day. [75] Notice that there already occur in Optatus terms compounded with “quasi” which were so significant in the later dogmatics of Catholicism. [76] Here stands the following sentence (V., 7): “Ne quis putaret, in solis apostolis aut episcopis spem suam esse ponendam, sic Paulus ait: ‘Quid est enim Paulus vel quid Apollo? Utique ministri ejus, in quem credidistis. Est ergo in universis servientibus non dominium sed ministerium.” [77] At this point there occur especially in V., 7, 8, very important expositions anticipating Augustine. “Ad gratiam dei pertinet qui credit, non ille, pro cujus voluntate, ut dicitis, sanctitas vestra succedit.”—“Nomen trinitatis est, quod sanctificat, non opus (operantis).”—“Restat jam de credentis merito aliquid dicere, cujus est fides, quam filius dei et sanctitati suæ anteposuit et majestati; non enim potestis sanctiores esse, quam Christus est.” Here follows the story of the Canaanitish woman, with the remarkable application: “Et ut ostenderet filius dei, se vacasse, fidem tantummodo operatam esse: vade, inquit, mulier in pace, fides tua te salvavit.” So also faith is extolled as having been the sole agent in the stories of the Centurion of Capernaum and the Issue of Blood. “Nec mulier petiit, nec Christus promisit, sed fides tantum quantum præsumpsit, exegit.” The same thoughts occur in Optatus’ contemporary, Ambrosiaster. [78] This it was in the case of Ambrosiaster as well as in that of Optatus. [79] The Donatist had said (II., 7): “Nam in illa (catholica) ecclesia quis spiritus esse potest, nisi qui pariat filios gehennæ?” That is the genuine confession of separatists. [80] We may here select a few details from the work of Optatus as characteristic of Western Christianity before Augustine. He regularly gives the name of “lex” to both the Testaments; he judges all dogmatic statements by the symbolum apostolicum, in which he finds the doctrine of the Trinity, to him the chief confession, without therefore mentioning the Nicene Creed; he confesses “per carnem Christi deo reconciliatus est mundus” (I., 10); he declares (VI., 1): “quid est altare, nisi sedes et corporis et sanguinis Christi, cujus illic per certa momenta corpus et sanguis habitabat?” He speaks of the reatus peccati and meritum fidei; he has definitely stated the distinction between præcepta and consilia (VI., 4) in his explanation of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The innkeeper is Paul, the two pence are the two Testaments, the additional sum still perhaps necessary are the consilia. He describes the position of the soteriological dogma in his time by the following exposition (II., 20):—“Est Christiani hominis, quod bonum est velle et in eo quod bene voluerit, currere; sed homini non est datum perficere, ut post spatia, quæ debet homo implere, restet aliquid deo, ubi deficienti succurrat, quia ipse solus est perfectio et perfectus solus dei filius Christus, cæteri omnes semi-perfecti sumus.” Here we perceive the great task that awaited Augustine. But even as regards Church politics Optatus betrays himself as an Epigone of the Constantinian era, and as a precursor of the Augustinian. See his thesis on the disloyalty of the Donatists to the State (III., 3): “Non respublica est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica est, id est in imperio Romano.” [81] In the West, before Augustine, the conception of gratia exhausted itself in that of the remissio peccatorum. We can see this in propositions like the following from Pacian, sermo de bapt. 3:—“Quid est gratia? peccati remissio, i.e., donum; gratia enim donum est.” [82] In this respect Ambrose takes an isolated position; thus it is, e.g., characteristic that he does not seem to have read Cyprian’s works. [83] I express myself thus intentionally; for Ambrose never, in words, thrust the actual, hierarchical Church into the foreground. [84] See proofs by Förster, l.c., p. 218 ff. [85] See at an earlier (late the Instructiones of Commodian. Ambrose was not such an advocate of Monachism as Jerome. [86] See above, p. 31. [87] See Ewald, Der Einfluss der stoisch-ciceronianischen Moral auf die Darstellung der Ethik bei Ambrosius, 1881. “De officiis,” with all its apparent consistency, shows merely a considerable vacillation between virtue as the supreme good (in the Stoic sense) and eternal life—which latter term, for the rest, is not understood in its Christian meaning. The moralism of antiquity, as well as the eudaimonist trait of ancient moral philosophy dominate the book, in which ultimately the “true wise man” appears most clearly. In such circumstances the distinction drawn between præcepta and consilia, in itself so dangerous to evangelical morality, constitutes an advantage; for specifically Christian virtues appear in the form of the consilia. [88] Hilary also speaks of the vitium originis. [89] See Deutsch, Des Ambrosius Lehre von der Sünde and Sündentilgung, 1867. Förster,1.c., p. 146 ff. All human beings are sinners, even Mary. The “hæreditarium vinculum” of sin embraces all. “Fuit Adam, et in illo fuimus omnes; periit Adam, et in illo omnes perierunt.” It is not only an inherited infirmity that is meant, but a guilt that continues active. “Quicunque natus est sub peccato, quem ipsa nosciæ conditionis hæreditas adstrinxit ad culpam.” No doctrine of imputation, indeed, yet occurs in Ambrose; for as he conceived it, mankind in Adam was a unity, in which took place a peccatrix successio, a continuous evolution of Adam’s sin. Accordingly no imputation was necessary. Ambrosiaster (on Rom. V., 12) has also expressed Ambrose’s thought: “Manifestum itaque est, in Adam omnes peccasse quasi in massa; ipse enim per peccatum corruptus, quos genuit, omnes, nati sunt sub peccato. Ex eo igitur cuncti peccatores, quia ex eo ipso sumus omnes.” In the West this thought was traditional after Tertullian. See Cyprian, Ep. 64, 5; De opere 1, and Commodian, Instruct. I., 35. [90] “Intret in animam tuam Christus, inhabitet in mentibus tuis Jesus. . . . Quid mihi prodest tantorum conscio peccatorum, si dominus veniat, nisi veniat in meam animam, redeat in meam mentem, nisi vivat in me Christus.” In Ps. CXIX., exp. IV., 26: in Luc. enarr., X., 7; in Ps. XXXVI., exp. 63. The passages are collected by Förster (see esp. De poenit., II., 8). See also Vol. III., p. 130. For the rest, the author of the Quæstiones ex Vet. et. Nov. Testam. (Ambrosiaster) could also speak in tones whose pathetic individualism recalls Augustine; cf. e.g., the conclusion of the inserted tractate c. Novat.: “ego . . . te (scil. deum) quæsivi, te desideravi, tibi credidi; de homine nihil speravi . . . ego verbis antistitis fidem dedi, quæ a te data dicuntur, quæque te inspirant, te loquuntur, de te promittunt; huic de se nihil credidi nec gestis ejus, sed fidei quæ ex te est, me copulavi.” [91] On Ps. CXIX., exp. XX., 14: “Nemo sibi arroget, nemo de meritis, nemo de potestate se jactet, sed omnes speremus per dominum Jesum misericordiam invenire—quæ enim spes alia peccatoribus?” [92] The interrogation mark in Reuter, August. Studien, p. 493, is due to exaggerated caution. The antithesis of nature and grace, which, wherever it occurs, has one of its roots in Paulinism, and was already familiar to Tertullian, is anew proclaimed in Ambrose; see De off. I., 7, 24; see also the address on the death of his brother. Ambrosiaster, too, makes use of the natura-gratia antithesis. [93] De Abrah., I., 3, 21. [94] De Jacob et vita beata I., 6, 21; other passages in Förster, pp. 160 ff., 303 ff. [95] A detailed account would here require to discuss many other Western writers, e.g., Prudentius (see monographs by Brockhaus, 1872, and Rosier, 1886), Pacian, Zeno, Paulinus of Nola, etc.; but what we have given may serve to define the directions in which Western Christianity moved. As regards Hilary, Förster has shown very recently (Stud. u. Krit., 1888, p. 645 ff.) that even he, in spite of his dependence on the Greeks, did not belie the practical ethical interest of the Westerns. [96] The East knew nothing of this excessive analysis; it took a man more as a whole, and judged him by the regular course taken by his will. [97] I have already discussed this briefly in Vol. III., p. 33 ff. Augustine (Confess. VII., 19) believed, up to the time of his conversion, that the doctrine of Christ held by the Catholic Church was almost identical with that of Photinus; his friend Alypius thought, on the contrary, that the Church denied Christ a human soul. We see from Hilary’s work, De trinitate, how many Christological conceptions circulated in the Western communities, among them even “quod in eo ex virgine creando efficax Dei sapientia et virtus exstiterit, et in nativitate ejus divinæ prudentiæ et potestatis opus intellegatur, sitque in eo efficientia potius quam natura sapientiæ.” Optatus (I., 8) had to blame Parmenian for calling the body of Christ sinful, and maintaining that it was purified by his baptism. Further, in spite of the doctrine of “two natures,” and the acceptance of Greek speculations, the thought of Hippolytus (Philos. X., 33): ei gar ho theos theon se ēthelēse poiēsai, edunato; echeis tou logou to paradeigma, runs like a concealed thread through the Christological utterances of the West. We shall see that even in Ambrose and Augustine there is to be found a hidden, but intentionally retained, remnant of the old Adoptian conception. (How this is to be regarded, see above under 2). We may here pass over the influence of Manichæan Christology on many secondary minds in the Western Churches. [98] Pseudo-Cyprian, De duplici martyrio, 16: “Domini mors potentior erat quam vita.” [99] For fuller details, see Vol. III., p. 310 ff. Ritschl, Lehre v.d., Rechtfertigung u. Versöhnung, 2nd. ed., I., p, 38, III:, p. 362. Gesch. des Pietism. III., p. 426 ff. [100] See e.g., the remarkable expositions ad Laurentium, c. 36 sq. The divine nature is indeed regarded as resting in the background; but in Jesus Christ there comes to the front the “individual” man, who, without previous merit, was of grace received into the Deity. [101] See the evidence in Bach’s Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, Vol. II. [102] See Vol. III., p. 189. [103] See on the extension of Manichæism in the West, Vol. III., p. 334 ff. It was always more Christian and therefore more dangerous there. On its importance to Augustine, see under. [104] See the conceptions of Ambrose, Victorinus, and Augustine. [105] See the Western popular philosophies in the style of Cicero, but also Ambrose’s De officiis. [106] See above, p. 40 f. [107] Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Siricius give us information regarding him. [108] I have demonstrated this in the Ztschr. f. Theol. u. Kirche I. (1891), pp. 82-178, and cannot repeat the proof here. From the I. Ep. of John onwards undercurrents can be traced in the Gentile Church which required to have the saying addressed to them: “Be not deceived, he who does righteousness is righteous.” My main references are to the erroneous views opposed in the Catholic Epistles; the lax Christians mentioned by Tertullian; the edict on penance of Calixtus, with its noteworthy evangelical basis (see also Rolffs in the Texten u. Unters, Vol. XI., part 3); Heraclius in Rome; the counter-efforts of the lax against the monachism which was establishing itself in the West; Jovinian; and to the opponents assailed by Augustine in his very important writing, “De fide et operibus.” This writing is, along with Jovinian’s discussions, the most important source. There can be no doubt that in the majority of cases an unbridled and accommodating trust in the sacrament—accordingly a strained form of the popular Catholic feeling—was the leading idea, and that the reference to Gospel texts, which bore witness to the unlimited mercy of God, was only a drapery; that accordingly the “sola fide”—the catchword occurs—was not conceived evangelically, but really meant “solo sacramento”—i e., even if the life did not correspond to the Christian demand for holiness. But there were Christian teachers who had really grasped the evangelical thesis, and Jovinian is to be counted one of them, even if his opponents be right (and I am doubtful of this) in taking offence at his conduct; and even if it be certain that his doctrine, in the circumstances of the time, could and did promote laxity. His main positions were as follows:—1. The natural man is in the state of sin. Even the slightest sin separates from God and exposes to damnation. 2. The state of the Christian rests on baptism and faith; these produce regeneration. 3. Regeneration is the state in which Christ is in us, and we are in Christ; there are no degrees in it, for this personal relationship either does or does not exist. Where it does, there is righteousness. 4. It is a relation formed by love that is in question: Father and Son dwell in believers; but where there is such an indweller, the possessor can want for nothing. 5. Accordingly all blessings are bestowed with and in this relationship; nothing can be thought of as capable of being added. 6. Since all blessings issue from this relationship, there can be no special meritorious works; for at bottom there is only one good, and that we possess as the best beloved children of God, who now participate in the divine nature, and that good will be fully revealed in Heaven. 7. In him who occupies this relationship of faith and love there is nothing to be condemned; he can commit no sin which would separate him from God; the devil cannot make him fall, for he ever recovers himself as a child of God by faith and penitence. The relationship fixed in baptism through faith is something lasting and indissoluble. 8. But such an one must not only be baptised; he must have received baptism with perfect faith, and by faith evince baptismal grace. He must labour and wrestle earnestly—though not in monkish efforts, for they are valueless—not in order to deserve something further, but that he may not lose what he has received. To him, too, the truth applies that there are no small and great sins, but that the heart is either with God or the devil. 9. Those who are baptised in Christ, and cling to Him with confident faith, form the one, true Church. To her belong all the glorious promises: she is bride, sister, mother, and is never without her bridegroom. She lives in one faith, and is never violated or divided, but is a pure virgin. We may call Jovinian actually a “witness of antiquity to the truth,” and a “Protestant of his time,” though we must not mistake a point of difference: the indwelling of God and Christ in the baptised is more strongly emphasised than the power of faith. The Spaniard, Vigilantius, even surpassed Jovinian, both in range and intensity, in the energy with which he attacked the excrescences of monkery, relic-worship, virginity, etc.; but he does not belong to this section, for he was moved by the impression made upon him by the superstition and idolatry which he saw rising to supremacy in the Church. Jerome’s writing against him is miserable, but is surpassed in meanness by the same author’s books against Jovinian. [109] The puzzling phenomenon of Priscillianism has not been made much clearer by the discovery of Priscillian’s homilies. I believe we may pass them over, since, important as were the points touched on in the Priscillian controversy (even the question as to the claims of the “Apocrypha” compared with the Bible), they neither evoked a dogmatic controversy, nor obtained a more general significance. The meritorious work by Paret, Priscillianus, ein Reformator des 4 Jahrh. (Würzburg, 1891) is not convincing in its leading thoughts (see on the other side Hilgenfeld in his Zeitschr. Vol. 35, 1892, pp. 1-85). _________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER III. THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF AUGUSTINE AS REFORMER OF CHRISTIAN PIETY. [110] “Virtues will so increase and be perfected as to conduct thee without any hesitation to the truly blessed life which only is eternal: where evils, which will not exist, are not discriminated from blessings by prudence, nor adversity is borne bravely, because there we shall find only what we love, not also what we tolerate, nor lust is bridled by temperance, where we shall not feel its incitements, nor the needy are aided justly, where we will have no need and nothing unworthy. There virtue will be one, and virtue and the reward of virtue will be that spoken of in sacred phrase by the man who loves it: “But to me to cling to God is a good thing.” This virtue will be there the full and eternal wisdom, and it will also truly be the life that is blessed. Surely this is to attain to the eternal and supreme blessing, to which to cling for ever is the end of our goodness. Let this (virtue) be called prudence, because it will cling to the good too eagerly for it to be lost, and fortitude, because it will cling to the good too firmly for it to be torn away, and temperance, because it will cling to the good too chastely to be corrupted, and justice, because it will cling to the good too justly to be inferior in any merit. Although even in this life the only virtue is to love what ought to be loved. But what should we choose chiefly to love except that than which we find nothing better? This is God, and if we prefer anything or esteem anything equal to love to him we fail to love ourselves. For it is the better for us, the more we enter into him, than whom there is nothing better. But we move not by walking, but by loving. We may not go (to him) afoot, but with our character. But our character is wont to be judged, not from what anyone knows, but from what he loves. Nothing makes character good or bad but good or bad affections. Therefore, by our corruption, we have been far from the righteousness of God. Whence we are corrected by loving the right, that being just we may be able to cling to the right.” [111] Augustine reveals his soul in these words; they therefore also mark his importance in the history of dogma. If, as we have attempted in the preceding chapter, we pursue and let converge the different lines along which Western Christianity developed in the fourth and fifth centuries, we can construct a system which approximates to “Augustinianism”; indeed we can even deduce the latter, as a necessary product, from the internal and external conditions in which the Church and theology then found themselves. But we cannot, for all that, match the man who was behind the system and lent it vigour and life. Similarly we can attempt—and it is a remunerative task—to make Augustine’s Christian conception of the world intelligible from the course of his education, and to show how no stage in his career failed to influence him. His pagan father, and pious, Christian mother, Cicero’s Hortensius, Manichæism, Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, with its mysticism and scepticism, the impression produced by Ambrose and monachism—all contributed their share. [112] But even from this stand-point we cannot finally do complete justice to the distinctive character of this man. That is his secret and his greatness, and perhaps all or any analysis itself is an injury: he knew his heart to be his worst possession, and the living God to be his highest good; he lived in the love of God, and he possessed a fascinating power of expressing his observations on the inner life. In doing this, he taught the world that the highest and sweetest enjoyment was to be sought in the feeling that springs from a soul that has triumphed over its pain, from the love of God as the fountain of good, and therefore from the certainty of grace. Theologians before him had taught that man must be changed in order to be blessed; he taught that man could be a new being if he let God find him, and if he found himself and God, from the midst of his distraction and dissipation. He destroyed the delusion of ancient popular psychology and morality; he gave the final blow to the intellectualism of antiquity; but he resuscitated it in the pious thought of the man who found true being and the supreme good in the living God. He was the first to separate nature and grace, two spheres which men had long attempted unsuccessfully to divide; but by this means he connected religion and morality, and gave a new meaning to the idea of the good. He was the first to mark off the scope and force of the heart and will, and to deduce from this what moralists and religious philosophers imagined they had understood, but never had understood; he set up a fixed goal for the aimless striving of asceticism: perfection in the love of God, suppression of selfish ambition, humility. He taught men to realise the horror of the depth of sin and guilt which he disclosed, at the same time with the blessed feeling of an ever-comforted misery, and a perennial grace. He first perfected Christian pessimism, whose upholders till then had really reserved for themselves an extremely optimistic view of human nature. But while showing that radical evil was the mainspring of all human action, he preached also the regeneration of the will, by which man adapted himself to the blessed life. He did not bridge for feeling and thought the gulf which Christian tradition disclosed between this world and the next; but he testified so thrillingly to the blessedness of the man who had found rest in God, that nothing was reserved for the future life but an indescribable “vision.” But above all and in all, he exhibited to every soul its glory and its responsibility: God and the soul, the soul and its God. He took religion—a transfigured and moulded monachism, dominated by positive conceptions and trust in Christ—out of its congregational and ritualistic form, and set it in the hearts of individuals as a gift and a task. He preached the sincere humility which blossoms only on ruins—the ruins of self-righteousness; but he recognised in this very humility the charter of the soul, and even where he assigned an imperious power to the authority of the Church, he only did so in the end in order to give the individual soul an assurance which it could not attain by any exertion, or any individual act of pardon. Therefore, he became not only a pedagogue and teacher, but a Father of the Church. He was a tree, planted by the waters, whose leaves do not fade, and on whose branches the birds of the air dwell. His voice has pealed forth to the Church through the centuries, and he preached to Christendom the words “Blessed is the man whose strength Thou art; in whose heart are Thy ways.” _________________________________________________________________ We do not require to prove that, for a man with such a personality, all that tradition offered him could only serve as material and means, that he only accepted it in order to work it into the shape that suited him. In this respect Augustine was akin to the great Alexandrians, and plenty of evidence can be adduced in support of this affinity, which was conditioned on both sides by the same loftiness of soul, as well as by dependence on Neoplatonic philosophy. But in spite of all they possessed in common, the distinction between them was extremely significant. It did not consist merely in the fact that while the former lived about A.D. 200, Augustine was a member of the Theodosian imperial Church, nor that he had passed through Manichæism, but it was due in a much greater degree to his having, in spite of his Neoplatonism, a different conception of the nature of the Christian religion, and also other ideas about the nature and authority of the Church. I. He thought of sin, when he reflected on God and Christ, and he thought of the living God, who has created and redeemed us, when he reflected on evil: the steadfastness with which he referred these factors to each other was the novel feature which distinguished him above all his predecessors. But not less novel was the energy with which he combined the categories God, Christ, the word of God, the sacraments, and the Catholic Church for practical piety, compressing what was fullest of life and freest, the possession of God, into, as it were, an objective property, which was transferred to an institution, the Church. As he accordingly begot the feeling that Christian piety was grief of soul comforted, so, on the other hand, he created that inter-weaving, characteristic of Western Catholicism, of the freest, most personal surrender to the divine, with constant submission to the Church as an institution in possession of the means of grace. According to this he is, in the first place, to be estimated, even for the history of dogma, not as a theologian, but as a reformer of Christian piety. The characteristic feature of the old Christian piety was its vacillation between hope and fear (Tertull., De uxor. II., 2: “Fear is the foundation of salvation, confidence is the barrier against fear”: timor fundamentum salutis est, præsumptio impedimentum timoris). [113] It was known that Jesus accepted sinners; but in that case men were accepted through baptism. The action of God was, as it were, exhausted. [114] The whole Dogmatic (Trinity, Christology, etc.) had its practical culmination, and therewith its end, in the merely retrospective blessing received in baptism. What next? Men feared the judge, and hoped in an uncertain fashion for a still existent grace. The fear of the judge led to fasting, almsgiving, and prayer, and the uncertain hope groped after new means of grace. Men wavered between reliance on their own powers and hope in the inexhaustibility of Christ’s grace. But did they not possess faith? They did, and prized it as a lofty possession; but they valued it as a condition, as an indispensable card of admission. In order actually to enter, there were other and wholly different conditions to be fulfilled. Piety, when it concerned itself with the task of the present, did not live in faith. The psychological form of piety was unrest, i.e., fear and hope. [115] Reliance was placed on free-will; but what was to be done if it led to one defeat after another? Repentance and amendment were required. No doubt was felt that repentance was sufficient wherever sins “against our neighbour” were in question, and where the injury could be made good. Repentance and compensation had the widest possible scope in relation to sin. Sin consisted in evil action; the good action united with repentance balanced it. One’s neighbour could forgive the offence committed against him, and the sin no longer existed; the Church could forgive what affected its constitution, and guilt was effaced. But he who was baptised sinned also “against God.” However widely the Church might extend the circle of sins in which she was the injured party, the judge, and the possessor of the right to pardon, there were sins against God, and there were transgressions which could not be made good. Who could cancel murder and adultery, or a misspent life on the part of the baptised? Perhaps even these sins were not in such evil case; perhaps God did not impute them to the baptised at all—though that would be an Epicurean error; perhaps the power of the Church did not break on the rock of accomplished facts; perhaps there were other means of grace besides baptism. But who could know this? The Church created a kind of sacrament of penance in the third and fourth centuries; but it did not say clearly what was to be expected of this sacrament. Did it reconcile with the Church or with God; did it do away with sin, guilt, or punishment; was it effective through the penances of the penitent, or through the power of grace? [116] Was it necessary? Was there in that case a sinful state, one that lasted, when the disposition had changed, when the will strove with all its powers after the good? Was there such a thing as guilt? Was not everything which man could do in accordance with his nature involved in the eternal alternation marked by good and evil actions, by knowledge, repentance, and striving? Knowledge and action decide. The man of to-day, who does the good, has no longer anything in common with the man of yesterday who did evil. But sins against God persisted in troubling them. Whence came fear, lasting fear? The Church threw its doors wider and wider; it forgave sin, all sin; but the earnest fled into the desert. There they tried to succeed by precisely the same means they had used in the world, and their mood remained the same—one of hope and fear. There was no consolation which was not confronted by a three-fold horror. That was the temper of the ancient Christians from the day when we can first observe them in the wide framework of the Roman Empire until the epoch with whose dawn we are here concerned. The “evangelical” ideas which are sometimes formed of the nature of their piety are not at all appropriate. The two most restless elements which can agitate a human breast, hope and fear, ruled over those Christians. These elements shattered the world and built the Church. Men, indeed, had a faith, and created a dogmatic for themselves; but these were insufficient to satisfy them regarding their daily life, or any life. They gave wings to hope, but they did not eradicate fear. They did not tell what the sins were with which the Christian daily fights, and what Christ had done for these sins. They left those questions to the individual conscience, and the answers given in ecclesiastical practice were not answers to soothe the heart. The only sure issue of the whole system of dogmatics was in the benefits of baptism. He who rose from the font had henceforth to go his way alone. If he reflected earnestly he could not doubt that all the Church could afterwards give him was a set of crutches. “Against Thee only have I sinned.” “Thou, Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it finds rest in Thee.” “Grant what Thou dost command, and command what Thou dost desire” (da quod jubes, et jube quod vis). [117] “The just by faith will live.” “No one enjoys what he knows, unless he also loves it, nor does anyone abide in that which he perceives unless by love” (eo quod quisque novit, non fruitur, nisi et id diligit, neque quisquam in eo quod percipit permanet nisi dilectione). [118] These are the new tones sounded by Augustine, that is the mighty chord which he produced from Holy Scripture, from the most profound observations of human nature, and speculations concerning the first and last things. Everything in the mind that was without God was absolutely sinful; the only good thing left to it was that it existed. Sin was the sphere and form of the inner life of every natural man. It had been maintained in all theological systems from Paul to Origen, and later, that a great revolt lay at the root of the present state of the human race. But Augustine was the first to base all religious feeling and all theological thought on this revolt as still existent and damning in every natural man. The Apologists regarded the revolt as an uncertain datum; Origen looked upon it as a premundane fatality. To Augustine it was the most vital fact of the present, one which, at work from the beginning, determined the life of the individual and of the whole race. Further, all sin was sin against God; for the created spirit had only one lasting relationship, that to God. Sin was self-will, the proud striving of the heart (superbia); therefore it took the form of desire and unrest. In this unrest, lust, never quieted, and fear revealed themselves. Fear was evil; but in this unrest there was also revealed the inalienable goodness of the spirit that has come from the hand of God: “We wish to be happy, and wish not to be unhappy, but neither can we will.” [119] We cannot but strive after blessings, after happiness. But there is only one good, one happiness, and one rest. “It is a good thing that I should cling to God.” All is included in that. Only in God as its element does the soul live. “Oh! who will give me to repose in Thee? Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my only good! What art Thou to me? Of Thy mercy teach me to declare it. What am I to Thee that Thou demandest my love, and if I give it not, art angry with me, and threatenest me with grievous miseries? . . . For Thy mercies’ sake tell me, O Lord my God, what Thou art to me. Say unto my soul: ‘I am thy salvation.’ Say it so, that I may hear. Behold, Lord, the ears of my heart are before Thee; open Thou them, and say to my soul: I am thy salvation. I will run after this voice, and take hold on Thee. Hide not Thy face from me; let me die seeing it— only let me see it. Narrow is the tenement of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that it may be able to receive Thee. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. Within, it has these things that must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know; but who will cleanse it? or to whom shall I cry save Thee?” [120] The same God who created us has redeemed us through Jesus Christ. That simply means that he has restored us to communion with himself. This takes place through grace and love, and in turn through faith and love. Through grace which lays hold of us and makes the unwilling willing (ex nolentibus volentes), which gives us an incomprehensibly new nature by imparting a new birth; and through love, which strengthens the weak spirit, and inspires it with powers of goodness. Through faith which holds to the saying, “He who is just by faith will live,” “which was written and confirmed by the all-powerful authority of apostolic teaching” (quod scriptum est et apostolicæ disciplinæ robustissima auctoritate firmatum); and through love, which humbly renounces all that is its own and longs for God and his law. Faith and love spring from God; for they are the means by which the living God enables us to appropriate him. The soul regards those possessions, in which it has obtained all that God requires of us, as an everlasting gift and a sacred mystery; for a heart equipped with faith and love fulfils the righteousness that is accepted by God. The peace of God is shed upon the soul which has the living God for its friend; it has risen from unrest to rest, from seeking to finding, from the false freedom to the free necessity, from fear to love; for perfect love casts out fear. It cannot for a moment forget that it is entangled in worldliness and sin, as long as it lives in this world; but it does not let its thoughts rest for a moment on sin, without remembering the living God who is its strength. The misery of sin overcome by faith, humility and love—that is Christian piety. In this temper the Christian was to live. He was constantly to feel the pain caused by sin, separation from God; but he was at the same time to console himself with the conviction that the grace of God had taken possession of him, that the Lord of heaven and earth had instilled His love into his heart, and that this love worked as mightily after as in baptism. [121] Thus Augustine dethroned the traditional feelings of the baptised, fear and hope, the elements of unrest, and substituted the elements of rest, faith, and love. For an uncertain and vacillating notion of sin he substituted the perception of its power and horror, for a still uncertain notion of grace he substituted the perception of its omnipotence. He did not abolish hope, he rather confirmed with all his power the old feeling that this life is not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed. But in realising and preaching the rest bestowed by faith and love, he transformed the stormy and fanatical power of hope into a gentle and sure conviction. [122] I have here reproduced Augustine’s teaching, as we find it chiefly in his Confessions. This book has the advantage of giving us an account which is not influenced by any particular aims. Our exposition is by no means complete; we should require to add more than one caution, in order to be perfectly just. [123] Further, the description has intentionally only considered the fundamental lines, and given expression to but one direction in which the epoch-making importance of Augustine comes to the front. But there can be no doubt that it is the most decisive. If we Western Christians are shut up to the conviction that religion moves between the poles of sin and grace—nature and grace; if we subordinate morality to faith, in so far as we reject the thought of an independent morality, one indifferent to religion; if we believe that it is necessary to pay much greater heed to the essence of sin than to the forms in which it is manifested—fixing our attention on its roots, not on its degrees, or on sinful actions; if we are convinced that universal sinfulness is the presupposition of religion; if we expect nothing from our own powers; if we comprise all means of salvation in the thought of God’s grace and of faith; if the preaching of faith and the love of God is substituted for that of fear, repentance, and hope; [124] if, finally, we distinguish between law and gospel, gifts and tasks appointed by God—then we feel with the emotions, think in the thoughts, and speak with the words of Augustine. [125] Who can deny that in this way religion disclosed deeper truths to feeling and thought, that the disease was recognised more surely, and the means of healing were demonstrated more reliably? Who can mistake the gain in laying bare the living heart, the need of the soul, the living God, the peace that exists in the disposition to trust and love? Even if he merely seeks to study these phenomena as a disinterested “historian of culture,” who can escape the impression that we have here an advance, at least in psychological knowledge, that can never again be lost? In fact, history seems to teach that the gain can never perish within the Christian Church; nay, it attests more, it would appear, than this: it tells us that a limit has been reached, beyond which the pious mood cannot receive a further development. If we review all the men and women of the West since Augustine’s time, whom, for the disposition that possessed them, history has designated as prominent Christians, we have always the same type; we find marked conviction of sin, complete renunciation of their own strength, and trust in grace, in the personal God who is apprehended as the Merciful One in the humility of Christ. The variations of this frame of mind are indeed numerous—we will speak of these later on; but the fundamental type is the same. And this frame of mind is taught in sermons and in instruction by truly pious Catholics and Evangelicals; to it youthful Christians are trained, and dogmatics are framed in harmony with it. It always produces so powerful an effect, even where it is only preached as the experience of others, that he who has once come in contact with it can never forget it; it accompanies him as a shadow by day and as a light in the dark; he who imagines that he has long shaken it off sees it rising up suddenly before him again. Since the days of Leibnitz, indeed, and the “Illumination,” a powerful opponent has grown up, an enemy that seemed to have mastered it during a whole century, that reduced the Christian religion, when it gave any countenance to it at all, once more to energetic action, and furnished it with the foil of a cheerful optimism, a mode of thought which removed the living God afar off, and subordinated the religious to the moral. But this opponent succumbed in our century, at least, within the Churches, before the power of the old frame of mind. Whether this triumph of Augustine is guaranteed to last, none but a prophet could tell. It is only certain that the constellation of circumstances in the fray has been favourable to the victor. On the part of the Church no doubt prevails that the Augustinian feeling and type of thought are alone legitimate in Christianity, that they are alone Christian; for the conception of redemption (by God himself), in the sense of regeneration, dominates everything. But we cannot fail to be puzzled when we consider that it cannot by any means be directly deduced from the surest words of Jesus, and that the ancient and Greek Church was ignorant of it. Further, we cannot but be doubtful when we weigh its consequences; for their testimony is not all favourable. A quietistic, I might almost say a narcotic, element is contained in it, or is, at least, imperceptibly associated with it. There is something latent in it which seems to enervate the vital energies, to hinder the exertion of the will, and to substitute feelings for action. Is there no danger in substituting a general consciousness of sin for evident evil tendencies, heartless words and shameful deeds? [126] Is it safe to rely on the uniform operation of Grace, when we are called to be perfect and holy like God? Are all the energies of the Will actually set free, where the soul lives constantly in the mood shown in the “Confessions”? Are fear and hope really phases, necessarily to be superseded by faith and love? Perhaps it is correct to answer all these questions in accordance with the type of thought here considered; but even then a doubt remains. Is it advisable—apart from the variety in men’s temperaments—to present this ideal as the aim at all stages of spiritual development? Here, at least, the answer cannot be doubtful. That which is the last stage reached by the advanced Christian who has passed through a rich experience is a refinement to him who is in process of development. But a refined piety or morality is always pernicious; for it no longer starts at the point of duty and conscience. It deceives regarding our need and its satisfaction. And since it is strong enough to fascinate, and can also be comprehended as a doctrine by an intelligence that is far from advanced, in order, once comprehended, never to pass away again, so it can become dangerous to morality, and therefore also to piety. For, after all, in both these spheres, that only has any value which heightens the power to be and do good; everything else is a poisonous fog. Perhaps, if we consider the matter fairly, no feeling or mood, and no theory of the factors in the religious process, are alone legitimate. As man requires sleep and wakefulness, so also he must, if he is to preserve his moral and religious life in health, alternate between the sense of his freedom and power and that of his bondage and helplessness, between the sense of full moral responsibility and the conviction that he is a favoured child of God. Or is there a way of so grasping Augustine’s type of feeling and thought, that it may fashion faith into the strongest lever of moral energy and action? Are not the difficulties that rise against his type of piety due perhaps just to his not having developed it forcibly and absolutely enough? This question will obtain its answer later on. Here we have to point out that the dissemination of the religious views, peculiar to Augustine, was not in every respect beneficial. They constituted his greatness; they conducted him to the wonderful path he trod; they led him to conceive redemption no longer as a solitary intervention, by means of baptism, in the course of human life, but as the element in which the soul lived—baptismal grace being therefore a continuously operative force. “Personal characteristics” lie beyond the sphere of errors and truths; they may be erroneous, looked at from without, true from within. They may for that very reason be even hurtful as influences, for “when they introduce disproportionately what is foreign, the question arises, how these adventitious peculiarities harmonise with those that are native to the soul, and whether by the very act of mingling they do not produce a sickly condition.” [127] Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Augustine submitted the traditional religious feeling to as thorough-going a revision as is conceivable, and even he who is not in a position to praise it unreservedly will not seek to minimise its benefits. [128] II. No one was further than Augustine from intending to correct the tradition of the Church. If he has done this so emphatically, he was himself merely actuated by the feeling that he was thus assimilating more and more thoroughly the faith of the Church. Having forced his way through scepticism to the truth of the Catholic Church, he regarded the latter as the rock on which his faith was founded. We should misunderstand him were we to blink this fact. He rather sets us reflecting how it was possible for the most vital piety to have a double ground of conviction, inner experience, and external, nay, extremely external, attestation. We can make a still stronger assertion. Augustine first transformed the authority of the Church into a factor in religion; he first expressed pious contemplation, the view of God and self, in such a way that the religious man always found the authority of the Church side by side with sin and grace. [129] Paul and post-apostolic teachers, especially Tertullian, had, indeed, already introduced the Church into the religious relationship itself; [130] but they were not thinking of its authority. When we fix our attention on Augustine’s distinctive type of Christian piety as the foundation of his significance for Church and dogmatic history, we must not only consider the decisive tendency of his doctrine of sin and grace, but we must also review his reception and characteristic revision of traditional elements. For from these his piety, i.e., his sense of God, and sin and grace, obtained the form which is familiar to us as specifically Catholic. In addition to (l) the above-mentioned element of the authority of the Church, there are, if my view is correct, other three; (2) the confusion of personal relationship to God with a sacramental communication of grace; (3) uncertainty as to the nature of faith and the forgiveness of sins; (4) uncertainty as to the significance of the present life. Even in the way he felt and wrote about these things he created new states of feeling; but they appear merely to be modifications of the old; or, rather, he first enabled the old moods fully to understand themselves, in other words, enriched them from the dead material which they brought with them. This exerted in turn a very strong influence on the fundamental feeling—the sense of sin and grace, and first gave it the form which enabled it to take possession of souls, without creating a revolution, or producing a violent breach with tradition. In the sequel we only discuss the fundamental features of these four elements. [131] 1. Augustine introduced the authority of the Church as a religious factor for two reasons. Like the thought of redemption, the significance of the Church seems, on a superficial examination, to have received so sovereign and fixed an impress in the conception formed by the ancient Catholic and Greek Fathers, that any further accentuation of it is impossible. But, if we look more closely, redemption was presented as a solitary intervention, and the significance of the Church was exhausted in the fact that, while it was the presupposition of Christian life and the guarantee of Christian truth, it did not enter into the separate acts in which the religious and moral life ran its spiritual course. Here also Rothe’s saying is true that Christians tacitly “laid their plans to meet the chance that in the end everything might require to be done by men alone.” These “plans” were based since the days of the Apologists on the optimistic conception of the inalienable goodness of human nature, and the demonstrability (clearness and intelligibility) of the Christian religion. The course of a spontaneously moral life was ultimately modified, neither by the doctrine of redemption nor by that of the Church. In both these respects Augustine’s experience had led to wholly different conclusions. His conflict with himself had convinced him of the badness of human nature, and Manichæism had left him in complete doubt as to the foundations and truth of the Christian faith. [132] His confidence in the rationality of Christian truth had been shaken to the very depths, and it was never restored. In other words, as an individual thinker he never gained the subjective certitude that Christian truth and as such everything contained in the two Testaments had to be regarded, was clear, consistent, and demonstrable. [133] When he threw himself into the arms of the Catholic Church, he was perfectly conscious that he needed its authority, not to sink in scepticism or nihilism. [134] For example, nothing but the authority of the Church could remove the stumbling-blocks in the Old Testament. The thousand doubts excited by theology, and especially Christology, could only be allayed by the Church. As regards the former case, allegorical interpretation, of course, helped to get one over the difficulties; but it (as contrasted with the literal which solves everything) did not justify itself; the Church alone gave the right to apply it. The Church guaranteed the truth of the faith, where the individual could not perceive it; that is the new thought whose open declaration proves the thinker’s scepticism, as well as the man’s love of truth. He would not impose upon himself; he would not become the sophist of his faith. Openly he proclaimed it: I believe in many articles only on the Church’s authority; nay, I believe in the Gospel itself merely on the same ground. [135] Thereby the Church had gained an enormous importance, an importance which it was henceforth to retain in Western Catholicism; upon it, an entity above all incomprehensible—for what and where is the Church?—a great part of the responsibility was rolled, which had hitherto to be borne by the individual. Thus henceforth the Church had its part in every act of faith. By this, however, a vast revolution was brought about in the relation to the “faith which is believed” (fides quæ creditur). Acts of faith were, at the same time, acts of obedience. The difficulties were recognised which the Alexandrians overcame by distinguishing between exoteric and esoteric religion, but this distinction was itself rejected. In its place was now openly proclaimed what had long—especially in the West (see ch. I., Scripture and Dogma as Law)—been secretly the expedient of thousands: partial renunciation of independent faith, and the substitution for it of obedience. It is obvious that thus a great body of dogmas, or of the contents of Scripture, was placed beyond the reach of the believing subject, that a wholly different relation to them was introduced, that, in a word, the doctrines of Scripture and the Church obtained a new meaning. Augustine was the father of the conception of implicit faith (fides implicita), by associating with the individual believer the Church, with which he believes and which believes for him, in as far as it takes the place for him in many points of a psychological element of faith, namely, inner conviction. In openly proclaiming this conception, which, as has been said, already lurked in darkness, Augustine, on the one hand, disburdened individual faith, and directed it more energetically to those spheres in which it could rest without difficulties, but, on the other hand, introduced all the evil consequences which spring from faith in authority. [136] However, this championship of faith in authority had an additional root, in the case of Augustine, besides scepticism. Tradition and grace are connected by secret ties. A genius, who was never a sceptic, and who was therefore never possessed by a mania for authority, has confessed: “The dew in which I bathe and find health is tradition, is grace.” Augustine was also led, both as a psychologist and a Christian of living faith, to tradition and therewith to the Church. In breaking with moralism, he broke too with the individualism and atomism of the ancient school. The “mass of perdition” (massa perditionis) was always confronted for him by grace (gratia) as a force working in history. I will not here yet go into his notion of the Church; it is certain that he possessed a lively sense that all great benefits, even communion with God himself, were attached to historical tradition, and it is manifest that religious individualism, as developed by him, was paralleled by and compatible with a conception, according to which the individual was supported by other persons, and by forces in the direction of goodness which he received through a visible medium. Augustine concentrated this correct historical conception in the idea of the Church. It was to him the organism and—for the individual—the womb of grace; it was further the communion of righteousness and love; and he felt this significance of the Church in his most personal piety much more acutely than any one before him. But the sceptic who needs the authority of the Church, and the Christian of quick feeling and sure observation, who perceives and prizes the value of Church communion, do not part company. There has never yet existed in the world a strong religious faith, which has not appealed, at some decisive point or other, to an external authority. It is only in the colourless expositions of religious philosophers, or the polemical systems of Protestant theologians, that a faith is constructed which derives its certitude exclusively from its own inner impulses. These undoubtedly constitute the force by which it exists and is preserved. But are not conditions necessary, under which this force becomes operative? Jesus Christ appealed to the authority of the Old Testament, ancient Christians to the evidence of prophecy, Augustine to the Church, and Luther himself to the written Word of God. Only academic speculation thinks that it can eliminate external authority; life and history show that no faith is capable of convincing men or propagating itself, which does not include obedience to an external authority, or fails to be convinced of its absolute power. The only point is to determine the rightful authority, and to discover the just relationship between external and internal authority. Were it otherwise, we should not be weak, helpless beings. We cannot think too highly of the nobility of human talents; but they are not lofty enough to enable men so to appropriate the sum of all the ideal elements which compose the inner life, that these simply grow with the growth of the soul, or become its product. Above all, the thought of God, the thought of the love of God, can never receive an irrefragable certainty, without being supported by an external authority. It is not a false view of religion that the restless quest of the soul only ceases when there has dawned upon it an authority whose validity is independent of the degree of strength with which its justification is felt within the breast. [137] All this Augustine perceived and expressed. Therefore “the traditional, exclusively authoritative doctrine” of the Church was transformed by him into a conception, according to which the Church is a religious factor. By this, however, the distinctive character of piety itself received a new definition. [138] 2. The perception that religion is the possession of the living God, a personal relationship between the soul and God, is conspicuous in Augustine’s Confessions, but also in other writings by him. That nothing but God himself could give the soul rest and peace is the fundamental note of the Confessions: “Say unto my soul: I am thy salvation.” His great place in the history of piety is bound up with this perception, as we find it attached to Rom. VIII., 31-39. He is to be compared, in this also, to the great Alexandrians, especially Clement. But as Augustine did not merely reach this conclusion by means of a laborious speculation, so it assumed a much more forcible and purer form in his life and works than in theirs. [139] But the sure application of what is simplest in dogma is ever the hardest thing. Augustine found himself confronted by a tradition which taught that men enjoyed intercourse with God through laws and communications of grace; nay, the prevailing tradition was constantly in danger of reducing the latter to the former. In opposition to this, a great advance was at once made by insisting on the distinction between law and gospel, commands and grace. We now perceive that Augustine substantially limited himself to this in his polemical dogmatic writings. That is, he was not in a position to translate into his dogmatic theory the vital perception that God himself, as he appeared in Christ, was the possession of the soul. He substantially left standing the old scheme that God came to man’s assistance, like a benevolent judge with acts of pardon, or like a physician with medicines. In other words, he gave the force of absolute conviction to what had been uncertain, viz., that God operates continuously by a mysterious and omnipotent impartation of grace, i.e., by powers of grace. [140] Thus grace (gratia per Christum) preserved even with him an objective character, and in his controversy with Donatists and Pelagians he completely developed this view of grace in connection with his doctrines of the Church and sacraments. He understood how to harmonise this, in his own feeling and self-criticism, with the conviction that the question involved was the possession of the living God. But as teacher of piety he did not succeed in doing so; indeed, we can say that, just because he laid all emphasis on grace through Christ, while conceiving it to consist in portions or instalments of grace, he was the means of establishing, along with the perception of its importance as beginning, middle, and end, the delusion that grace had an objective character. His age could understand, though with a great effort, his exposition of grace, as something imparted by the sacraments or the Church. It could bring that down to its own level. The magical element which adhered to this conception, the external solidity which the notion of grace received. in the sacrament, the apparent clearness of the view, the possibility of instituting theological computations with sin and grace—all these phases in the Augustinian doctrine of grace were greedily seized. Thus, in making grace the foundation and centre of all Christian theological reflection, it was due to his way of thinking that the living God and the personality of Christ lost ground in the consciousness of the Church he influenced. The believer had to do with the inheritance left by Christ, with what he had gained, with his merit, but not with Christ himself. The love of God was instilled into the soul in portions; but Augustine did not perceive that dogmatic was imperfect, nay, formed a hindrance to religion, as long as the supreme place was withheld from the principle: “Our heart is restless, until it rests in Thee.” The violent agitation which he had himself experienced, the crisis in which the sole question was whether he should or should not find God to be his God, he has extremely imperfectly expressed in the dogmatic theory of his later period. He poured the new wine into old bottles, and was thus partly to blame for the rise of that Catholic doctrine of grace, which is perhaps the most dreadful part of Catholic dogmatics; for “the corruption of the best is the worst” (corruptio optimi pessima). When a Roman Catholic dogmatist very recently called the doctrine of grace “thorny ground,” this description alone must have sufficed to show every common-sense Christian that the whole treatment of this main article had stumbled on a false path since the days of Augustine. Could there be a sadder admission than this, that reflection on what God grants the soul in Christ leads us among nothing but thorns? And could we conceive a greater contrast than that which exists between the sayings of Jesus and the Catholic doctrine of grace? But Protestantism, in its actual form, need not boast of having surmounted this pernicious Catholic doctrine. As it rests on the Augustinian doctrine of grace in the good sense of the term, and is distinguished thereby as Western Christianity from Eastern, it also bears the greatest part of the burden of this doctrine, and is therefore subject to the same dangers as Catholicism. It runs the risk of concealing the personal Christ by grace and the sacraments, of hedging in the living God through grace itself, and of setting up calculations about grace which make an account out of what is freest and holiest, and either dull the soul or leave it in unrest. But as Augustine knew, for his part, by what his soul lived, and was able to testify to it in words that lived, and, indeed, in some of his discussions also doctrinally, he exerted a powerful influence in this respect, too, on posterity. He became the father not only of the Catholic doctrine of grace, but also of that mysticism which was naturalised in the Catholic Church, down to the Council of Trent, indeed, till the Jansenist controversy. In more than a hundred passages of his works, above all by his Christian personality, he incited men to gain a life with God, within which they apprehended the personal God in grace. We may here also recall his doctrine of predestination. One of its roots indisputably grew out of the thought of the supremacy of personal relationship to God. It was understood, too in this way, wherever it was the means in after-times of obviating the pernicious consequences of the Church doctrine of grace and sacraments. But there can undoubtedly be no mistake, that wherever Augustine threw into the background his questionable doctrine of grace, he at once also incurred the danger of neutralising Christ’s general significance. According to him, Christ’s work referred to, and exhausted itself in the forgiveness of sins. But, as we shall see in what immediately follows, forgiveness did not bestow all that the Christian requires for salvation. Therefore the doctrine of grace was relatively independent of the historical Christ. This danger of conceiving positive grace without reference to Christ, or of connecting it with him only in the form of esthetic observations, continued to exert an influence. Luther, who started from Augustinianism, first overcame it, in as far as, in his relation to God, he only thought of God at all as he knew him in Christ. Augustine was prevented from doing so by his religious philosophy, and also his Biblicism, both of which had established independent claims upon him. Thus it happened that he influenced the piety of Western Christians by a doctrine of grace which met their lower inclinations, as well as by a promulgation of the immediateness of the religious relationship which failed to do justice to Christ’s significance as mirror of God’s fatherly heart and as the eternal mediator. In the latter as the former case, he set his seal on and gave vitality to elements which existed in the traditional doctrine only as dead material or stunted germs. 3. Augustine shared with the whole of contemporary Christendom the thought, held to be all-important, that a time would come when at the judgment-seat of Christ “every one would receive in accordance with his actions”; and none will impugn the Christian character of this thought. But he went a step further, and also accepted the conception of merits current in the Church from the days of Tertullian and Cyprian. He did not get beyond the idea that in the final decision merits could alone be considered. He reconciled this principle, however, with his doctrine of grace, by teaching that God crowned his gifts (munera) in crowning our merits (merita). [141] This seemed to correspond to both considerations, and the certainty with which this conception established itself in the Church appeared to guarantee that the correct view had now been reached. But, first, the question arises whether the ambiguity of the reconciliation did not contribute to its being received; secondly, it cannot fail to surprise us that there is not a word about faith in the principle. We are once more at a point where Augustine, in reforming the prevailing piety, paid it a very considerable tribute. He certainly expressed the importance and power of faith in a striking and novel fashion. He who disregards the formulas, but looks to the spirit, will everywhere find in Augustine’s works a stream of Pauline faith. None before him but his teachers Victorinus and Ambrose, in some of their expositions, had used similar language. Numerous passages can be cited in which Augustine extolled faith as the element in which the soul lives, as beginning, middle, and end of piety. But in the sphere of dogmatic reflection Augustine spoke of faith with extreme uncertainty, and, indeed, as a rule, not differently from his predecessors. Different points meet here. Firstly, it was simply the power of tradition which prevented him from perceiving more in faith than the act of initiation. Secondly, Scriptural texts led him to the assumption that something else than faith, namely, habitual goodness (righteousness), must finally fall to be considered at the divine tribunal. Thirdly and lastly, he limited the significance of the forgiveness of sins. The last point is in his case the most paradoxical, but here the most important. He for whom the supreme thing was the certainty of possessing a God, and who called to his whole period: “You have not yet considered of how great weight sin is” (nondum considerasti, quanti ponderis sit peccatum), never realised the strict relation that exists between faith and forgiveness, nor could explain clearly that the assurance of forgiveness is life and salvation. At this point the moral element suddenly entered with sovereign power into religious reflection. It is as if Augustine had here sought to escape the quietistic consequences of his doctrine (see above), and, in his inability to deduce positive virtue from faith in forgiveness of sin, turned from faith to works. Or was he prevented by the remnants of religious philosophy and cosmology that still clung to his theory of religion from perceiving absolutely that religion is bound up in faith in forgiveness of sins? [142] Or, again, is this perception itself erroneous and untenable, one that paralyses the power of moral exertion? We do not intend to examine these questions here. The fact is that Augustine conceived faith to be a preliminary stage, because he regarded forgiveness of sins as preliminary. If we look closely, we find that in his dogmatic theory sin was not guilt, but loss and infirmity. The very man who strove for, and found, a lasting relationship with God, was not capable of reproducing and stating his experience correctly in the shape of doctrine. He came back to the customary moralistic view, in so far as in his doctrine of grace he thought not of enmity to God, but the disease of sin, not of divine sonship, but of the restoration of a state in which man was rendered capable of becoming good, i.e., sinless. Therefore faith was merely something preliminary, and it is this that makes it so difficult to define Augustine’s conception of the forgiveness of sins. It appears to have been really identical with the external and magical idea of his predecessors, with the exception that he had a firmer grasp of the forgiveness being an act of God, on which the baptised might constantly rely. But his reflection rarely took the form of regarding assurance of forgiveness as something whereby the soul receives energy and wings. He substantially never got beyond the impression that something was actually swept away by it, though that was indeed the gravest of facts, sin. The impossibility of carrying out this conception will always, however, leave a latent doubt. In spite of his new feeling, Augustine, for this reason, moved entirely in the lines of the old scheme when he sought to supplement and to build upon forgiveness of sin, and looked about him for a positive force which was required to take its place alongside of the negative effect. This he found in love. It was not in faith, but only in love, that he could recognise the force that really changed a man’s nature, that set him in a new relationship. But then, in spite of the empirical objections that confronted him, he did not doubt that love could be infused like a medicine. Certain that God alone effects everything, he transferred to love the conception applicable to faith (trust)—that it ceases to be itself where it is felt to be other than an assimilative organ (organon lēptikon)—as if love could also be as simply regarded as a gift of God through Christ (munus dei per Christum). The result of these reflections is that Augustine held that the relation of the pious soul to God was most appropriately described as a gradually advancing process of sanctification. To this he believed he could reduce all legitimate considerations, the fundamental importance of faith, the conception of (sacramental) grace as beginning, middle, and end, the need of positive forces capable of changing man’s state, the view that only the just could be saved, and that no one was righteous whose works were not perfect, i.e., the necessity of merits, etc. He believed that he had found a means of adjusting the claims of religion and morality, of grace and merits, of the doctrine of faith and eschatology. Omnipotent love became for him the principle that connected and supported everything. Faith, love, and merit were successive steps in the way to final salvation, and he has impressed this view on the Catholic Church of after times, and on its piety up to the present day. It is the ancient scheme of the process of sanctification leading to final salvation, but so transformed that grace acts upon all its stages. Excellent and—for many stages of development—appropriate as this conception appears, yet it cannot be mistaken that in it Augustine lagged behind his own experience, and that against his will he subordinated the religious sphere to moral goodness; for this subordination was by no means precluded by the equation “our merits, God’s gifts” (nostra merita, dei munera). Where merits play a part there is a failure to understand that there is a relationship to God which is maintained mid weakness and sin, as well as in misery and death. [143] Of this even Augustine had a presentiment, and he therefore also imparted to the Church, to which he transmitted his doctrine of faith, love, and merit, germs of a conception which could not but be fatal to that doctrine. They are not only included in his doctrine of predestination, but at least as much so in every passage of his writings, where he gives voice to the confession, “To me to cling to God is a good thing.” In this avowal the religious possession and moral goodness coincide, and are referred to God, their source. But even apart from this, his idea of love: “in this life also virtue is nothing but loving what ought to be loved; good affections make a good character,” [144] was so excellent and forcible that all criticism looks like impudent coxcombry. Nevertheless, we must criticise it from the standpoint of the gospel. We have already remarked above that Augustine’s doctrine of infused love is indifferent to the work of the historical Christ. Therefore he had a two-fold Christology: on the one hand, Christ is God, a member of the Trinity (unus ex trinitate); on the other hand, the chosen man, who was as much under grace as we are. All that leads us back ultimately to the fact that he under-estimated the significance of the forgiveness of sins and of the publican’s faith: that his piety was not yet simple enough. [145] 4. Finally, it is to be pointed out that Augustine in his reformation of Christian piety did not disturb its character as a preparation for the next world. He could have changed nothing here without wounding the Christian religion itself; for the view of some Protestants, that Christianity can be transformed into a religion of this world, is an illusion. Augustine lived as much in the future world as Justin and Irenæus. His eschatological reflections are inexhaustible, and if, as will be shown afterwards, he set aside a few of the older ideas, yet that affords no standard of the whole trend of his piety. He only intensified the pessimistic view of this life, this mortal life and living death (vita mortalis, mors vitalis), by his doctrine of sin. “What flood of eloquence would ever suffice to portray the tribulations of this life, to describe this wretchedness, which is, as it were, a kind of hell in our present existence? Verily, the new-born infant comes to our mortal light, not laughing but weeping, and by its tears prophesies in some fashion, even without knowing it, to what great evils it has come forth. . . . A heavy yoke burdens all the children of Adam from the day of birth to that of burial, when they return to the common mother of all. . . . And the sorest thing of all is that we cannot but know how, just by the grievous sin committed in Paradise, this life has become a punishment to us.” [146] Just as he has retained the pessimistic view of our present life, he has also described blessedness as the state of the perfect knowledge of God. He has done so in one of his earliest writings, De vita beata, and he substantially adhered to it. But the very perception, that misery was not a mere fatality, but was incurred by guilt, and the confidence that grace could make man free and happy even upon this earth, exerted a certain counterpoise. He undoubtedly does not call the present life of the Christian “joy of felicity,” “but comfort of misery,” and declares that to be an extremely false felicity which is devised by men who seek here another happiness than that entertained by hope. [147] But in not a few passages he yet speaks of the joy in God which creates blessedness even here. He seldom obeyed this feeling. For that very reason he found this life in itself objectless, and there are only a few indications, especially in the work, De civitate dei, in which he tried to show that a kingdom of Christ may be built up even in this world, and that the just, who live by faith, constitute it, and have a present task to perform (see also De trinit. I., 16 and 21). Speaking generally, he propagated the feeling shown in ancient Christian eschatology in every respect, and prepared the ground for monachism. If he seems to have instigated the development of the Catholic Church in its tendency to masterful rule over this world, yet external circumstances, and the interpretation they produced of his work “De civitate dei,” contributed much more to the result than any intentional impulses given by him. [148] Where, however, there has developed in Catholicism in after times a strong sense of the blessedness which the Christian can receive even in this state, it has always assumed a mystical and ecstatic character. This is a clear proof that in any case this life was disregarded; for the mystical feeling of blessedness, even as Augustine knew it, really exists, by means of an excess, already in the future state. _________________________________________________________________ In the preceding pages the attempt has been made to show how the piety was constituted in which Augustine lived, and which he transmitted to posterity. It is extraordinary difficult to understand it aright; for experience and tradition are interwoven in it in the most wonderful way. Yet we cannot understand him as teacher of the Church, until we have formed our estimate of him as reformer of piety; for, besides Scripture and tradition, his theories have their strongest roots in the piety that animated him. They are in part nothing but states of feeling interpreted theoretically. But in these states of feeling there gathered round the grand experience of conversion from bondage to freedom in God all the manifold religious experiences and moral reflections of the ancient world. The Psalms and Paul, Plato and the Neoplatonists, the Moralists, Tertullian and Ambrose, we find all again in Augustine, and, side by side with the new psychological view constructed by him as disciple of the Neoplatonists, we come once more upon all the childish reflections and absolute theories which these men had pursued. _________________________________________________________________ [110] Of the immense literature about Augustine, the following works may be mentioned (with special regard to the Pelagian controversy): The critical investigations of the Benedictines in their editions of Aug.’s Opp., and the controversies over his doctrine of grace in the 16th to the 18th century; the works of Petavius, Noris (Hist. Pelag.), Tillemont, Gamier, Mansi, Hefele; Bindemaun, Der hl. Aug. 3 vols., 1844-69; Böhringer, Aur. Aug., 2 ed., 1877-78; Reuter, August. Studien, 1887 (the best of later works); A. Dorner, Aug., sein theol. System and seine relig.-philos. Anschauung, 1873; Loofs, “Augustinus in the 3 Ed. of the R.-Encykl. v. Hauck, Vol. II., pp. 257-285 (an excellent study, with an especially good discussion of the period to 395). Comprehensive expositions in Ritter, Baur, Nitzsch, Thomasius, Schwane, Huber (Philos. der KVV.), Jul. Müller (L. v. d. Sünde), Dorner (Entwicklgesch. d. L. v. d. Person Christi), Prantl (Gesch. d. Logik), Siebeck (Gesch. d. Psychologie), Zeller; see esp. Eucken, Die Lebenanschauungen der grossen Denker (1890) p. 258 ff.—Naville, S’ Aug., Etude sur le devéloppement de sa pensée jusqu à 1’époque de son ordination (Geneva 1872). Bornemanu, Aug.’s Bekenntnisse, 1888; Harnack, Aug.’s Confessionen, 1888; Boissier, La conversion de S. Aug. in the Rev. de deux mondes, 1888 Jan.; Wörter, Die Geistesentw. d. h. Aug. bis zu seiner Taufe, 1892; Overbeck, Aug. u. Hieronymus in the Histor. Ztschr. N. F., Vol. VI.; Feuerlein, Ueb. d. Stellung Aug.’s in the Kirchen und Culturgesch. Histor. Ztschr., XXII., p. 270 ff. (see Reuter, l.c. p. 479 ff.); Ritschl, Ueber die Methode der ältesten D.-G. in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol., 1871 (idem, Rechtfert. and Versöhn. Vol. I., Gesch. d. Pietismus Vol. I.); Kattenbusch, Studien z. Symbolik in the Stud. u. Krit. 1878; Reinkens, Geschichtsphilos. d. hl. Aug., 1866; Seyrich, Geschichts philosophie Aug.’s, 1891; Gangauf, Metaphys. Psychologie d. hl. Aug., 1852; Bestmann, Qua ratione Aug. notiones philosophiæ græca, etc., 1877; Lœsche, De Aug. Platonizante 1880; Ferraz, Psychologie de S. Aug., 1862; Nourissou, La philosophic de S. Aug., 2 Ed., 1866; Storz, Die Philosophie des hl. Aug., 1882; Scipio, Des Aurel. Aug. Metaphysik, etc., 1886; Melzer, Die august. Lehre vom Causalitätsverhältniss Gottes zur Welt, 1892 Melzer, Augustini et Cartesii placita de mentis humanæ sui cognitione, 1860; Siebeck, Die Anfänge der neueren Psychologie in the Ztschr. f. Philos., 1888, p. 161 ff.; Kahl, Der Primat des Willens bei Aug., 1886; Schütz, August. non esse ontologum, 1867; Heinzelmann, Aug.’s Ansichten vom Wesen der menschlichen Seele, 1894; van Endert, Gottesbeweis in d. patrist. Zeit, 1869; Clauren, Aug. s. script. interpret., 1822; Gangauf, Des hl. Aug. Lehre von Gott dem Dreieinigen, 1865; Nitzsch, Aug.’s Lehre v. Wunder, 1865. Walch, De pelagianismo ante Pelagium, 1783; idem. hist. doctrinæ de peccato orig., 1783; Horn, Comm. de sentent. patrum . . . de pecc. originali, 180:; Dunker, Pecc. orig. et act., 1836; Krabinger, Der angebliche Pelagianismus d. voraugust. VV. Tüb Quartalschr., 1853; Kuhn, Der vorgebl. Pelagianismus d. voraugust. VV., in same journal; Walch, Ketzerhistorie, Vols. IV. and V.; Wiggers, Pragmat. Darstell. des Augustinismus u. Pelagianismus, 2 Vols., 1831-33 (the continuation on Semipelagianism in the Zeitschr. f. d. histor. Theol., 1854 ff.); Rottmanner, Der Augustinismus, 1892; Jacobi, Die Lehre des Pelagius, 1842; Leutzen, de Pelagianorum doctrinæ principiis, 1833; Jul. Muller, Der Pelagianismus in the deutsche Zeitschr f. christl. Wissensch., 1854, Nr. 40 f.; Wörter, Der Pelagianismus, 1866; Klasen, Die innere Entw. des Pelagianism., 1882; Geffcken, Histor. semipelag., 1826; Wiggers, de Joanne Cass., 1824-25; Wörter, Prosper v. Aquitanien über Gnade and Freiheit, 1867; Landerer, Das Verhältniss v. Gnade u. Freiheit in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol., Vol. II., 1857; Luthardt, Die L. v. freien Willen u. s. Verh. z. Gnade, 1863; Kihn, Theodor. v. Mopsueste, 1880; Ritschl, Expos. doctr. S. Aug. de creat., peccato, gratia, 1843; Zeller, Die Lehre des Paulus u. Augustinus v. d. Sünde u. Gnade in ihrem Verhältniss z. protest. Kirchenlehre (Theol. Jahrbb., 1854, p. 295 ff.); Ehlers, Aug. de origine mali doctrina, 1857; Nirschl, Ursp. u. Wesen des Bösen nach Aug., 1854; Hamma, Die L. des hl. Aug. über die Concupiscenz in the Tüb. Quartalschr., 1873; Voigt, Comment. de theoria August., Pelag., Semipelag. et Synergist., 1829; Kühner, Aug.’s Anschauung v. d. Erlösungsbedeutung Christi, 1890; Dieckhoff, Aug.’s L. v. d. Gnade in the Mecklenb. Theol. Ztschr. I., 1860; Weber, Aug. de justificatione doctr.; Ernst, Die Werke der Ungläubigen nach Aug., 1871; Beck, Prädest.—Lehre in the Stud. u. Krit., 1847, II.; Koch, Autorität Aug.’s in der Lehre v. der Gnade u. Prædest., in the Tüb. Quartalschr., 1891, p. 95 ff.; H. Schmidt, Origenes u. Aug. als Apologeten, in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theologie, Vol. VIII.; Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 1886.—On Aug.’s doctrine of Baptism see Reuter, Kliefoth (Liturg. Abhandl.), and Höfling. Wilden, Die L. d. hl. Aug. v. Opfer d. Eucharistie, 1864; Ginzel L. d. hl. Aug. v. d. Kirche, in the Tüb. Theol. Quartalschr., 1849; Köstlin, Die kathol Auffass. v. d. Kirche, etc., in the deutschen Zeitschrift f. christl. Wissensch., 1856, Nr. 14; H. Schmidt, Aug.’s L. v. d. Kirche, in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol., 1861 (id. Die Kirche, 1884); Seeberg, Begriff d. christl. Kirche, Pt. I., 1885; Roux, Diss. de. Aug. adversario Donatistarum, 1838; Ribbeck, Donatus and Augustinus, 1858. [111] August. Ep. 155 c. 12. 13. “Virtutes ita crescent et perficientur, ut te ad vitam vere beatam, quæ nonnisi æterna est, sine ulla dubitatione perducant: ubi jam nec prudenter discernantur a bonis mala, quæ non erunt, nec fortiter tolerentur adversa, quia non ibi erit nisi quod amemus, non etiam quod toleremus, nec temperanter libido frenetur, ubi nulla ejus incitamenta sentiemus, nec juste subveniatur ope indigentibus, ubi inopem atque indignum non habebimus. Una ibi virtus erit, et idipsum erit virtus præmiumque virtutis, quod dicit in sanctis eloquiis homo qui hoc amat: Mihi autem adhærere deo bonum est. Hæc ibi erit plena et sempiterna sapientia eademque veraciter vita jam beata. Perventio quippe est ad æternum ac summum bonum, cui adhærere est finis nostri boni. Dicatur hæc et prudentia quia prospectissime adhærebit bono quod non amittatur, et fortitudo, quia fermissime adhærebit bono unde non avellatur, et temperantia, quia castissime adhærebit bono, ubi non corrumpatur, et justitia, quia rectissime adhærebit bono, cui merito subjiciatur. Quamquam et in hac vita virtus non est nisi diligere quod diligendum est. Quid autem eligamus quod præcipue diligamus, nisi quo nihil melius invenimus? Hoc deus est, cui si diligendo aliquid vel præponimus vel æquamus, nos ipsos diligere nescimus. Tanto enim nobis melius est, quanto magis in illum imus, quo nihil melius est. Imus autem non ambulando, sed amando. Ad eum non pedibus ire licet, sed moribus. Mores autem nostri, non ex eo quod quisque novit, sed ex eo quod diligit, dijudicari solent. Nec faciunt bonos vel malos mores, nisi boni vel mali amores. Pravitate ergo nostra a rectitudine dei longe fuimus. Unde rectum amando corrigimur, ut recto recti adhærere possimus.” [112] Compare my lecture “Augustin’s Confessionen,” 1888. See also Essay by G. Boissier in the Rev. de deux mond., 1 Jan., 1888. [113] In what follows the fundamental tendency is alone characterised. It is not to be denied that in some cases evangelical features were more marked. [114] After the exposition given in Vols. I.-IV., and the indications in Chap. II. of this vol., I need not adduce further evidence that for the ancient Church the grace of God in Christ was exhausted in the gifts received in baptism. All other grace, which was hoped for, was beset with uncertainty. [115] Read the striking avowals of II. Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, Tertullian, the confessions of monks, and of the great theologians of the fourth century who were prevented by circumstances from becoming monks. [116] Rothe says very truly, Kirchengesch., II., p. 33: “Men secretly distrusted inevitably the presupposed purely supernatural and accordingly magical operation of God’s grace, and they therefore arranged their plans on the eventuality that in the end everything might still require to be done by man alone.” [117] De pecc. mer. et remiss., II., 5; De spiritu et lit., 22; see Confessions, X, 40, and De dono persever., 53. The substance is given already in Soliloq., I., 5: “Jube quæso atque impera quidquid vis, sed sana et aperi aures meas.” Enchir., 117, “Fides impetrat quod lex imperat.” [118] De fide et symb., 19. [119] De Trinit., XIII., 4: “Felices esse volumus et infelices esse nolumus, sed nec velle possumus.” De civit. dei, XI., 26: “Tam porro nemo est qui esse se nolit, quam nemo est qui non esse beatus velit. Quo modo enim potest beatus esse, si nihil sit?” [120] Confess., I., 5: Quis mihi dabit acquiescere in te? Quis mihi dabit ut venias in cor meum et inebries illud, ut obliviscar mala mea et unum bonum amplectar te? Quid mihi es? Miserere, ut loquar. Quid tibi sum ipse, ut amari te jubeas a me, et nisi faciam irascaris mihi et mineris ingentes miserias? . . . Dic mihi per miserationes tuas, domine deus meus, quid sis mihi. Dic animæ meæ: Salus tua ego sum. Sic dic, ut audiam. Ecce aures cordis mei ante te, domine; aperi eas, et dic animæ meæ: Salus tua ego sum. Curram post vocem hanc et apprehendam te. Noli abscondere a me faciem tuam; moriar ne moriar, ut eam videam. Angusta est domus animæ meæ quo venias ad eam; dilatetur abs te. Ruinosa est; refice eam. Habet quæ offendant oculos tuos; fateor et scio; sed quis mundabit eam? aut cui alteri præter te clamabo? [121] Enchir., 64: “Excepto baptismatis munere ipsa etiam vita cetera, quantalibet præpolleat fœcunditate justitiæ, sine peccatorum remissione non agitur.” [122] We will afterwards discuss how far Augustine failed to surmount this uncertainty and unrest, owing to the reception of popular Catholic elements into his piety. [123] The most important caution—that Augustine fitted his new form of feeling and reflection into the old—will be discussed later on; it has been only mildly suggested in the above exposition. [124] I need hardly guard against the misapprehension that I represent faith as not having been of fundamental importance to the Pre-Augustinian and Greek Church. The question here is as to the feeling and disposition of the Christian. The Pre-Augustinian Christian regarded faith as the self-evident presupposition of the righteousness which he had to gain by his own efforts. [125] It need not be objected that this is the doctrine of Scripture. In the first place, Scripture has no homogeneous doctrine; secondly, even Paul’s range of thought, to which Augustine’s here most closely approximates, does not perfectly coincide with it. But we must undoubtedly recognise that the Augustinian reformation was quite essentially a Pauline reaction against the prevailing piety. Augustine, to some extent, appears as a second Marcion, see Vol. I., p. 136, Reuter, August. Studien, p. 492 “We can perhaps say that Paulinism, which the growing Catholic Church only half-learned to understand, which Marcion attempted to open up in an eccentric one-sidedness that the Church, in its opposition to him, had all but rejected, was exploited by our Church Father for the second time, in such a way, that much hitherto belonging to popular Catholicism was remodelled.” This is followed by a parallel between Augustine and Marcion. The triad “Faith, Love, and Hope,” is Pauline, and occurs in almost all Church Fathers; but Augustine first made it fruitful again (perhaps he learned here from Jovinian). [126] I say nothing of the arrogant habit of those who, because they agree with the Augustinian doctrine, not only openly credit themselves with possessing “positive” Christianity, but also denounce their opponents as “half-believers.” For this nonsense Augustine is not responsible, and it only made its appearance in the nineteenth century. It is only in our days that evangelical Christendom has permitted itself to be terrorised by people who bear the deeper “knowledge of sin” as a motto, and with this shield guard themselves against the counsel to be just and modest. [127] Compare Goethe in his wonderful reflections on Sterne, Werke (Hempel’s Ed.), Vol. XXIX., p. 749 f. [128] Augustine’s Exposition of the Church I neither count one of his greater achievements, nor can I hold it to be the central idea which determines what is essential to him. [129] Reuter says excellently (l.c., p. 494): “Many phases of the hitherto traditional and authoritative doctrine were transformed by him into really religious factors; he effected a revolution in the religious consciousness in those circles in and upon which he worked, yet without seeking to endanger its Catholicity.” Cf., also p. 102 (71-98): “Much, but very far from all, that belonged to popular Catholicism was revised by Augustine.” [130] See De bapt., 6: “Cum antem sub tribus et testatio fidei et sponsio salutis pignerentur, necessario adicitur ecclesiæ mentio, quoniam ubi tres, id est pater et filius et spiritus sanctus, ibi ecclesia, quæ trium corpus est.” De oral., 2: “Pater . . . filius . . . ne mater quidam ecclesia præteritur. Si quidem in filio et patre mater recognoscitur, de qua constat et patris et filii nomen.” De monog., 7: “Vivit enim unicus pater noster et mater ecclesia.” All this is based on the Symbol. [131] We don’t need now to say for the first time that Augustine was as closely as possible united to the past of the Church in all else (Scripture, doctrinal confession, etc.). Besides this, he shared with his contemporaries in the conception of the Church’s science in its relation to faith, and had on many points as naïve ideas as they of the limits and scope of knowledge. If he possessed the faculty of psychological observation in a much higher degree than his predecessors, he retained the absolute type of thought, and, with all the sceptical reserve which he practised in single questions, he further developed that conglomerate of cosmology, ethics, mythology, and rationalism, which was then called science. So also he was implicated in all the prejudices of contemporary exegesis. It is to be added, finally, that, although less credulous than his contemporaries, he was, like Origen, involved in the prejudices, the mania for miracles, and the superstition of the age. His works, sober in comparison with many other elaborations of the epoch, are yet full of miracles. A slave learns to read in answer to prayer, in three days, and without human help; and we have divine judgments, miracle-working relics, etc. He certainly made the absurd indispensable to the Church. Since Augustine’s time there are wholly absurd Church doctrines, whose abandonment would not be without danger, because they have excited, or at least have supported, like the vine-pole, the virtues of conscientiousness, strictness in self-examination, and tenderness of soul (see, e.g., his doctrine of original sin). But like all absurdities, they have also excited blind fanaticism and fearful despair. [132] See Reuter, l.c. p. 490 f. [133] The few tendencies to this conception, which are also found in his works, are always combined with that neutralising of the historical displayed by the Apologists. We cannot here discuss more fully this undercurrent in his writings. But it is important to show clearly the main current, namely, that scholars were by no means confident of the rationality of the Catholic faith. The attacks made by heathens and Manichæans had shaken them. Some speak, partly with self-satisfaction, partly with pain, of “modern” doubts of the faith of the Church. But these doubts are so far from modern that the creation of the Augustinian and mediæval authority of the Church is their work. That ecclesiasticism is so powerful, nay, has become a dogmatic quantity, is due to the defective morality of Christians in the second and third centuries, and to their defective faith in the fourth and fifth. The distinction between Justin and Augustine is in this respect much greater than that between Augustine and a Christian of the sixteenth or nineteenth centuries. [134] See the middle Books of the Confessions, e.g., VI., 11: “Scripturæ sanctæ, quas ecclesiæ catholicæ commendat auctoritas.” VI., 7: “Libris tuis, quos tanta in omnibus fere gentibus auctoritate fundasti. . . . Non audiendos esse, si qui forte mihi dicerent; unde scis illos libros unius veri et veracissimi dei spiritu esse humano generi ministratos? idipsum enim maxime credendum erat.” VI., 8: “Ideoque cum essemus infirmi ad inveniendam liquida ratione veritatem, et ob hoc nobis opus esset auctoritate sanctarum litterarum, jam credere cœperam nullo modo te fuisse tributurum tam excellentem scripturæ per omnes jam terras auctoritatem, nisi et per ipsam tibi credi et per ipsam te quæri voluisses. Jam enim absurditatem quæ me in illis litteris solebat offendere, cum multa ex eis probabiliter exposita audissem, ad sacramentorum altitudinem referebam.” See also the treatise De utilit. credendi, and, in general, the writings against Manichæism. [135] Contra Ep. Manichæi, 5: “Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae (ecclesiæ) commoveret auctoritas.” Innumerable parallels exist, especially in the writings against Manichæism, but also elsewhere. [136] Reuter, who by no means over-values the importance of the idea of the Church in Augustine, declares (p. 499): “By Augustine the idea of the Church was rendered the central power in the religious state of mind and ecclesiastical activity of the West in a fashion unknown to the East.” “Central power” is almost saying too much (see Theol. Lit.-Zeit., 1887, No. 15). [137] This argument has been very badly received by some critics, but I find nothing to change in it. Perhaps it will help to its being understood if I add that the spiritual man is directly conscious of the Divine Spirit as his Lord—who constrains him to obedience, even where he himself does not perceive the inner authority—but the non-spiritual require some sort of intervening authority, whether consisting in persons, or a book, or Church. But in both cases we are dealing with a controlling power, whose authority rises above one’s own individuality and knowledge. I hope that in disclosing this state of the case I am safe from being (wrongly) understood to draw a fixed line between the spiritual and non-spiritual. Throughout it is only a question of the proportion in which the apocalyptic and mediated elements appear and are connected in personal religion. Even the spiritual man who holds direct communion with God has, as history shows, extremely seldom, perhaps never entirely, freed himself from all intermediate authority; on the contrary, he has clung to it firmly, in spite of his intercourse with the Deity. This is not the place to explain this phenomenon; but personal religion is not shown to be valueless by its being proved that its authorities are not sound (against Baumann, Die Grundfrage der Religion, 1895, p. 22 f.). The important point is what the pious man has derived from his authorities. [138] It is only to a superficial observer that Eastern Christians seem to cling more strongly to the Church than Western. In the East the historical course of events welded ecclesiasticism and nationality into one, and the internal development made the cultus of the Church the chief matter. But what other rule does the Church play in personal piety than being the scene of Christian life, the teacher of doctrine, and the administrator of the mysteries? All these are, in fact, presupposed conditions; in the West, on the contrary, the Church has thrust itself into all relations and points of contact of the pious soul to God and Christ, as far as the Augustinian tradition is accepted. [139] Let anyone read attentively the Confessions B. VII. and VIII., as also the writings and epistles composed immediately after his conversion, and he will find that Augustine’s Neoplatonism had undoubtedly a share in giving him this perception. But he was brought to it in a much higher degree by his inner experience, and the reading of Paul and the Psalms. The Psalmists’ piety was revived in him (see esp. Confess., IX., 8-12). His style even was modelled on theirs. In Clement of Alex. and Origen, Neoplatonic speculation, on the contrary, prevailed. Even in the most glorious of their expositions, in which the power of feeling is clearly conspicuous, we cannot forget the speculative path by which they thought they had attained to the possession of God. [140] The final ground of this view with Augustine consists naturally in the fact that he never wholly got rid of the old Catholic scheme that the ultimate concern of Christianity was to transform human nature physically and morally for eternal life. He took a great step forward; but he was not able to give clear expression to the Pauline thought that the whole question turned on forgiveness of sins and sonship to God, or to frame all dogmatics in harmony with it. [141] See e.g., Confess. IX. 34: “Quisquis tibi enumerat vera merita sua, quid tibi enumerat nisi munera tua.” Ep. 194, n. 19: “cum deus coronat merita nostra, nihil aliud coronat quam munera sua.” De gratia et lib. arb., 15: “Dona sua coronat deus non merita tua . . . si ergo dei dona sunt bona merita tua, non deus coronat merita tua tamquam merita tua sed tamquam dona sua.” De gestis Pelag., 35: “Redditur quidem meritis tuis corona sua, sed dei dona sunt merita tua.” De trinit., XIII., 14: “Et ea quæ dicuntur merita nostra, dona sunt eius,” etc. XV. 21: “Quid animam faciet beatam, nisi meritum suum et præmium domini sui? Sed et meritum ejus gratia est illius, cujus, præmium erit beatitudo ejus.” De prædest. sanct., 10. For this very reason the fundamental principle holds good, that grace is not granted secundum merita nostra. [142] In his 177th letter, e.g. (Ad Innocent., c. 4), he expressly declares that it is an error to say that gratia is liberum arbitrium or remissio peccatorum. [143] But, besides, the final and supreme question as to assurance of salvation is not less misunderstood. [144] Et in hac vita virtus non est nisi diligere quod diligendum est; faciunt boni amores bonos mores. [145] It has seemed necessary to concede to Augustine’s conception of sanctification that it had the merit of correcting the quietistic phase that clung dangerously to his doctrine of grace. But, on a closer inspection, we find that love did not certainly mean to him the exemplification of morality in serving our neighbour, but sentiments, or such works of love, as owed their value to reflex action at least as strongly as to philanthropy. Here again, in very many expositions, he did not advance beyond the old Catholic Christians, or Cyprian and Ambrose; man attends best to his own interests by means of caritas, and pleases God in divesting himself of what is worldly. [146] See also the thrilling description, De civitat, XIX., 4. [147] In his Soliloquies, one of his earliest writings, he awards felicity to the soul that perceives God here below. But in his Retractations, I., 4, he says expressly, “Nec illud mihi placet, quod in ista vita deo intellecto jam beatam esse animam (in Soliloquiis) dixi, nisi forte spe.” In general, Augustine at a later date disavowed many arguments in his works written immediately after his conversion; nay, even in his Confessions, in which he is disposed to describe his conversion as instantaneous, he has admitted in one important sentence how imperfect his Christian thought was at that time: IX. 7, “Ibi (in Cassiciacum) quid egerim in litteris, jam quidem servientibus tibi, sed adhue superbiæ scholam tanquam in pausatione anhelantibus, testantur libri disputati cum præsentibus (libr. c. Academ.—de beata vita—de ordine) et cum ipso me solo (Soliloquia) coram te; quæ autem cum absente Nebridio, testantur epistolæ”). But our judgment must here be divided. What was written earlier was undoubtedly in many respects less complete, less churchly, more Neoplatonic; but on the other hand it was more direct, more personal and determined to a smaller degree by regard for the Catholicism of the Church. Yet he was already determined to have nothing to do with a felicity of inquiry and seeking; but only saw it in its possession (Adv. Acad. lib., I.). [148] On Augustine’s pessimistic and eschatological tendency, his view of the secular and clerical life, as also the efforts to surmount the popular Catholic conception, see Reuter, l.c., Studie VI. We return briefly to these subjects further on. _________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER IV. THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF AUGUSTINE AS TEACHER OF THE CHURCH. _________________________________________________________________ The ancient Church before Augustine only possessed a single great dogmatic scheme, the Christological. Augustine also knew it and made use of it; but in inserting it into a greater and more living group, he deprived it of its original meaning and object. It has been said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven; we may maintain of Augustine that he did the same for dogmatics, by separating it from speculations about the finite and infinite, God the Logos and the creature, mortal and immortal, and connecting it with questions as to moral good, freedom, sin, and blessedness. Goodness became for him the point on which turned the consideration of blessings; moral goodness (virtue) and the possession of salvation were not merely to occupy corresponding positions, but to coincide (ipsa virtus et præmium virtutis). If we may use a figure, we can say that Augustine formed into one the two centres of popular Catholic theology, the renewing power of redemption and the free effort to attain virtue; of the ellipse he made a circle—God, whose grace delivers the will and endows it with power to do what is good. In this is comprehended his significance in the history of the Christian religion. He did not, however, vindicate the new portion consistently, but built the old into it. Indeed, in the new cathedral erected by him, the old building formed, as it were, the holy of holies, which is seldom entered. When we seek to determine what has been accomplished by an ancient Church theologian as teacher of the Church, we must examine his expositions of the Symbol. We possess several by Augustine. It is extremely instructive to compare the earliest (De fide et symbolo, A.D. 393) with one of the latest (De fide, spe et caritate, A.D. 421, or later). In the former Augustine is still substantially a theologian of the ancient Church. The questions discussed by him are the same as were then dealt with, in both halves of the Church, in the Symbol, and are suggested by its language. Even the manner in which he discusses them is but slightly distinguished from the customary one. Finally, the polemic is the one that was usual: Arians, Manichæans, Apollinarians, Pneumatomachoi occupy the foreground; the last named especially are very thoroughly refuted. On the other hand, Augustine’s characteristics declare themselves even in this early exposition. [149] Thus we have, above all, his love of truth and frankness in the sections on the Holy Spirit, and his sceptical reserve and obedient submission to Church tradition. Further, in the Christology we find his characteristic scheme “Christ invested in man” (Christus indutus in homine), as well as the strong emphasis laid on the humility of Christ contrasted with pride (superbia). Compare, besides, sentences like the following. Chapter V I.—“Since he is only-begotten he has no brothers; but since he is first-begotten, he has deigned to name all those his brothers who after and through his headship are born again into the grace of God through the adoption of sons.” Or (Chapter XI.): “Our Lord’s humility was lowly in his being born for us; to this it was added that he deigned to die for mortals.” Or (Chapter XIX.): “The writers of the Divine Scriptures declare that the Holy Spirit is God’s gift in order that we may believe that God does not bestow a gift inferior to himself.” Or (ibid.): “No one enjoys that which he knows, unless he also loves it . . . nor does anyone abide in that which he apprehends unless by love.” [150] But if Augustine had died before the Donatist and Pelagian controversies, he would not have been the dogmatist who changed the whole scheme of doctrine; for it was these controversies that first compelled him to reflect on and review what he had long held, to vindicate it with all his power, and to introduce it also into the instruction of the Church. But since it had never entered his mind that the ancient doctrinal tradition, as attached to the Symbol, could be insufficient, [151] since it had still less occurred to him to declare the Symbol itself to be inadequate, it was a matter of course to him that he should make everything which he had to present as religious doctrine hinge on that Confession. In this way arose the characteristic scheme of doctrine, which continued to influence the West in the Middle Ages; nay, on which the Reformed version is based—a combination of ancient Catholic theology and system with the new fundamental thought of the doctrine of grace, forced into the framework of the Symbol. It is evident that by this means a mixture of styles arose which was not conducive to the transparency and intelligibility of doctrine. But we have not only to complain of want of clearness, but also of a complexity of material which, in a still higher degree than was the case in the ancient Catholic Church, necessarily frustrated the demand for a closely reasoned and homogeneous version of religious doctrine. We are perhaps justified in maintaining that the Church never possessed in ancient times another teacher so anxious as Augustine to think out theological problems, and to secure unity for the system of doctrine. But the circumstances in which he was placed led to him above all others necessarily confusing that system of doctrine, and involving it in new inconsistencies. [152] The following points fall to be considered. 1. As a Western theologian, he felt that he was bound by the Symbol; but no Western theologian before him had lived so much in Scripture, or taken so much from it as he. The old variance between Symbol and Scripture, [153] which at that time indeed was not yet consciously felt, was accordingly intensified by him. The uncertainty as to the relation of Scripture and Symbol was increased by him in spite of the extraordinary services he had rendered in making the Church familiar with the former. [154] The Biblicism of later times, which afterwards took up an aggressive attitude to the Church in the West, is to be traced back to Augustine; and the resolute deletion of Scriptural thoughts by an appeal to the authority of the Church’s doctrine may equally refer to him. [155] If we are asked for the historical justification of pre-reformers and reformers in the West, in taking their stand exclusively on Scripture, we must name Augustine; if we are asked by what right such theologians have been silenced, we may refer similarly to Augustine; but we can in this case undoubtedly go back to the authority of Tertullian (De præscr. hær.). 2. On the one hand, Augustine was convinced that everything in Scripture was valuable for faith, and that any thought was at once justified, ecclesiastically and theologically, by being proved to be Biblical—see his doctrine of predestination and other tenets, of which he was certain simply because they were found in the Bible. By this principle any unity of doctrine was nullified. [156] But, on the other hand, Augustine knew very well that religion was a practical matter, that in it faith, hope, and love, or love alone, were all-important, and that only what promoted the latter had any value. Indeed he advanced a considerable step further, and approximated to the Alexandrian theologians: he ultimately regarded Scripture merely as a means, which was dispensed with when love had reached its highest point, and he even approached the conception that the very facts of Christ’s earthly revelation were stages beyond which the believer passed, whose heart was possessed wholly by love. [157] This latter point—which is connected with his individualistic theology, but slightly influenced by the historical Christ—will be discussed below. It is enough here to formulate sharply the inconsistency of making Scripture, on the one hand, a source, and, on the other, a means. [158] —a means indeed which is finally dispensed with like a crutch. [159] The mystics and fanatics of the West have given their adhesion to the last principle, advancing the inner light and inner revelation against the written. Now Augustine, in his excellent preface to his work “De doctrina Christiana,” has undoubtedly, as with a flash of prophetic illumination, rejected all fanatical inspiration, which either fancied it had no need at all of Scripture, or, appealing to the Spirit, declared philological and historical interpretation to be useless. But yet he opened the door to fanaticism with his statement that there was a stage at which men had got beyond Scripture. Above all, however, he created the fatal situation, in which the system of doctrine and theology of the Western Church are still found at the present day, by the vagueness which he failed to dispel as to the importance of the letter of Scripture. The Church knows, on the one hand, that in the Bible, so far as meant for faith, the “matter” is alone of importance. But, on the other hand, it cannot rid itself of the prejudice that every single text contains a Divine and absolute direction, a “revelation.” Protestant Churches have in this respect not gone one step beyond Augustine; Luther himself, if we compare his “prefaces” to the New Testament, e.g., with his position in the controversy about the Lord’s Supper, was involved in the same inconsistency as burdened Augustine’s doctrinal structure. 3. Augustine brought the practical element to the front more than any previous Church Father. Religion was only given to produce faith, love, and hope, and blessedness itself was bound up in these virtues bestowed by God, or in love. But the act of reform, which found expression in the subordination of all materials to the above intention, was not carried out by him unalloyed. In retaining the old Catholic scheme, knowledge and eternal life (aphtharsia) remained the supreme thoughts; in pursuing Neoplatonic mysticism, he did not cast off the acosmic view that regarded all phenomena as transient, and all that was transient as figurative, retaining finally only the majesty of the concealed Deity; in despising the present life, he necessarily also depreciated faith and all that belonged to the present. Thus, his theology was not decided, even in its final aims, by one thought, and he was therefore unable really to carry out his doctrine of grace and sin in a pure form. As the intellectualism of antiquity, of course in a sublimated form, was not wholly superseded by him, his profoundest religious utterances were accompanied by, or entwined with, philosophical considerations. Often one and the same principle has a double root, a Neoplatonic and a Christian (Pauline), and accordingly a double meaning, a cosmological and a religious. Philosophy, saving faith, and Church tradition, disputed the leading place in his system of faith, and since Biblicism was added to these three elements, the unity of his type of thought was everywhere disturbed. 4. But apart from the intention, the execution contains not only inconsistencies in detail, but opposite views. In his conflict with Manichæism and Donatism, Augustine sketched a doctrine of freedom, the Church, and the means of grace, which has little in common with his experience of sin and grace, and simply conflicts with the theological development of that experience—the doctrine of predestinating grace. We can positively sketch two Augustinian theologies, one ecclesiastical, the other a doctrine of grace, and state the whole system in either. 5. But even in his ecclesiastical system and his doctrine of grace, conflicting lines of thought meet; for in the former a hierarchical and sacramental fundamental element conflicts with a liberal, universalist view inherited from the Apologists; and in the doctrine of grace two different conceptions are manifestly combined, namely, the thought of grace through (per, propter) Christ, and that of grace emanating, independently of Christ, from the essential nature of God as the supreme good and supreme being (summum bonum, summum esse). The latter inconsistency was of greatest importance for Augustine’s own theology, and for the attitude of Western theology after him. The West, confessedly, never thoroughly appropriated the uncompromising Eastern scheme of Christology as a statement of saving faith. But by Augustine the relation of the doctrine of the two natures (or the Incarnation) to that of salvation was still further loosened. It will be shown that he really prepared the way much more strongly for the Franciscan feeling towards Christ than for Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and that, in general, as a Christologian—in the strict sense of the term—he bequeathed more gaps than positive material to posterity. But in addition to this antithesis of a grace through Christ and without Christ, we have, finally, in Augustine’s doctrine of sin a strong Manichæan and Gnostic element; for Augustine never wholly surmounted Manichæism. From our exposition up to this point—and only the most important facts have been mentioned—it follows that we cannot speak of Augustine having a system, nor did he compose any work which can be compared to Origen’s peri archōn. Since he did not, like the latter, boldly proclaim the right of an esoteric Christianity, but rather as Christian and churchman constantly delayed taking this liberating step, [160] everything with him stands on one level, and therefore is involved in conflict. [161] But it is “not what one knows and says that decides, but what one loves”; he loved God, and his Church, and he was true. This attitude is conspicuous in all his writings, whether it is the Neoplatonist, the earlier Manichæan, the Pauline Christian, the Catholic Bishop, or the Biblicist, that speaks, and it lends to all his expositions a unity, which, though it cannot be demonstrated in the doctrines, can be plainly felt. Therefore, also, the different movements that started or learned from him, were always conscious of the complete man, and drew strength from him. He would not have been the teacher of the future if he had not stood before it as a Christian personality who lent force and weight to every word, no matter in what direction it led. As preacher of faith, love, and the dispensation of grace, he has dominated Catholic piety up to the present day. By his fundamental sentiment: “Mihi adhærere deo bonum est,” as also by his distinction between law and gospel, letter and spirit, and his preaching that God creates faith and a good will in us, he called forth the evangelical Reformation. [162] By his doctrine of the authority and means of grace of the Church, he carried forward the construction of Roman Catholicism; nay, he first created the hierarchical and sacramental institution. By his Biblicism he prepared the way for the so-called pre-reformation movements, and the criticism of all extra-Biblical ecclesiastical traditions. By the force of his speculation, the acuteness of his intellect, the subtlety of his observation and experience, he incited, nay, partly created, scholasticism in all its branches, including the Nominalistic, and therefore also the modern theory of knowledge and psychology. By his Neoplatonism and enthusiasm for predestination he evoked the mysticism as well as the anti-clerical opposition of the Middle Ages. [163] By the form of his ideal of the Church and of felicity, he strengthened the popular Catholic, the monachist, state of feeling, domesticating it, moreover, in the Church, and thereby rousing and capacitating it to overcome and dominate the world as contrasted with the Church. Finally, by his unique power of portraying himself, of expressing the wealth of his genius, and giving every word an individual impress, by his gift of individualising and self-observation, he contributed to the rise of the Renaissance and the modern spirit. These are not capricious combinations, but historical facts: [164] the connecting lines that lead back to him, can everywhere be clearly demonstrated. But where, then, in the history of the West is there a man to be compared to him? Without taking much to do with affairs—Augustine was Bishop of a second-rate city, and possessed neither liking nor talent for the rôle of an ecclesiastical leader or practical reformer—by the force of his ideas he influenced men, and made his life permeate the centuries that followed. _________________________________________________________________ It has been attempted to depict Augustine’s significance as Church teacher, by dividing absolutely the various directions in which his thought moved, and by giving separate accounts of the Neoplatonist, the Paulinist, the earlier Manichæan, and the Catholic Bishop. [165] But it is to be feared that violence is done him by such an analysis. It is safer and more appropriate, within the limits of a history of dogma, to keep to the external unity which he has himself given to his conceptions. In that case his Enchiridion ad Laurentium, his matured exposition of the Symbol, presents itself as our best guide. This writing we mean to bring forward at the close of the present chapter, after preliminary questions have been discussed which were of supreme importance to Augustine, and the controversies have been reviewed in which his genius was matured. We shall, in this way, obtain the clearest view of what Augustine achieved for the Church of his time, and of the revolution he evoked. It is a very attractive task to centralise Augustinian theology, but it is safer to rest content with the modest result of becoming acquainted with it, in so far as it exerted its influence on the Church. One difficulty meets us at the very outset which can not be removed, and went on increasing in after times. What portion of Augustine’s countless expositions constituted dogma in his own eyes, or became dogma at a later period? While he extended dogma to an extraordinary extent, he at the same time sometimes relaxed, sometimes—as regards ancient tradition—specifically stiffened, the notion to be held of it. The question as to the extent of dogmas was neither answered, nor ever put precisely, in the West, after the Donatist and Pelagian controversies. In other words, no necessity was felt for setting up similarly express positive statements in addition to the express refutations of Pelagians, Donatists, etc. But the necessity was not felt, because Churchmen possessed neither self-confidence nor courage to take ecclesiastical action on a grand scale. They always felt they were Epigones of a past time which had created the professedly adequate tradition. This feeling, which was still further accentuated in the Middle Ages, was gradually overcome by the Popes, though solely by them. Apart from a few exceptions, it was not till the Council of Trent that dogmas were again formed. Till then the only dogmas were the doctrines contained in the Symbols. Next these stood the catalogues of heretics, from which dogmas could be indirectly deduced. This state of matters induces us to present the doctrine of Augustine as fully as possible, consistently with the design of a text-book. Many things must here be brought forward from his works which bore no fruit in his own time, but had a powerful influence on the course of doctrinal development in the following centuries, and came to light in the dogmas of Trent. [166] In what follows we shall proceed (1) to describe Augustine’s fundamental view, his doctrines of the first and last things; [167] for they were fixed when he became a Catholic Christian; (2) and (3) we then describe his controversies with Donatists and Pelagians, in which his conception of faith was deepened and unfolded; and (4) we expound his system of doctrine by the help of the Enchiridion ad Laurentium. _________________________________________________________________ [149] The foundation of Augustine’s religious characteristics can be best studied in the writings that are read least, namely in the tractates and letters written immediately after his conversion, and forming an extremely necessary supplement to his Confessions (see above, p. 92, note 2). In these writings he is not yet at all interested in Church dogmatics, but is wholly absorbed in the task of making clear to himself, while settling with Neoplatonism, the new stage of religious philosophical reflection and inner experience, in which he finally found rest (see De vita beata, Adv. Academ., Soliloquia, De ordine, and the Epistles to Nebridius). The state of feeling expressed by him in these work, never left him; but it was only in a later period that he gave it its dogmatic sub-structure. In consequence of this, as is proved even by the Confessions and also the Retractations, he himself lost the power of rightly estimating those writings and the inner state in which he had found himself in the first years after his conversion. But he never lost the underlying tone of those first fruits of his authorship: “Rest in the possession of God,” as distinguished from the unrest and unhappiness of a seeking and inquiry that never reach their aim, or the essentially Neoplatonic version of the loftiest problems (see e.g., De ordine II., 11 ff., “mala in ordinem redacta faciunt decorem universi”; the same view of evil is still given in De civit., XI., 18). Those writings cannot be more fully discussed in a history of dogma. [150] “Secundum id, quod unigenitus est, non habet fratres; secundum id autem quod primogenitus est, fratres vocare dignatus est omnes qui post ejus et per ejus primatum in dei gratiam renascuntur per adoptionem filiorum.” “Parva erat pro nobis domini nostri humilitas in nascendo; accessit etiam ut mori pro mortalibus dignaretur.” “Divinarum scripturarum tractatores spiritum sanctum donum dei esse prædicant, ut deum credamus non se ipso inferius donum dare.” “Eo quod quisque novit non fruitur, nisi et id diligat . . . neque quisquam in eo quod percipit permanet nisi dilectione.” [151] He undoubtedly noticed, and with his love of truth frankly said, that the Church writers gave throughout an insufficient statement of the grace of God; but he contented himself with the plea that the Church had always duly emphasised grace in its prayers and institutions. See prædest. sanct., 27: “Quid opus est, ut eorum scrutemur opuscula, qui prius quam ista hæresis (Pelagianorum) oriretur, non habuerunt necessitatem in hac difficili ad solvendum quæstione versari? quod procul dubio facerent, si respondere talibus cogerentur. Unde factum est, ut de gratia dei quid sentirent, breviter quibusdam scriptorum suorum locis et transeunter adtingerent, immorarentur vero in eis, quæ adversus inimicos ecclesiæ disputabant, et in exhortationibus ad quasque virtutes, quibus deo vivo et vero pro adipiscenda vita æterna et vera felicitate servitur. Frequentationibus autem orationum simpliciter apparebat dei gratia quid valeret; non enim poscerentur de deo quæ præcipit fieri, nisi ab illo donaretur ut fierent.” He himself had indeed learned from experience in his struggle with the Manichæans, that the defence of truth has to be regulated by the nature of the attack. When he was twitted by his opponents with what he had formerly written about freewill against the Manichæans, he appealed to the claims of advancing knowledge, as well as to the duty of offering resistance both to right and left. He thus saw in the earlier Church teachers the defenders of the truth of the Church against fatalism, Gnosticisim, and Manichæism, and from this standpoint explained their attitude. [152] It is self-evident that for this reason dogma, i.e., the old Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and Christology, necessarily became less impressive. Reuter’s objection (l.c. p. 495) rests on an incomprehensible misunderstanding. [153] See on this and on what follows, Vol. III., pp. 203 ff., 207 ff. [154] The attempts to define their relationship, e.g., in Book I. of the treatise De doctrina Christiana, are wholly vague, and indeed scarcely comprehensible. The “substance” of Scripture is to form the propositions of the Rule of Faith; but yet every sentence of Scripture is an article of faith. [155] After his conversion Augustine was firmly of opinion that nothing stood in Scripture that contradicted the doctrine of the Church; he was not so certain that the interpretation of Scripture must follow the authority of tradition. Yet what a profusion of “dangerous” ideas would have been evolved from the Bible by his rich and acute genius if once he had freed his intellect from the fetters of obedience! The perception that no less than everything would have been doubtful, that a thousand contradictions would have taken the place of a unanimous doctrine, certainly helped in determining him not to shake the bars of his prison. He felt he would never be able to escape, but would be buried by the ruins of the collapsing edifice. Hence the principle declared in De nat. et grat. 22, that we must first submit to what stands in Scripture, and only then ask “quomodo id fieri potuerit.” What a difference from Origen! [156] See Vol. II., 331, n. 3. [157] De doctr. Christ. I., 34: an extremely noteworthy exposition, which, so far as I know, has very few clear parallels in Augustine’s works, but forms the background of his development. [158] See the details in “De doctr. Christiana” copied in Vol. III., p. 203, n. 2, of this work. [159] De doctr. Christ., 35-40, especially c. 39, “Therefore a man who depends on faith, hope, and love, and holds by them invincibly, only needs Scripture to instruct others.” Scripture even only offers patchwork; but a man may rise to such perfection even in this life as no longer to require the patchwork. [160] Tendencies in this direction are found everywhere; but they were never more than tendencies. [161] It is one of Reuter’s chief merits that he has proved the impossibility of constructing a system from Augustine’s thought, and of removing the inconsistencies that occur in it. [162] See the testimonies to Augustine of the Reformers and their confessional writings; yet the difference that still existed was not unknown to them. [163] Even the Anti-Gregorian party in the Middle Ages frequently appealed to Augustine. It was possible to find in him welcome statements as to the meaning of the Empire, the possibility of correcting Councils, and, generally, anti-hierarchical passages. [164] Compare Reuter, Studie VII. [165] It is unmistakable that there are three planes in Augustine’s theological thoughts, Neoplatonic mysticism (without means of grace, without the Church, nay, in a sense, even without Christ), Christological soteriology, and the plane of the authority and sacraments of the Church. Besides these, rationalistic and Manichæan elements have to be taken into account. [166] Reuter also recognises (p. 495 f., note) that Augustine held the contents of the Symbol alone to be dogma. But we have here to remember that the most elaborate doctrine of the Trinity and Christology were evolved from the Symbol, and that its words “sancta ecclesia” and “remissio peccatorum” contained theories from which equally far-reaching dogmas could be formed, or heretics be convicted. Even Cyprian refuted the Novatians from the Symbol, and Augustine used it against the Pelagians. A peculiar difficulty in the way of discussing Augustine in the history of dogma consists further in the fact that he created countless theological schemes, but no dogmatic formulas. He was too copious, too earnest, and too sincere to publish catch-words. [167] Augustine was the first dogmatist to feel the need of considering for himself the questions, which we are now accustomed to treat in the “prolegomena to dogmatics.” The Alexandrians undoubtedly attempted this also; but in their case formal and material, original and derived, were too much intertwined. Nor did they advance to the last problems of psychology and the theory of perception. Enchir., 4: “Quid primum, quid ultimum, teneatur, quæ totius definitionis summa sit, quod certum propriumque fidei catholicæ fundamentum.” (Questions by Laurentius.) _________________________________________________________________ 1. Augustine’s Doctrines of the First and Last Things. [168] It has been said of Fiesole that he prayed his pictures on to the walls. It can be maintained of Augustine that his most profound thoughts regarding the first and the last things arose out of prayers; for all these matters were contained for him in God. If the same can be said of innumerable mystics down to the private communities of Madame de Guyon and Tersteegen, it is true of them because they were Augustine’s disciples. But more than anyone else he possessed the faculty of combining speculation about God with a contemplation of mind and soul which was not content with a few traditional categories, but analysed the states of feeling and the contents of consciousness. Every advance in this analysis became for him at the same time an advance in the knowledge of God, and vice versâ; concentration of his whole being in prayer led him to the most abstract observation, and this, in turn, changed to prayer. No philosopher before or after him has verified in so conspicuous a fashion the profound saying that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Godliness was the very atmosphere of his thought and life. “Piety is the wisdom of man” (Hominis sapientia pietas est, Enchir., 2; De civ. dei XIV., 28). Thus Augustine was the psychological, because he was the theological, genius of the Patristic period. [169] Not unversed in the domains of objective secular knowledge, he yet discarded them more resolutely than his Neoplatonic teachers, to whom he owed much, but whom he far surpassed. “The contents of the inner life lay clearly before Augustine’s eyes as a realm of distinctive objects of perception, outside and independent of sense experience, and he was convinced by his own rich insight that in this sphere quite as genuine knowledge and information, based on inner experience, were to be gained, as by external observation in surrounding nature.” Augustine brought to an end the development of ancient philosophy by completing the process which led from the naïve objective to the subjective objective. [170] He found what had been long sought for: the making of the inner life the starting-point of reflection on the world. [171] And he did not give himself up to empty dreams, but investigated with a truly “physiological psychology” all conditions of the inner life, from its elementary processes up to the most sublime moods; he became, because he was the counterpart of Aristotle, the true Aristotle of a new science, [172] which seems indeed to have forgotten that as a theory of perception, and as inner observation, it originated in the monotheistic faith and life of prayer. He disposed of all that we call the ancient classical temper, the classical conception of life and the world. With the last remains of its cheerfulness and naïve objectivity, he buried for a long time the old truth itself, and showed the way to a new truth of things. But this was born in him amid pains, and it has kept its feature of painfulness. Mohammed, the barbarian, smote into ruins, in the name of Allah, who had mastered him, the Hellenistic world which he did not know. Augustine, the disciple of the Hellenes, completed in the West the long prepared dissolution of this world, in the name of God, whom he had perceived to be the only reality; [173] but he built up a new world in his own heart and mind. [174] However, nothing really perished entirely, because everything was accomplished by a protracted transformation, and, besides, the old Hellenistic world continued in part to exist on the North-East coast of the Mediterranean. It was possible to travel back along the line which had been traced by a millennium down to Augustine, and the positive capital, which Neoplatonism and Augustine had received from the past and had changed into negative values, could also be re-established with a positive force. But something had undoubtedly been lost; we find it surviving in almost none but those who were ignorant of theology and philosophy; we do not find it among thinkers; and that is frank joy in the phenomenal world, in its obvious meaning, and in calm and energetic work. [175] If it were possible to unite in science and in the disposition, the piety, spirituality, and introspection of Augustine, with the openness to the world, the restful and energetic activity, and unclouded cheerfulness of antiquity, we should have reached the highest level! We are told that such a combination is a phantom, that it is an absurd idea. But do we not honour the great minds, who have been granted us since Luther, simply because they have endeavoured to realise the “fancy picture”? Did not Goethe declare this to be his ideal, and endeavour to present it in his own life, in his closing epoch? Is it not in the same ideal that the meaning of evangelical and reforming Christianity is contained, if it is really different from Catholicism? “I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing at all.” [176] In these words Augustine has briefly formulated the aim of his spiritual life. That was the truth [177] for which “the marrow of his soul sighed.” All truth was contained for him in the perception of God. After a brief period of sore doubting, he was firm as a rock in the conviction that there was a God, and that he was the supreme good (summum bonum); [178] [179] but who he was, and how he was to be found, were to him the great questions. He was first snatched from the night of uncertainty by Neoplatonism: the Manichæan notion of God had proved itself to be false, since its God was not absolute and omnipotent. Neoplatonism had shown him a way by which to escape the flux of phenomena, and the mysterious and harassing play of the transient, to reach the fixed resting-point he sought, and to discover this in the absolute and spiritual God (Confess. VI I., 26: “incorporea veritas”). Augustine traversed this ascending path from the corporeal world through ever higher and more permanent spheres, and he also experienced the ecstatic mood in the “excess” of feeling. [180] But at the same time he turned more energetically to those observations for which the Neoplatonists had only been able to give him hints—to his spiritual experience, and psychological analysis. He was saved from scepticism by perceiving that even if the whole of external experience was subject to doubt, the facts of the inner life remained and demanded an explanation leading to certainty. There is no evil, but we are afraid, and this fear is certainly an evil. [181] There is no visible object of faith, but we see faith in us. [182] Thus—in his theory of perception—God and the soul entered into the closest union, and this union confirmed him in his belief in their metaphysical connection. Henceforth the investigation of the life of the soul was to him a theological necessity. No examination seemed to him to be indifferent; he sought to obtain divine knowledge from every quarter. The command to “know thyself” (Gnōthi seauton) became for him the way to God. We cannot here discuss the wealth of psychological discoveries made by him. [183] But he only entered his proper element when he was inquiring into the practical side of spiritual life. The popular conception, beyond which even philosophers had not advanced far, was that man was a rational being who was hampered by sensuousness, but possessed a free will capable at every moment of choosing the good—a very external, dualistic view. Augustine observed the actual man. He found that the typical characteristic of the life of the soul consisted in the effort to obtain pleasure [184] (cupido, amor); from this type no one could depart. It was identical with the striving to get possessions, enjoyment. As the attempt to attain the pleasant it was desire (libido), cupiditas, and was perfected in joy; as resistance to the unpleasant, it was anger (ira), fear (timor), and was completed in sadness (tristitia). All impulses were only evolutions of this typical characteristic; sometimes they partook more of the form of passive impression, sometimes they were more of an active nature, and they were quite as true of the spiritual as of the sensuous life. [185] According to Augustine, the will is most closely connected with this life of impulse, so that impulses can indeed be conceived as contents of the will, yet it is to be distinguished from them. For the will is not bound to the nexus of nature; it is a force existing above sensuous nature. [186] It is free, in so far as it possesses formally the capacity of following or resisting the various inclinations; but concretely it is never free; that never free choice (liberum arbitrium), but is always conditioned by the chain of existing inclinations, which form its motives and determine it. The theoretical freedom of choice therefore only becomes actual freedom when desire (cupiditas, amor) of good has become the ruling motive of the will; in other words, it is only true of a good will that it is free: freedom of will and moral goodness coincide. But it follows just from this that the will truly free possesses its liberty not in caprice, but in being bound to the motive which impels to goodness (“beata necessitas boni”). This bondage is freedom, because it delivers the will from the rule of the impulses (to lower forms of good), and realises the destiny and design of man to possess himself of true being and life. In bondage to goodness the higher appetite (appetitus), the genuine impulse of self-preservation, realises itself, while by satisfaction “in dissipation” it brings man “bit by bit to ruin.” It does not follow, however, from Augustine’s assertion of the incapacity for good of the individual spontaneous will, that the evil will, because it is not free, is also irresponsible; for since the will is credited with the power of yielding to the love of good (amor boni), it is guilty of the neglect (the defect). From this point Augustine, combining the results of Neoplatonic cosmological speculation with the above analysis, now built up his metaphysic, or more correctly, his theology. But since in the epoch in which he pursued these observations, he turned to the asceticism of Catholic monachism, and also studied profoundly the Psalms (and the Pauline epistles), the simple grandeur of his living notion of God exerted a tremendous influence on his speculations, and condensed the different, and in part artificially obtained, elements of his doctrine of God, [187] again and again into the supremely simple confession: “The Lord of heaven and earth is love; He is my salvation; of whom should I be afraid?” By the Neoplatonic speculation of the ascent [of the soul] Augustine reached the supreme unchangeable, permanent Being, [188] the incorporeal truth, spiritual substance, incommutable and true eternity of truth, the light incommutable [189] (incorporea veritas, spiritalis substantia, incommutabilis et vera veritatis æternitas, the lux incommutabilis). Starting with this, everything which was not God, including his own soul, was examined by Augustine from two points of view. On the one hand, it appeared as the absolutely transient, therefore as non-existent; for no true being exists, where there is also not-being; therefore God exists alone (God the only substance). On the other hand, as far as it possessed a relative existence, it seemed good, very good, as an evolution of the divine being (the many as the embodiment, emanating, and ever-returning, of the one). Augustine never tires of realising the beauty (pulchrum) and fitness (aptum) of creation, of regarding the universe as an ordered work of art, in which the gradations are as admirable as the contrasts. The individual and evil are lost to view in the notion of beauty; nay, God himself is the eternal, the old and new, the only, beauty. Even hell, the damnation of sinners, is, as an act in the ordination of evils (ordinatio malorum), an indispensable part of the work of art. [190] But, indeed, the whole work of art is after all—nothing; a likeness, but ah! only a likeness of the infinite fulness of the one which alone exists. How deeply in earnest Augustine was with this acosmic Pantheism, which threatened to degenerate into cosmic Monism, how he never wholly abandoned it, is shown even by the expression “pulchritudo” (beauty) for God, [191] by his doctrine of predestination, which has one of its roots here, and, finally, by the aesthetic optimism of his view of the world which comes out here and there even in his latest writings, [192] and by his uncertainty as to the notion of creation. [193] But the very fact that, as a rule, Augustine was governed by a wholly different temper is a guarantee that the element here obtained was only a grounding to which he applied new colours. He would not have been the reformer of Christian piety if he had only celebrated, albeit in the most seductive tones, [194] that Neoplatonic notion of God, which, indeed, ultimately rested on a pious natural sentiment. The new elements resulted first from the psychological analysis briefly indicated above. He found in man, as the fundamental form of existence, the desire to reach happiness, goods, being, and he could harmonise this desire excellently with his Neoplatonic doctrine. He farther found the desire to obtain an ever higher happiness, and ever loftier forms of good, an inexhaustible and noble longing, and this discovery also agreed with the doctrine. Unrest, hunger and thirst for God, horror and disgust at the enjoyment of lower kinds of good, were not to be stifled; for the soul, so far as it exists, comes certainly from God, and belongs to Him (ex deo and ad deum). But now he discovered a dreadful fact: the will, as a matter of fact, would not what it would, or at least seemed to will. No, it was no seeming; it was the most dreadful of paradoxes; we will to come to God, and we cannot, i.e., we will not. [195] Augustine felt this state along with the whole weight of responsibility; that responsibility was never lessened for him by the view that the will in not seeking God was seeking nothing, that it therefore by self-will was properly “annulling itself until it no longer existed.” Nor was it mitigated for him by the correlative consideration, that the individual will, ruled by its desire, was not free. Rather, from the dread sense of responsibility, God appeared as the good, and the self-seeking life of impulse, which determined the will and gave its motive, constituted evil. The “summum bonum” now first obtained its deeper meaning—it was no longer merely the permanent resting point for disturbed thinkers, or the exhilarating enjoyment of life for jaded mortals: it now meant that which ought to be, [196] that which should be the fundamental motive ruling the will, should give the will its liberty, and therewith for the first time its power over the sphere of the natural, freeing the inexhaustible longing of man for the good from the dire necessity of sinning (misera necessitas peccandi), and accordingly first making that innate longing effectual. In a word, it now meant the good. And thus the notion of the good itself was divested of all accretions from the intellect, and all eudaimonist husks and wrappings. In this contemplation that overpowered him, the sole object was the good will, the moral imperative vitalised, to renounce selfish pleasure. But at the same time he acquired the experience which he himself could not analyse, which no thinker will undertake to analyse, that this good laid hold of him as love, and snatched him from the misery of the monstrous inconsistency of existence. [197] Thereby the notion of God received a wholly new content: the good which could do that was omnipotent. In the one act of liberation was given the identity of omnipotent being and the good, the summum on (supreme being) was holiness working on the will in the form of omnipotent love. This was what Augustine felt and described. A stream of divine conceptions was now set loose, partly given in the old language, but with a meaning felt for the first time, wonderfully combined with the statement of the philosophical knowledge of God, but regulating and transforming it. The Supreme Being (summum esse) is the Supreme Good; He is a person; the ontological defect of creaturely being becomes the moral defect of godlessness of will; evil is here as there negative; [198] but in the former case it is the negation of substance (privatio substantiæ), in the latter that of good (privatio boni), meaning the defect arising from freedom. The good indeed still remains the divine being as fulness of life; but for man it is summed up in the “common morality” which issues from the divine being and divine love. That is, he cannot appropriate it save in the will, which gladly forsakes its old nature, and loves that which dwells above all that is sensuous and selfish. Nothing is good except a good will: this principle was most closely combined by Augustine with the other: nothing is good but God; and love became for him the middle term. For the last and highest point reached in his knowledge was his combination of the thought that “all substance was from God” (omnis substantia a deo) with the other that “all good was” from God (omne bonum a deo). The conception of God as universal and sole worker, shaded into the other that God, just because he is God and source of all being, is also the only author and source of good in the form of self-imparting love. [199] It belongs just as essentially to God to be grace (gratia) imparting itself in love, as to be the uncaused cause of causes (causa causatrix non causata). If we express this anthropologically: goodness does not make man independent of God—that was the old conception—but in goodness the constant natural dependence of all his creatures on God finds expression as a willed dependence securing the existence of the creaturely spirit. The latter only exists in yielding himself, only lives in dying, is only free when he suffers himself to be entirely ruled by God, is only good if his will is God’s will. These are the grand paradoxes with which he contrasted the “monstrous” paradoxes discussed above. But meanwhile there is no mistake that the metaphysical background everywhere shows in the ethical view; it is seen, first, in the ascetic trait which clings to the notion of the good in spite of its simple form (joy in God); secondly, in uncertainty as to the notion of love, into which an intellectual element still enters; thirdly, in the conception of grace (gratia), which appears not infrequently as the almost natural mode of the divine existence. The instruction how to hold communion with God displays still more clearly the interweaving of metaphysical and ethical views, that wonderful oscillation, hesitancy, and wavering between the intellectual and that which lives and is experienced in the depths of the soul. [200] On the one hand, it is required to enjoy God; nay, he is the only “thing” (res) which may be enjoyed, all else may only be used. But to enjoy means “to cling to anything by love for its own sake” (alicui rei amore inhærere propter se ipsam”). [201] God is steadfastly to be enjoyed—the Neoplatonists are reproached with not reaching this. [202] This enjoying is inseparably connected with the thought of God’s “beauty,” and in turn with the sense that he is all in all and indescribable. [203] But, on the other hand, Augustine thrust aside the thought that God was a substance (res) in the interest of a living communion with him. God was a person, and in the phrase “to cleave by love” (“amore inhærere”) the emphasis falls in that case on the love (amor) which rests on faith (fides), and includes hope (spes). “God to be worshipped with faith, hope, and love (“Fide, spe, caritate colendum deum”). [204] Augustine was so strongly possessed by the feeling, never, indeed, clearly formulated, that God is a person whom we must trust and love, that this conviction was even a latent standard in his Trinitarian speculations. [205] Faith, hope, and love had, in that case, however, nothing further to do with “freedom” in the proper sense of the word. They were God’s gifts, and constituted a spiritual relation to Him, from which sprang good resolves (bonum velle) and righteousness (justitia). But, indeed, whenever Augustine looked from this life to eternal life, the possession of faith, love, and hope assumed a temporary aspect. “But when the mind has been imbued with the commencement of faith which works by love, it aspires by a good life to reach the manifestation in which holy and perfect hearts perceive the ineffable beauty whose complete vision is the highest felicity. This is surely what thou requirest, ‘what is to be esteemed the first and the last thing,’ to begin with faith, to be perfected in sight” (Enchir. 5; see De doctr., II. 34 sq.). [206] Certain as it is that the Neoplatonic tendency comes out in this, it is as certain that we have more than a mere “remnant of mystical natural religion”; for the feeling that “presses upward and forward” from the faith in what is not seen, to the seeing of what is believed, is not only the innate germ of religion, but its enduring stimulus. [207] The idea of the world sketched from contemplation of the inner life and the sense of responsibility, which was combined with that of metaphysical cosmological speculation, led finally to a wholly different state of feeling from the latter. The optimism founded on aesthetics vanished before the “monstrum” of humanity which, infirm of will, [208] willed not and did not what at bottom it desired, and fell into the abyss of perdition. They are only a few who suffer themselves to be saved by grace. The mass is a massa perditionis, which death allures. “Woe is thee, thou torrent of human custom! Who shall stop thy course? How long will it be before thou art dried up? and whom wilt thou, O offspring of Eve, roll into the huge and hideous ocean, which even they scarcely overpass who have climbed the tree [the Church]?” [209] The misery of the earth is unspeakable; whatever moves and cherishes an independent life upon it is its own punishment; for he who decreed sins (the ordinator peccatorum) has ordained that every sin judges itself, that every unregulated spirit is its own punishment. [210] But from the beginning the historical Christian tradition penetrated with its influence the sequence of thoughts (on nature and grace), which the pious thinker had derived from his speculations on nature and his spiritual experience. Brought up from boyhood as a Catholic Christian, he has himself confessed that nothing ever satisfied him which did not bear the name of Christ. [211] The description of the years when he wandered in doubt is traversed as with a scarlet cord by the bond that united him with Christ. Without many words, indeed with a modest reserve, he recalls in the Confessions the relation to Christ that had never died out in him, until in VII. 24 f., he can emphasise it strongly. We cannot doubt that even those expositions of his which are apparently indifferent to the Church traditions of Christianity—on the living personal God, the distinction between God and the world, on God as Creator, on grace as the omnipotent principle—were already influenced by that tradition. And we must remember that his intense study of Paul and the Psalms began whenever, having broken with Manichæism, he had been convinced by Neoplatonism that God was a spiritual substance (spiritalis substantia). Even the expositions in the earliest writings which are apparently purely philosophical, were already dominated by the Christian conviction that God, the world, and the Ego were to be distinguished, and that room was to be made for the distinction in mystical speculation. Further, all attempts to break through the iron scheme of God’s unchangeableness (in his active presence in the world) are to be explained from the impression made by Christian history upon Augustine. However, we cannot here take in hand to show how Christ and the Church gradually obtained a fixed fundamental position in his mode of thought. His reply to Laurentius in the Enchiridion, that “Christ is the sure and peculiar foundation of the Catholic faith,” (certum propriumque fidei catholicæ fundamentum Christus est), would have been made in the same terms many years before, and, indeed, though his conceptions of Christ were then still uncertain, as early as about A.D. 387. [212] Christ, the way, strength, and authority, explained for him the significance of Christ. It is very noteworthy that in the Confessions VII., 24 sq., and other passages where he brings the Christian religion into the question as to the first and last things, he does not produce general theories about revelation, but at once gives the central place to Christ and the Church. [213] The two decisive principles on which he laid stress were that the Catholic Church alone introduces us into communion with Christ, and that it is only through communion with Christ that we participate in God’s grace. That is, he is only certain of the speculative conception of the idea of the good, and its real activity as love when it is proclaimed authoritatively by the Church and supported by the conception of Christ. By the conception formed of Christ. Here a new element entered. Augustine supported, times without number, the old Western scheme of the twofold nature (utraque natura), the word and man one person (verbum et homo una persona)—(we may leave unnoticed the rare, inaccurate expressions “permixtio,” “mixtura,” e.g. Ep. 137, I11, 12), the form of God and form of a slave, and he contributed much to fortify this scheme in the West with its sharply defined division between what was done by the human, and what by the divine. But the unusual energy with which he rejected Apollinarianism—from his earliest to his latest writings—is enough to show that his deepest interest centred in the human soul of Jesus. The passages are extremely rare in which he adopts the same interpretation as Cyril of the confession: “the Word became flesh,” and the doctrine of the deification of all human nature by the Incarnation is not represented, or, at any rate, only extremely doubtfully represented, by him. (Passages referring to it are not wholly awanting, but they arc extremely rare.) He rather explains the incarnation of the Word from another point of view, and accordingly, though he has points of contact with Origen, he describes it quite differently from the Greeks. Starting from the speculative consideration, to him a certainty, that it is always the whole Trinity that acts, and that its operation is absolutely invariable, the Incarnation was also a work of the whole Trinity. The Trinity produced the manifestation held to signify the Son (De trin. in many places). The Word (verbum) was not really more closely related than the whole Trinity to the Son. But since the Trinity could not act upon Jesus except as it always did, the uniqueness and power of the Person of Jesus Christ were to be derived from the receptiveness with which the man Jesus met the operatio divina; in other words, Augustine started from the human nature (soul) in his construction of the God-man. The human nature received the Word into its spirit; the human soul, because it acted as intermediary (medians), was also the centre of the God-man. Accordingly, the Word did not become flesh, if that be taken to mean that a transformation of any sort took place, but the divina operatio trinitatis could so work upon the human spirit of Jesus, that the Word was permanently attached to him, and was united with him to form one person. [214] This receptiveness of Jesus was, as in all other cases, caused by the election of grace; it was a gift of God (munus dei), an incomprehensible act of divine grace; nay, it was the same divine grace that forgives us our sins which led the man Jesus to form one person with the Word and made him sinless. The Incarnation thus appeared simply to be parallel to the grace which makes us willing who were unwilling, and is independent of every historical fact. [215] But it was not so meant. While, indeed, it is here again evident, that the conception of the divine grace in Christ was, at bottom, subordinate to predestinating grace, and that the latter was independent of the former, [216] yet Augustine by no means confined himself to dealing with the ultimate grounds of his conceptions. Rather the Incarnation benefited us; the salvation bestowed was dependent on it for us “who are his members” (qui sumus membra ejus). [217] But how far? Where Augustine speaks as a Churchman, he thinks of the sacraments, the powers of faith, forgiveness and love, which were the inheritance left the Church by the God-man (see under). But where he expresses the living Christian piety which actuated him, he had three wholly distinct conceptions by which he realised that Christ, the God-man, was the rock of his faith. [218] The Incarnation was the great proof of God’s love towards us; [219] the humility of God and Christ attested in it breaks down our pride and teaches us that “all goodness is made perfect in humility” (omne bonum in humilitate perficitur); the truth which was eternal is made comprehensible to us in Christ: lying in the dust we can apprehend God who redeems us by revealing himself in our lowliness. Throughout all this we are met by the living impression of Christ’s person, [220] and it is humility, which Paul also regarded as so important, that stands out as its clearest and most weighty attributes. [221] The type of humility exhibited in majesty—this it was that overpowered Augustine: pride was sin, and humility was the sphere and force of goodness. From this he learned and implanted in the Church the new disposition of reverence for humility. The new bias which he thus gave to Christology continued to exert its influence in the Middle Ages, and displayed itself in rays of varying brilliancy and strength; although, as a consequence of the Adoptian controversy, Greek Christology once more entered in force, from the ninth century, and hindered piety from expressing its knowledge clearly in dogma. We now understand also why Augustine attached such value to the human element (homo) in Christ. This was not merely due to a consequence of his theology (see above), but it was in a much higher degree the pious view of Christ that demanded this conception. He could not realise Christ’s humility with certainty in the Incarnation; for the latter sprang from the universal working of God, predestinating grace, and Jesus’ receptiveness; but humility was the constant “habit” of the divino-human personality. Thus the true nature of Jesus Christ was really known: “strength is made perfect in weakness” (robur in infirmitate perficitur). That lowliness, suffering, shame, misery, and death are means of sanctification; nay, that selfless and therefore ever suffering love is the only means of sanctification (“I sanctify myself for them”); that what is great and good always appears in a lowly state, and by the power of the contrast triumphs over pride; that humility alone has an eye wherewith to see the divine; that every feeling in the good is accompanied by the sense of being pardoned—that was the very core of Augustine’s Christology. He, for his part, did not drag it into the region of æsthetics, or direct the imagination to busy itself with separate visions of lowliness. No, with him it still existed wholly on the clear height of ethical thought, of modest reverence for the purport of Christ’s whole life, whose splendour had been realised in humility. “Reverence for that which is beneath us is a final stage which mankind could and had to reach. But what was involved not only in despising the earth and claiming a higher birthplace, but in recognising lowliness and poverty, ridicule and contempt, shame and misery, suffering and death as divine, nay, in revering sin and transgression not as hindrances, but as furtherances of sanctification.” Augustine could have written these words; for no idea was more strongly marked in his view of Christ than that he had ennobled what we shrank from—shame, pain, sorrow, death—and had stripped of value what we desired—success, honour, enjoyment. “By abstinence he rendered contemptible all that we aimed at, and because of which we lived badly. By his suffering he disarmed what we fled from. No single sin can be committed if we do not desire what he despised, or shirk what he endured.” But Augustine did not succeed in reducing this conception of the person of Christ to dogmatic formulas. Can we confine the sun’s ray in a bucket? He held by the old formulas as forming an element of tradition and as expressing the uniqueness of Christ; but to him the true foundation of the Church was Christ, because he knew that the impression made by his character had broken down his own pride, and had given him the power to find God in lowliness and to apprehend him in humility. Thus the living Christ had become to him the truth [222] and the way to blessedness, and he who was preached by the Church his authority. [223] But what is the beatific fatherland, the blessed life, to which Christ is the way and the strength? We have already discussed it (p. 91 f.), and we need only here mention a few additional points. The blessed life is eternal peace, the constant contemplation of God in the other world. [224] Knowledge remains man’s goal; even the notion of the enjoyment of God (fruitio dei), or that other of heavenly peace, does not certainly divert us from it. [225] Knowledge, is, however, contrasted with action, and the future state is wholly different from the present. From this it follows that Augustine retained the popular Catholic feeling that directed men in this life wholly to hope, asceticism, and the contemplation [of God] in worship, for though that can never be attained in this world which the future will bring, yet life here must be regulated by the state which will be enjoyed afterwards. Hence Augustine championed monachism and opposed Jovinian so decidedly; hence he regarded the world in the same light as the ancient Catholic Fathers; hence he valued as highly as they did the distinction between precepts and counsels; hence he never looked even on the highest blessings (munera dei) which we can here enjoy as containing the reality, but only a pledge and similitude; for set in the sphere of the transitory they were themselves transitory; hence, finally, he did not think of the earthly Church when seeking to realise the first and last things, for God alone, constantly seen and enjoyed, was the supreme blessing; and even the divine kingdom, so far as it was earthly, was transitory. But even here much that was new emerged in the form of undercurrents, and the old was modified in many respects, a few details being almost set aside. It is therefore easy to point to numerous dissonances in Augustine’s idea of the goal; but he who does not criticise like an irresponsible critic or impartial logician will admit that he knows no more than Augustine, and that he also cannot do better than alternate between different points of view. Let us pick out the following points in detail. 1. Augustine put an end to the doubt whether virtue was not perhaps the supreme good; he reduced virtues to dependance on God—to grace; see Ep. 155, 12 sq. [226] He, indeed, re-admitted the thought at a new and higher stage—merits called forth by grace, righteousness made perfect by love. But the mood at any rate is changed. 2. Augustine did not follow the lead of the Greek Church: he did not cultivate systematic mysticism with a view to the future state, or regard and treat the cultus as a means by which to anticipate deification. He set aside the elements of physical magic in religious doctrine, and by this means spiritualised the ideas of the other world. The ascetic life of the churchman was to be spiritual and moral. Statements, indeed, are not wholly wanting in his works to the effect that eternal life can be experienced in ecstatic visions in this world; but he is thinking then especially of Biblical characters (Paul), and in the course of his Christian development he thrust the whole conception more and more into the background. 3. Augustine’s profound knowledge of the will, and his perception of the extent to which the latter swayed even knowledge, led to his discovery of the principle, that goodness and blessing, accordingly also final salvation, coincided in the dependance of the will on God. By this means he broke through intellectualism, and a superlative blessing was shown to exist even in this world. “It is a good thing for me to cleave to God.” This “cleaving” is produced by the Holy Spirit, and he thereby imparts love and blessedness to the heart. [227] In presence of the realisation of this blessedness, the antithesis of time and eternity, life and death, disappears. [228] 4. Starting from this, he arrived at a series of views which necessarily exerted a powerful influence on the popular frame of mind. (a) Of the three virtues, graces, by which man clings to God—faith, love, and hope—love continues to exist in eternity. Accordingly, love, unchanging and grateful, connects this world with the next. (b) Thereby, however, the quietism of knowledge is also modified. Seeing is to be nothing but loving; an element of adjustment of all discords in feeling and will is introduced into the notion of blessedness, and although “rational contemplation” (contemplatio rationalis) is always ranked above “rational action” (actio rationalis), a high value is always attached to practical and active love. [229] (c) A higher meaning was now given, not indeed to the earthly world, but to the earthly Church and its peculiar privileges (within it) in this world. The idea of the city of God on earth, formulated long before by others, was yet, as we shall see in the next section, first raised by Augustine into the sphere of religious thought. In front of the Holy of Holies, the first and last things, he beheld, as it were, a sanctuary, the Church on earth, with the blessings granted it by God. He saw that it was a self-rewarding task, nay, a sacred duty, to cherish this sanctuary, to establish it in the world, to rank it higher than worldly ties, and to devote to it all earthly goods, in order again to receive them from it as legitimate possessions. He thus, following, indeed, the impulses given by the Western tradition, also created, if we may use so bold a phrase, a religion of the second order. But this second-order religion, was not, as in the case of the Greeks, the formless creation of a superstitious cultus. It was on the contrary a doctrine which dealt with the Church in its relation to the world as an active and moral power transforming and governing society, as an organism, in which Christ was actively present, of the sacraments, of goodness and righteousness. Ecclesiasticism and theology were meant to be thoroughly united, the former serving the latter, the one like Martha, the other like Mary. [230] They ministered to the same object, and righteousness made perfect by love was the element in which both lived. [231] (d) While the ascetic life remained the ideal for the individual, Augustine modified the popular tendency also in monachism by never forgetting, with all his appreciation of external works (poverty, virginity, etc.), that faith, hope, and charity were alone of decisive importance, and that therefore the worth of the man who possessed these virtues might no longer be determined by his outward performances. He knew, besides, better than anyone else, that external works might be accomplished with a godless heart—not only by heretical monks, where this was self-evident, but also by Catholics, Ep., 78, 79, and, uniting ascetics as closely as possible to the Church, he urged them to engage in active work. Here, again, we see that he broke through the barren system which made blessedness consist in contemplatio rationalis and that alone. This is, in brief, Augustine’s doctrine of the first and last things, together with indications that point to that sphere which belongs though not directly yet indirectly to those things, viz., the equipment and tasks of the Church in our present state. “Doctrine” of the first and last things is really an incorrect expression; for, and this is the supreme thing to be said in closing the subject, it was not to him a matter of “doctrine,” but of the faithful reproduction of his experiences. The most thorough-going modification by Augustine of traditional dogmatic Christianity consisted in his perception “that Christianity is ultimately different from everything called ‘doctrine’” (Reuter, p. 494). The law is doctrine; the gospel is power. The law produces enlightenment; the gospel peace. This Augustine clearly perceived, and thereby set religion in the sphere of a vital, spiritual experience, while he disassociated it from knowledge and inference. He once more, indeed, placed his newly-discovered truth on the plane of the old; for he was a Catholic Christian; but the connection with the past which belongs to every effective reformer need not prevent us from exhibiting his originality. Anyone who seeks to give effect to the “whole” Augustine and the “whole” Luther is suspected of seeking to evade the “true” Augustine and the “true” Luther; for what man’s peculiarity and strength are fully expressed in the breadth of all he has said and done? One or two glorious passages from Augustine should show, in conclusion, that he divested the Christian religion of what is called “doctrine” or “dogma.” “I possess nothing but will; I know nothing but that what is fleeting and transitory ought to be despised, and what is certain and eternal ought to be sought for. . . . If those who flee to thee find thee by faith, grant faith; if by virtue, grant virtue; if by knowledge, grant knowledge. Increase in me faith, hope, love.” “But we say that man’s will is divinely aided to do what is righteous, so that, besides his creation with free-will, and besides the doctrine by which he is taught how he should live, man receives the Holy Spirit in order that there may be created in his mind, even now when he still walks by faith, and not by appearance, the delight in and love of that supreme and unchangeable good which is God; in order that this pledge, as it were, having been given him of the free gift, a man may fervently long to cling to his Creator, and be inflamed with desire to enter into the participation of that true light, that he may receive good from him from whom he has his being. For if the way of truth be hidden, free-will is of no use except for sinning, and when that which ought to be done, or striven for, begins to reveal itself, nothing is done, or undertaken, and the good life is not lived, unless it delights and is loved. But that it may be loved, the love of God is diffused in our hearts, not by free choice emanating from ourselves, but by the Holy Spirit given unto us.” “What the law of works commands by threatening, the law of faith effects by believing. This is the wisdom which is called piety, by which the father of lights is worshipped, by whom every excellence is given, and every gift made perfect. . . . By the law of works God says: Do what I command; by the law of faith we say to God: Grant what thou commandest. . . . We have not received the spirit of this world, says the most constant preacher of grace, but the spirit which is from God, that we may know what things have been granted us by God. But what is the spirit of this world but the spirit of pride? . . . Nor are they deceived by any other spirit, who, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, are not subject to God’s righteousness. Whence it seems to me that he is a son of faith who knows from whom he hopes to receive what he does not yet possess, rather than he who attributes to himself what he has. We conclude that a man is not justified by the letter, but by the spirit, not by the merits of his deeds, but by free grace.” [232] _________________________________________________________________ [168] Augustine taught that it was only possible to obtain a firm grasp of the highest questions by earnest and unwearied independent labour. Herein above all did his greatness consist. [169] Compare with what follows, Siebeck, in the Ztschr. f. Philos. and philos. Kritik, 1888, p. 170 ff. [170] See the Appendix on Neoplatonism, Vol. I., p. 336 ff. [171] The method of the Neoplatonists was still very uncertain, and this is connected, among other things, with their polytheism. It is easy to show that Augustine went so much further in psychology because he was a monotheist. So far as I know we are still, unfortunately, without any investigation of the importance of monotheism for psychology. [172] See the excellent parallel between them in Siebeck, l.c. p. 188 f.: “Among the important personalities of Antiquity two could hardly be found with characters so different as Aristotle and Augustine. In the former we have the Greek, restful and clear, and yet moved by energetic warmth of thought, who gives its purest scientific expression to the Hellenic ideal of the life of the cultured, contentment with the even and constant advance of the life of the thinker, examining the depths and wants of the soul, only in so far as they appear on the surface, in the external nature and garb of the affections, and discussing this whole domain, not properly in order to know the heart, but only for rhetorical purposes. The internal world of the soul is here described and criticised only in so far as it evinces itself in reciprocal action with the external, and in the form it assumes as determined by the co-operation of the latter. For the comprehensive and final problem with Aristotle is the scientific construction and form of the external world in nature and social life. Augustine’s tendency and frame of mind are quite the opposite. The external owes all its importance and value in his eyes to the form it assumes as reflected in the internal. Everything is dominated not by problems of nature and the State and secular ethics, but by those of the deepest wants of mind and heart, of love and faith, hope and conscience. The proper objects and the moving forces of his speculation are not found in the relation of inward to outward, but of inner to innermost, to the sense and vision of God in the heart. Even the powers of the intellect are looked at from a new point of view, owing to the influence exerted on them by the heart and will, and they lose, in consequence, their claim to sole supremacy in scientific thought. The cool analysis made by Aristotle of the external world, which also dissected and discriminated between the states of the soul, as if they were objects that existed externally, disappears in Augustine before the immediate experience and feeling of states and processes of the emotional life; but the fact that he presents them to us with the warmest personal interest in them, entirely prevents us from feeling the absence of the Aristotelian talent of acuteness in analytical dissection. While Aristotle avoids all personal and individual colouring in his views, and labours everywhere to let the matter in hand speak for itself, Augustine, even when bringing forward investigations of the most general purport, always speaks as if only of himself, the individual, to whom his personal feelings and sensations are the main thing. He is a priori certain that they must have a farther reaching meaning, since feeling and wishing are found to be similar potencies in every human heart. Questions of ethics, which Aristotle handles from the standpoint of the relation of man to man, appear in Augustine in the light of the relations between his own heart and that of this known and felt God. With the former the supreme decision is given by clear perception of the external by reason; with the latter, by the irresistible force of the internal, the conviction of feeling, which in his case—as is given in such perfection to few—is fused with the penetrating light of the intellect. . . . Aristotle knows the wants of the inner life only so far as they are capable of developing the life, supported by energetic effort and philosophic equanimity, in and with society. He seems to hold that clear thinking and restfully energetic activity prevent all suffering and misfortune to society or the individual. The deeper sources of dispeace, of pain of soul, of unfulfilled wants of the heart, remain dark in his investigation. Augustine’s significance begins just where the problem is to trace the unrest of the believing or seeking soul to its roots, and to make sure of the inner facts in which the heart can reach its rest. Even the old problems which he reviews and examines in their whole extent and meaning from the standpoint of his rich scientific culture, now appear in a new light. Therefore he can grasp, and, at the same time, deepen everything which has come to him from Hellenism. For Aristotle, everything that the intellect can see and analyse in the inner and outer world constitutes a problem; for Augustine, that holds the chief place which the life of feeling and desire forces on him as a new fact added to his previous knowledge. In the one case it is the calm, theoretical mind; in the other, the conscience excited by the unrest caused by love of God and consciousness of sin, from which the questions spring. But along with this, scientific interest also turned to a wholly novel side of actual life. No wonder that the all-sufficiency of the dissecting and abstracting intellect had its despotism limited. The intellect was now no longer to create problems, but to receive them from the depths of the world of feeling, in order then to see what could be made of them. Nor was it to continue to feel supremacy over the will, but rather the influence to which it was subject from it. The main subject of its reflections was to consist, henceforth, not in the external world, nor in the internal discussed by means of analogy with, and the method of, the external, but in the kernel of personality, conscience in connection with emotion and will. Only from this point might it return, in order to learn to understand them anew, to previous views of the inner and outer life. Aristotle, the Greek, was only interested in the life of the soul, in so far as it turned outward and helped to fathom the world theoretically and practically; Augustine, the first modern man (the expression occurs also in Sell, Aus der Gesch. des Christenthums, 1888, p. 43; I had already used it years ago), only took it into consideration, in so far as reflection upon it enabled him to conceive the inner character of personal life as something really independent of the outer world.” Aristotle and Augustine are the two rivals who contended in the science and tendency of the following centuries. Both, as a rule, were indeed degraded, Aristotle to empty distinctions and categories, and a hide-bound dogmatism, Augustine to a mysticism floating in all conceivable media, having lost the guidance of a sure observation of the inner nature. Even in the Pelagians Augustine energetically opposed Aristotelian rationalism, and his controversy with them was repeated over and over again in after ages. In the history of religion it was a fight between a really irreligious, theologically, labelled morality and religion; for even in its classical form, Aristotelianism is a morality without religion. [173] All Christian Hellenistic thinkers before Augustine were still refined polytheists, or, more correctly, the polytheistic element was not wholly eradicated in their case, seeing that they preserved a part of nature-religion. This is most evident among Origen’s successors. [174] Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört, Die schöne Welt, Mit mächtiger Faust; Sie stürzt, sie zerfällt! Ein Halbgott hat sie zerschlagen! Wir tragen Die Trümmer ins Nichts hinüber Und klagen Ueber die verlorene Schöne. Prächtiger baue sie wieder, In deinem Busen baue sie auf! [175] Compare even the state of feeling of Petrarch and the other Humanists. [176] Soliloq., I. 7. Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino. In the knowledge of God was also included that of the Cosmus, see Scipio, Metaphysik, p. 14 ff. [177] Playing with husks and shells disgusted Augustine; he longed for facts, for the knowledge of actual forces. [178] Augustine became a Manichæan because he did not get past the idea that the Catholic doctrine held God to be the originator of sin. [179] Confess., VII. 16: “Audivi (verba Ego sum qui sum) sicut auditur in corde, et non erat prorsus unde dubitarem; faciliusque dubitarem vivere me, quam non esse veritatem (VI., 5). [180] Suggestions in Confess., VII. 13-16, 23. Here is described the intellectual “exercise” of the observation of the mutabilia leading to the incommutabile. “Et pervenit cogitatio ad id quod est, in ictu trepidantis aspectus. Tunc vero invisibilia tua, per ea quæ facta sunt, intellecta conspexi (this now becomes his dominant saying); sed aciem figere non valui: et repercussa infirmitate redditus solitis, non mecum ferebam nisi amantem memoriam et quasi olfacta desiderantem (quite as in Plotinus) quæ comedere nondum possem,” VIII. 1. But again in his famous dialogue (IX. 23-25), with his mother in Ostia, a regular Neoplatonic “exercise” is really described which ends with ecstasy (attigimus veritatem modice toto ictu cordis”). We afterwards meet extremely seldom with anything of the same kind in Augustine; on the other hand, the anti-Manichæan writings still show many echoes (“se rapere in deum,” “rapi in deum,” “volitare,” “amplexus dei”). Reuter says rightly (p. 472) that these are unusual expressions, only occurring exceptionally. But he must have forgotten the passages in the Confessions when he adds that no instructions are given as to the method to be followed. [181] Confess., VII. 7: “Ubi ergo malum et unde et qua huc irrepsit? Quæ radix ejus et quo semen ejus? An omnino non est? Cur ergo timemus et cavemus quod non est? Aut si inaniter timemus, certe vel timor ipse malum est . . . et tanto gravius malum, quanto non est quod timeamus. Idcirco aut est malum quod timemus, aut hoc malum est quia timemus.” [182] De trinit., XIII. 3: “Cum propterea credere jubeamur, quia id quod credere jubemur, videre non possumus, ipsam tamen fidem, quando inest in nobis, videmus in nobis.” [183] As regards memory, association of ideas, synthetic activity of spontaneous thought, ideality of the categories, a priori functions, “determinant” numbers, synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, etc. Of course all this is only touched on by him; we have, as it were, merely flashes of it in his works; see Siebeck, 1.c. p. 179. He has applied his observations on self-consciousness in his speculation on the Trinity. [184] He meant by this the legitimate striving after self-assertion, after Being, which he attributed to all organic, nay, even to inorganic, things; see De civ. dei, XI., 28. [185] This is the most important advance in perception. [186] See Siebeck l.c. p. 181 f.; Hamma in the Tüb. Theol. Quartalschr., vol. 55, pp. 427 ff. 458; Kahl, Primat des Willens, p. 1 f. Augustine’s psychology of the will is undoubtedly rooted in indeterminism; but in his concrete observations he becomes a determinist. [187] They have all besides a practical object, i.e., they correspond to a definite form of the pious contemplation of the divine, and a definite relation to it (a definite self-criticism). For details of the theology, see Dorner, Augustin, pp. 5-112. [188] In Confess. VII. 16, he could now put the triumphant question: “Numquid nihil est veritas, quoniam neque per finita, neque per infinita locorum spatia diffusa est.” [189] Not common light; “non hoc illa erat; sed aliud, aliud valde ab istis omnibus. Nec ita erat supra mentem meam sicut oleum super aquam, nec sicut coelum super terram, sed superior, quia ipsa fecit me, et ego inferior, quia factus sum ab ea. Qui novit veritatem novit eam, et qui novit eam, novit æternitatem. Caritas novit eam. O æterna veritas, et vera caritas, et cara æternitas! tu es deus meus; tibi suspiro die ac nocte.” (Confess. VII. I6.) Further the magnificently reproduced reflection, IX. 23-25, De Trin. IV. 1. By being, Augustine did not understand a vacuous existence, but being full of life, and he never doubted that being was better than not-being. De civit. dei, XI. 26: “Et sumus et nos esse novimus et id esse ac nosse diligimus.” The triad, “esse, scire, amare” was to him the supreme thing; he never thought of the possibility of glorifying not-being after the fashion of Buddhism or Schopenhauer. [190] We cannot here discuss Augustine’s cosmology more fully (see the works by Gangauf and Scipio). His reflections on life and the gradation of organic and inorganic (“ordo, species, modus”) were highly important to later philosophy and theology, and especially continued to exert an influence in mediæval mysticism. So also the view that evil and good are necessary elements in the artistic composition of the world continued to make its presence actively felt in the same quarter. Yet—as in Augustine—the idea of the privative significance of evil always preponderated. [191] This expression is frequent in all his writings. Even utterances like “;vita vitæ meæ,” etc., have at first an acosmic meaning, but, of course, were given a deeper sense by Augustine. [192] Augustine never lost his optimistic joy in life in the sense of the true life, as is proved in his work, De civit. dei; but in contrasting the moods caused by contemplation of the world—æsthetic joy in the Cosmus, and sorrow over the world perverted by sin—the latter prevailed. Existence never became to Augustine a torment in itself, but that existence did which condemned itself to not-being, bringing about its own ruin. [193] Where Augustine put the question of creation in the form, “How is the unity of being related to plurality of manifestation?” the notion of creation is really always eliminated. But he never entirely gave up this way of putting the question; for, at bottom, things possess their independence only in their manifestation, while, in so far as they exist, they form the ground of knowledge for the existence of God. But besides this, Augustine still asserted vigorously the creatio ex nihilo (“omnes naturæ ex deo, non de deo,” De nat. bon. c. Manich., I.). See note 4, p. 120. [194] He discovered these, and inspired hundreds of mystics after him. We have no right to deny that this contemplative view of being, not-being, and the harmony of being evolving itself in the phenomenal, is also a sphere of piety. [195] We have the most profound description of this state in Confess. VIII, 17-26; Augustine calls it a “monstrum” (monstrous phenomenon). He solves the problem disclosed, in so far as it is capable of solution, not by an appeal to the enslaved will, accordingly not by the “non possumus,” but as an indeterminist by the reflection, “non ex toto volumus, non ergo ex toto [nobis] imperamus.” (21), “I was afraid that Thou mightest soon hear me, and heal me of the sickness of lust, whose satisfaction I wished more than its eradication. . . . And I was deluded, therefore I put off following Thee alone from day to day, because I had not yet seen any certain aim for my striving. And now the day was at hand, and the voice of my conscience exhorted me: ‘Didst thou not say thou wouldst not cast the vain burden from thee, only because the truth was still uncertain? Behold now thou art certain of the truth, but (thou wilt not).’ . . . The way to union with God, and the attainment of the goal, coincide with the will to reach this goal, though, indeed, only with the determined and pure will. . . . And thus during this inner fever and irresoluteness I was wont to make many movements with my body, which can only be performed when the will makes definite resolves, and become impossible if the corresponding limbs are wanting, or are fettered, worn out, asleep, or hindered in any way. If, e.g., I tore a hair out, beat my brow, or embraced my knee with folded hands, I did it because I willed it. But I might have willed and not done it, if the power of motion in my limbs had forsaken me. So many things, then, I did in a sphere, where to will was not the same as to be able. And yet I did not that which both I longed incomparably more to do, and which I could do whenever I really earnestly willed it; because, as soon as I had willed it, I had really already made it mine in willing. For in these things the ability was one with the will, and really to resolve was to do. And yet, in my case, it was not done; and more readily did my body obey the weakest willing of my soul, in moving its limbs at its nod, than the soul obeyed itself where it was called upon to realise its great desire by a simple effort of the will. How is such a prodigy possible, and what is its reason? The soul commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the soul commands itself, and is resisted. The soul commands the hand to be moved, and it is done so promptly that command and performance can scarcely be distinguished; and yet the soul is spirit, but the hand is a member of the body. The soul commands the soul itself to an act of will; it is its own command, yet it does not carry it out. How is such a prodigy possible, and what is its reason? The soul commands an act of will, I say; its command consists simply in willing; and yet that command is not carried out. Sed non ex toto vult; non ergo ex toto imperat. Nam in tantum imperat, in quantum vult, et in tantum non fit quod imperat, in quantum non vult. Quoniam voluntas imperat ut sit voluntas, nec alia sed ipsa. Non itaque plena imperat ideo non est quod imperat. Nam si plena esset, nec imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset. Non igitur monstrum partim velle, partim nolle, sed ægritudo animi est, quia non totus assurgit, veritate sublevatus, consuetudine prægravatus. Et ideo sunt duæ voluntates, quia una earum tota non est, et hoc adest alteri quod deest alteri.” [196] “What ought to be? How cannot the inner nature exhibit itself by reflection, but can by action?” (Scipio, Metaphysik des Aug., p. 7.) Augustine was the first to put this question clearly. “Antiquity conceived the whole of life, we might say, in a naïve fashion from the standpoint of science: the spiritual appeared as natural, and virtue as a natural force. [197] Augustine indeed could further explain why the form, in which the good takes possession of and delivers the soul, must consist in the infusion of love. So long as the soul along with its will is confronted by duty (an ought), and commands itself to obey, it has not completely appropriated the good; “nam si plena esset, nec imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset” (Confess. VIII. 21). Accordingly, the fact that it admits the duty, does not yet create an effective will ex toto. It must accordingly so love what it ought, that it no longer needs command itself; nay, duty (the ought) must be its only love; only then is it plena in voluntate bona. The “abyssus corruptionis nostræ” is only exhausted when by love we “totum illud, quod volebamus nolumus et totum illud, quod deus vult, volumus (Confess. IX. 1). [198] Confess. VII. 18: “Malum si substantia esset, bonum esset. Aut enim esset incorruptibilis substantia, magnum utique bonum; aut substantia corruptibilis esset, quæ nisi bona esset, corrumpi non posset.” But since evil thus always exists in a good substance (more accurately: springs from the had will of the good substance), it is absolutely inexplicable; see e.g., De civitat. dei, XII. 7: “Nemo igitur quærat efficientem causam malæ voluntatis; non enim est efficiens sed deficiens (that is, the aspiration after nothing, after the annulling of life, constitutes the content of the bad will), quia nec illa effectio sed defectio. Deficere namque ab eo, quod summe est, ad id, quod minus est, hoc est incipere habere voluntatem malam. Causas porro defectionum istarum, cum efficientes non sint, ut dixi, sed deficientes, velle invenire tale est, ac si quisquam velit videre tenebras vel audire silentium, quod tamen utrumque nobis notum est, neque illud nisi per oculos, neque hoc nisi per aures, non sane in specie, sed in speciei privatione. Nemo ergo ex me scire quærat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte, ut nescire discat, quod scire non posse sciendum est. Ea quippe quæ non in specie, sed in ejus privatione sciuntur, si dici aut intellegi potest quodammodo nesciendo sciuntur, ut sciendo nesciantur.” [199] Augustine says of love (De civ. XI. 28), that we not only love its objects, but itself. “Amor amatur, et hinc probamus, quod in hominibus, qui rectius amantur, ipse magis amatur.” This observation led him to see God everywhere in love. As God is in all being, so is he also in love; nay, his existence in being is ultimately identical with his existence in love. Therefore love is beginning, middle, and end. It is the final object of theological thought, and the fundamental form of true spiritual life. “Caritas inchoata inchoata justitia est; caritas provecta provecta justitia est; caritas magna magna justitia est; caritas perfecta perfecta justitia est” (De nat. et grat. 84). But since in life in general voluntas = caritas (De trin. XV. 38): “quid est aliud caritas quam voluntas?”, we here find once more the profound connection between ethics and psychology. [200] Augustine’s ability to unite the Neoplatonic ontological speculation with the results of his examination of the practical spiritual life was due inter alia especially to his complete abstinence, in the former case, from accepting ritualistic elements, or from introducing into his speculation matter taken from the Cultus and the religion of the second order. If at first the stage of spiritual development which he occupied (when outside the Church), of itself protected him from admitting these deleterious elements, yet it was a conspicuous and hitherto unappreciated side of his greatness that he always kept clear of ritualistic mysticism. Thereby he rendered an invaluable service not only to his disciples in mysticism, but to the whole Western Church. [201] De doctr. christ., I., 3 sq. [202] See Confess., VII. 24: “et qæerebam viam comparandi roboris quod esset idoneum ad fruendum te, etc.,” 26: “certus quidem in istis eram, nimis taken infirmus ad fruendum te.” [203] Augustine has often repeated the old Platonic assertion of the impossibility of defining the nature of God, and that not always with a feeling of dissatisfaction, but as an expression of romantic satisfaction (“ineffabilis simplex natura”; “facilius dicimus quid non sit, quam quod sit”). He contributed much, besides, to the relative elucidation of negative definitions and of properties and accidents, and created scholastic terminology; see especially De trinit., XV. He is the father of Western theological dialectic: but also the inventor of the dialectic of the pious consciousness. From the anti-Manichæan controversy sprang the desire to conceive all God’s separate attributes as identical, i.e., the interest in the indivisibility of God—God is essence, not substance; for the latter cannot be thought of without accidents; see De trinit., VII., 10; and this interest went so far as to hold that even habere and esse coincided in God (De civ., X1. 10: “ideo simplex dicitur quoniam quod habet hoc est”). In order to guard God from corruptibilitas, compositeness of any sort was denied. But, at this point, Augustine had, nevertheless, to make a distinction in God, in order to discriminate the divine world-plan from him, and not to fall completely into Pantheism. (The latter is stamped on many passages in the work De trinit., see e.g., IV., 3, “Quia unum verbum dei est, per quod facta sunt omnia, quod est incommutabilis veritas, ibi principaliter atque incommutabiliter sunt omnia simul, et omnia vita sunt et omnia unum sunt.”) But since he always harked to the conviction that being, and wisdom, and goodness, are identical in God, he did not reach what he aimed at. This difficulty increased still further for him, where he combined speculation as to the nature of God with that regarding the Trinity. (Dorner, p. 22 ff.) It is seen most clearly in the doctrine of the divine world-plan. It always threatens to submerge the world in the Son as a unity, and to take away its difference (it is wrong, however—at least for the period after c., A.D. 400—to say conversely that the intelligible world is for Augustine identical with the Son, or is the Son). The vacillation is continued in the doctrine of creation. But Dorner (p. 40 f.) is wrong when he says: “Augustine had no conception as yet that the notion of causality, clearly conceived, is sufficient to establish the distinction between God and the world.” Augustine had undoubtedly no such conception, but this time it is not he, but Dorner, who shows his simplicity. The notion of causality, “clearly conceived,” can never establish a distinction, but only a transformation. If he had meant to give expression to the former, he required to introduce more into the cause than the effect; that is, it was necessary to furnish the cause with properties and powers which did not pass into the causatum (effect). But this already means that the scheme of cause and effect is inadequate to establish the difference. Augustine, certainly, had no clear conception of such a thing; but he felt that mere causality was useless. He adopted the expedient of calling in “nihil” (nothing) to his aid, the negation: God works in nothing. This “nothing” was the cause of the world not being a transformation or evolution of God, but of its appearing as an inferior or irridescent product, which, because it is a divina operatio, exists (yet not independently of God), and which, so far as independent, does not exist, since its independence resides in the nihil. The sentence “mundus de nihilo a deo factus”—the root principle of Augustinian cosmology—is ultimately to be taken dualistically; but the dualism is concealed by the second element consisting in negation, and therefore only revealing itself in the privative form (of mutability, transitoriness). But in the end the purely negative character of the second element cannot be absolutely retained (Augustine never, certainly, identified it with matter); it purported to be absolute impotence, but combined with the divine activity it became the resisting factor, and we know how it does resist in sin. Accordingly, the question most fatal to Augustine would have been: Who created this nothing? As a matter of fact this question breaks down the whole construction. Absurd as it sounds, it is justified. Augustine cannot explain negation with its determinative power existing side by side with the divina operatio; for it is no explanation to say that it did not exist at all, since it merely had negative effects. Yet theory, sometimes acosmic, sometimes dualistic, in form, is everywhere corrected in Augustine, whether by the expression of a wise nescience, or by faith in God as Father. The criticism here used has been attacked by Loofs (R.-Encykl. 3, Vol. II., p. 271). We have to admit that it goes more deeply into the reason of his views than Augustine’s words require. But I do not believe that the statement given by Loofs is adequate: “God so created his creatures from nothing that some are less fair, less good than others, and, therefore, have less being (esse).” Could Augustine have actually contented himself with these facts without asking whence this “less”? [204] Enchirid. 3. [205] See Vol. IV., p. 129 ff. I do not enter further into the doctrine of the Trinity, but remark that the term “tres personæ” was very fatal to Augustine, and that all his original efforts in dealing with the Trinity lead away from cosmical and hypercosmical plurality to conceptions that make it express inner, spiritual self-movement in the one God. [206] Cum autem initio fidei quæ per dilectionem operatur imbuta mens fuerit, tendit bene vivendo etiam ad speciem pervenire, ubi est sanctis et perfectis cordibus nota ineffabilis pulchritudo, cujus plena visio est summa felicitas. Hoc est nimirum quod requiris, “quid primum, quid ultimum teneatur,” inchoari fide, perfici specie. [207] We may here touch briefly on the question several times recently discussed, as to the supremacy of the will in Augustine. Kahl has maintained it. But Siebeck (1.c. 183 f.) has with reason rejected it; (see also my notice of Kahl’s book in the ThLZ., 1886, No. 25); and Kahl has himself to admit “that at the last stage of knowledge Neoplatonic intellectualism, which explains volition away in view of thought, has frequently traversed the logical consequences of Augustine’s standpoint.” But it is just the last stage that decides. On the other hand, Kahl is quite right in appreciating so highly the importance of the will in Augustine. The kernel of our nature exists indisputably according to Augustine in our will; therefore, in order that the veritas, the scire deum et animam may be able to obtain supremacy, and become, as it were, the unique function of man, the will must be won on its behalf. This takes place through God’s grace, which leads the soul to will and love spiritual truth, i.e., God. Only now is it rendered possible for the intellect to assume supremacy. Accordingly the freeing of the will is ultimately the substitution of the supremacy of the intellect for that of the will. (Compare, e.g., the passage Confess. IX. 24: “regio ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israel in æternum veritatis pabulo, et ubi vita sapientia est”; but for this life it holds true that “sapientia hominis pietas.”) Yet in so far as the supremacy of the intellect could not maintain itself without the amor essendi et sciendi, the will remains the co-efficient of the intellect even in the highest sphere. That is, briefly, Augustine’s view of the relation of the will and intellect. It explains why the return to Augustine in the Middle Ages brought about the complete subordination of the intellect to the will; for Augustine himself so presented the case that no inner state and no activity of thought existed apart front the will. But if that were so, Augustine’s opinion, that the vision (visio) of God was the supreme goal, could not but in the end pass away. It was necessary to demonstrate a goal which corresponded to the assured fact that man was will (see Duns Scotus). [208] See De civit. dei, XIV. 3 sq.; it is not the body (sensuousness) that is the ultimate cause of sin. [209] Confess. I. 25: Væ tibi flumen moris humani? quis resistet tibi? quamdiu non siccaberis? quosque volves Evæ, filius in mare magnum et formidolosum, quod vix transeunt qui lignum [ecclesiam] conscenderint? [210] There is a wonderful contrast in Augustine between the profound pessimistic view of the world, and the conception, strictly held in theory, that everything takes place under the uniform and unchangeable activity of God. What a difference between the statement of the problem and the result! And in order to remove this difference the metaphysician refers us to the—nothing. The course of the world is so confidently regarded as caused in whole and in detail by God, nay, is, as it were, taken up into the unchangeableness of God himself, that even miracles are only conceived to be events contrary to nature as known to us (Genes. ad lit. VI. 13; cf. De civ. X. 12; XXI. 1-8; nothing happens against nature; the world is itself the greatest, nay, the sole miracle; see Nitzsch, Aug’s Lehre v. Wunder, 1865; Dorner, p. 71 f.), and yet everything shapes itself into a vast tragedy. In this nothing there still indeed lurks in Augustine a part of Manichæism; but in his vital view of the world it is not the “nothing” which plays a part, but the sin of wicked pleasure—self-will. [211] Confess. III. 8; V. 25; etc. [212] See the avowals in Confess. VII. 25. [213] Naturally, general investigations are not wanting of the nature of revelation as a whole, its relation to ratio, its stages (punishment of sin, law, prophecy), etc., but they have no secure connection with his dogmatics; they are dependant on the occasions that called them forth, and they are not clearly thought out. In any case, however, so many elements are found in them which connect them with Greek speculations, and in turn others which exerted a powerful influence at a later date (see Abelard), that one or two references are necessary (cf. Schmidt, Origenes and Aug. als Apolegeten in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol. VIII.; Böhringer, p. 204 ff.; Reuter, p. 90 f., 350 ff., 400). Augustine occupies himself here, as always, with a problem whose factors ultimately do not admit of being reconciled. On the one hand, he never gave up the lofty appreciation of reason (ratio), of independent knowledge, in which being and life are embraced. Originally (in his first period, after A.D. 385), although he had already seen the importance of auctoritas, he set up as the goal of the ratio the overcoming of auctoritas, which required to precede it only for a time (De ord. II., 26, 27). “Ratio was to him the organ in which God reveals himself to man, and in which man perceives God.” In after times this thought was never given up; but it was limited by the distinction between subjective and objective reason, by the increasing perception of the extent of the influence exerted on human mason by the will, by the assumption that one consequence of original sin was ignorance, and, finally, by the view that while knowledge, due to faith, would always be uncertain here below, the soul longed after the real, i.e., the absolute and absolutely sure, knowledge. The latter alone superseded ratio as the organ by which God is known, as guide to the vita beata; the other limitations were limitations pure and simple. And the constancy with which, in spite of these, Augustine at all times valued ratio is proved by those striking expositions, which occur in his earliest and latest writings, of Christianity as the disclosure of the one true religion which had always existed. The whole work De civitate dei is, indeed, built upon this thought—the civitas dei not being first created by the appearance of Christ—which, indeed, has two other roots besides Rationalism, namely, the conception of the absolute immutability of God, and the intention to defend Christianity and its God against Neoplatonic and pagan attacks. (The first two roots, as can be easily shown, are reducible ultimately to one single conception. The apologetic idea is of quite a different kind. Christianity is held to be as old as the world, in order that the reproach of its late arrival may fall to the ground. Here the wholly incongruous idea is introduced that Christians before Christ had believed on his future appearance. Reuter has shown excellently (p. 90 ff.) how even the particularist doctrine of pre-destination has its share in the universalist and humanist conception; he also deserves the greatest gratitude for collecting the numerous passages in which that conception is elaborated.) Even before the appearance of Christ the civitas dei existed; to it belonged pagans and Jews. Christianity is as old as the world. It is the natural religion which has existed from the beginning under various forms and names. Through Christ it received the name of the Christian religion; “res ipsa quæ nunc Christiana religio nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque ipse Christus venit in carne, unde vera religio, quæ jam erat, cœpit appellari Christiana” (Retract. I., 12, 3); see especially Ep. 102 and De civit. XVIII., 47, where the incongruous thought is inserted that the unus mediator was revealed to the heathens who belonged to the heavenly Jerusalem in the earliest time. The latter idea is by no means inserted everywhere; there was rather up to the end of his life, in spite and because of his doctrine of particular predestinating grace, an undercurrent in Augustine’s thought: co-ordinating God and free knowledge, he recognised behind the system of the Church a free science, and in accordance therewith conceived also God and the world to be the abiding objects of knowledge. With this idea, however, as in the case of Origen, Christ at once disappears. The ultimate reason of this consists in the fact that Augustine, with all his progress in knowledge, never advanced to history. The great psychologist was still blind to the nature of historical development, to what personality achieved in history, and what history had accomplished fur mankind. He had only two methods of observation at his disposal—either the mythological contemplation of history, or a rationalistic neutralising. The man who felt so clearly and testified so convincingly that freedom lay in the change of will when it received a strength binding us to the good, was yet incapable as a thinker of drawing clearly the consequences of this experience. But those should not blame him who cannot free themselves from the illusion that an absolute knowledge of some sort must be possible to man; for the effort to obtain such a knowledge is the ultimate cause of the inability to understand history as history. He who is only happy with absolute knowledge is either blind to history, or it becomes a Medusa’s head to him. Yet rationalism is only the undercurrent, though here and there it does force its way to the surface. More surely and more constantly Augustine appeased with revelation his hunger for the absolute, which he was unable to distinguish from aiming at force and strength (God and goodness). His feelings were the same as Faust’s: “We long for revelation.” Now, it is very characteristic that in dealing with the notion of revelation, Augustine has expounded nothing more clearly than the thought that revelation is absolutely authoritative. We can leave out of account his other views on its necessity, nature, etc. The decisive fact for him is that revelation does not merely recommend itself by its intrinsic worth. Accordingly, the external attestation is the main point. Augustine discussed this (especially in his work De civit.) much more carefully and comprehensively than earlier Apologists, in order to establish the right to demand simple submission to the contents of revelation. Auctoritas and fides were inseparably connected; indeed, they occupied an almost exclusive relation to each other (see De util. cred., 25 sq.). We indeed find him explaining in his writings of all periods that authority is milk-food, and that, on the other hand, the demand in matters of religion for faith resting on authority is not exceptional, but that all the affairs of life of a deeper nature rest on such a faith. But these are simply sops to Cerberus. Man needs authority to discipline his mind, and to support a certainty not to be obtained elsewhere. Augustine was especially convinced of this as against heretics (Manichæans). Heathens he could refute to a certain extent from reason, heretics he could not. But even apart from this, since the power which hinds the will to God presented itself to him as the rock-fast conviction of the unseen, even the “strong” could not dispense with faith in authority. The gradual progress from faith to knowledge, which was well-known to him (“Every one who knows also believes, although not every one who believes knows,”) was still a progress constantly accompanied by faith. The saying, “fides præcedit rationem,” of which he has given so many variations (see e.g., Ep. 120, 2 sq.: “fides præcedit rationem,” or paradoxically: “rationabiliter visum est, ut fides præcedat rationem,”) did not signify a suspension of faith at the higher stages. Or, rather, and here the Sic et Non holds good, Augustine was never clear about the relation of faith and knowledge; he handed over this problem to the future. On the one hand he trusted ratio; but, on the other hand, he did not, relying only on God, and:is Genius ruling in experience. Faith’s authority was given for him in Scripture and the Church. But here, again, he only maintained and transmitted the disposition to obey, while his theoretical expositions are beset by sheer contradictions and ambiguities; for he has neither worked out the sufficiency, infallibility, and independence of Scripture, nor demonstrated the infallibility of the Church, nor defined the relation of Scripture and the Church. Sometimes Scripture is a court of appeal which owes its authority to the Church, sometimes the Church doctrine and all consuetudo are to be measured by Scripture (Scripture is the only source of doctrina Christiana), sometimes Church and Scripture are held to constitute one whole; in one place the Church seems to find in the Council its infallible mouthpiece, in the other, the perfectibility of Councils themselves is maintained. “The idea of the Church’s infallibility belongs to Augustine’s popular Catholic presuppositions which grew out of his Catholic faith. It was never directly or expressly expounded by him, or dogmatically discussed. Therefore he cannot have felt the necessity of adjusting an exhaustive or precise doctrine regarding the legitimate form of the supreme representation of the Church by supposition infallible. This uncertainty and vagueness perhaps” (rather, indisputably) “spring from the vacillations of his thought regarding authority and reason, faith and knowledge” (see Reuter, pp. 345-358; Böhringer, pp. 217-256; Dorner, pp. 233-244; further, above pp. 77-83, and Vol. III., p. 203 ff.). [214] The figure often used by Augustine that the Word was united with the man Jesus as our souls are with our bodies is absolutely unsuitable. Augustine borrowed it from antiquity without realising that it really conflicted with his own conception. [215] Enchir., 36: “Hic omnino granditer et evidenter dei gratia commendatur. Quid enim natura humana in homine Christi meruit ut in unitatem personæ unici filii dei singulariter esset assumpta! Quæ bona voluntas, cujus boni propositi studium, quæ bona opera præcesserunt, quibus mereretur iste homo una fieri persona cum deo? Numquid antea fuit homo, et hoc ei singulare beneficium præstitum est, cum singulariter promereretur deum? Nempe ex quo homo esse cœpit, non aliud cœpit esse homo quam dei filius: et hoc unicus, et propter deum verbum, quod illo suscepto caro factum est, utique deus. . . . Unde naturæ humanæ tanta gloria, nullis præcedentibus meritis sine dubitatione gratuita, nisi quia magna hic et sola dei gratia fideliter et sobrie considerantibus evidenter ostenditur, ut intellegant homines per eandem gratiam se justifcari a peccatis, per quam factum est ut homo Christus nullum habere posset peccatum.” 40: “Natus Christus insinuat nobis gratiam dei, qua homo nullis præcedentibus meritis in ipso exordio naturæ suæ quo esse cœpit, verbo deo copularetur in tantam personæ unitatem, ut idem ipse esset filius dei qui filius hominis, etc.” De dono persev., 67. Op. imperf., I., 138: “Qua gratia homo Jesus ab initio factus est bonus, eadem gratia homines qui sunt membra ejus ex malis fiunt boni.” De prædest. 30: “Est etiam præclarissimum lumen prædestinationis et gratiæ ipse salvator, ipse mediator dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus, qui ut hoc esset, quibus tandem suis vel operum vel fidei præcedentibus meritis natura humana quæ in illo est comparavit? . . . Singulariter nostra natura in Jesu nullis suis præcedentibus meritis accepit admiranda (scil. the union with deity). Respondeat hic homo deo, si audet, et dicat: Cur non et ego? Et si audierit: O homo, tu quis es qui respondeas deo, etc.” De corrept. et grat. 30: “Deus naturam nostram id est animam rationalem carnemque hominis Christi suscepit, susceptione singulariter mirabili vel mirabiliter singulari, ut nullis justitiæ suæ præcedentibus meritis filius dei sic esset ab initio quo esse homo cœpisset, ut ipse et verbum, quod sine initio est, una persona esset.” De pecc. mer. II. 27. Augustine says in Confess. VII. 25: “Ego autem aliquanto posterius didicisse me fateor, in eo quod verbum caro factum est, quomodo catholica veritas a Photini falsitate dirimatur.” Our account given above will have shown, however, that he never entirely learnt this. His Christology, at all times, retained a strong trace of affinity with that of Paul of Samosata and Photinus (only all merit was excluded on the part of the man Jesus), because he knew that his faith could not dispense with the man Jesus, and he supplanted the pseudo-theological speculation as to the Word by the evangelical one that the Word had become the content of Christ’s soul. [216] Therefore, also, the uncertainty which we find already in Augustine as to whether the Incarnation was necessary. In De Trinit. XIII. 13, he answers the momentous question whether God might not have chosen another way, by leaving the possibility open, but describing the way selected as bonus, divinæ dignitati congruns and convenientior. By this he opened up a perilous perspective to the Middle Ages. [217] Op. imperf. l.c. [218] He definitely rejects the idea held by him before his conversion that Christ was only a teacher; see, e.g., Confess. VII. 25: “Tantum sentiebam de domino Christo meo, quantum de excellentis sapientiæ viro, cui nullus posset æquari; præsertim quia mirabiliter natus ex virgine ad exemplum contemnendorum temporalium pro adipiscenda immortalitate divina pro nobis cura tantam auctoritatem magisterii meruisse videbatur.” [219] De trin. XIII. 13: “Quid tam necessarium fuit ad erigendam spem nostram, quam ut demonstraretur nobis, quanti nos penderet deus quantumque diligeret?” That takes place through the Incarnation. [220] The “work” of Christ falls to be discussed afterwards; for we cannot include Augustine’s views concerning it among his fundamental conceptions. In part they alternate (between redemption from the devil, sacrifice, and removal of original sin by death), and in part they are dependant on his specific view of original sin. Where he indulges in expositions of practical piety, he has no theory at all regarding Christ’s work. [221] The clearest, and on account of the historical connection the most decisive, testimony is given in Confess. VII. 24-27, where, in telling what Christ had become to him, he at the same time explains why Neoplatonism was insufficient. He knew what the Neoplatonists perceived, but “quærebam viam comparandi roboris quod esset idoneum ad fruendum te, nec inveniebam donec amplecterer mediatorem dei et hominem, hominem Christum Jesum vocantem et dicentem: Ego sum via et veritas et vita, et cibum, cui capiendo invalidus eram, miscentem carni; quoniam verbum caro factum est, ut infantiæ nostræ lactesceret sapientia tua per quam creasti omnia. Non enim tenebam dominum meum Jesum, humilis humilem, nec cujus rei magistra esset ejus infirmitas noveram. Verbum enim tuum æterna veritas . . . subditos erigit ad se ipsam: in inferioribus autem ædificavit sihi humilem domum de limo nostro, per quam subdendos deprimeret a seipsis et ad se trajiceret, sanans tumorem et nutriens amorem, ne fiducia sui progrederentur longius, sed potius infirmarentur videntes ante pedes sues infirmam divinitatem ex participatione tunicæ pelliceæ nostræ, et lassi prosternerentur in eam, illa autem surgens lavaret eos.” He then explains in the sequel that the Neoplatonic writings led him to thoroughly understand the nature of God, but: “garriebam plane quasi peritus, et nisi in Christo salvatore nostro viam tuam quærerem, non peritus, sed periturus essem.” I sought to be wise, puffed up by knowledge. “Ubi enim erat illa ædificans caritas a fundamento humilitatis, quod est Christus Jesus?” This love rooted in humility those writings could not teach me. It was from the Bible I first learned: “quid interesset inter præsumptionem et confessionem, inter videntes quo eundun sit nec videntes qua, et viam ducentem ad beatificam patriam, non tantum cernendam, sed et habitandam.” Now I read Paul. “Et apparuit mihi una facies eloquiorum castorum. Et cœpi et inveni quidquid illac verum legeram, hac cum commendatione gratiæ tuæ dici, ut qui videt non sic glorietur quasi non acceperit, non solum id quod videt, sed etiam ut videat, et ut te non solum admoneatur ut videat, sed etiam sanetur ut teneat, et qui de longinquo videre non potest, viam tamen ambulet, qua veniat et videat et teneat.” For if a man delights in the law of God after the inner man, what does he do with the other law in his members? . . . What shall wretched man do? Who shall deliver him from the body of this death? Who but thy grace through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom the handwriting which was against us was abolished. “Hoc illæ litteræ non habent. Non habent illæ paginæ vultum pietatis hujus, lacrimas confessionis, sacrificium tuum, spiritum contribulatum. . . . Nemo ibi cantat: Nonne deo subdita erit anima mea. Ab ipso enim salutare meum. Nemo ibi audit vocantem: Venite ad me, omnes qui laboratis. Dedignantur ab eo discere quoniam mitis est et humilis corde. Abscondisti enim hæc a sapientibus et prudentihus, et revelasti ea parvulis.” “For it is one thing from the mountain’s wooded top to see the land of peace and yet to find no way to it, and another to keep steadfastly on the way thither.” Compare with this the elaborate criticism of Platonism in De civit. dei, X., esp. ch. 24 and 32, where Christ is presented as “universalis animæ liberandæ via,” while his significance is for the rest explained much more in the popular Catholic fashion than in the Confessions. In ch. 1 ff. there is even an attempt to conceive the angels and saints as a heavenly hierarchy as the Greeks do. [222] Augustine accordingly testifies that in order that the truth which is perceived should also be loved and extolled, a person is necessary who should conduct us and that on the path of humility. This is the burden of his Confessions. The truth itself had been shown clearly to him by the Neoplatonists; but it had not become his spiritual possession. Augustine knew only one person capable of so impressing the truth as to make it loved and extolled, and he alone could do this, because he was the revelation of the verbum dei in humilitate. When Christendom has attained securely and clearly to this “Christology,” it will no longer demand to be freed from the yoke of Christology. [223] This is linked together by Augustine in a wonderful fashion. The scepticism of the thinker in genre and the doubts, never overcome in his own mind as to the Catholic doctrine in specie, demanded that Christ should be the indisputable authority of the Church. To this is added, in connection with gratia infusa, the Christ of the sacraments. I do not discuss this authoritative Christ more fully, because he coincides with the authority of the Church itself, and we have already dealt with the latter. [224] De civ. dei XIX. 13: “Pax cælestis civitatis ordinatissima et concordissima societas fruendi deo et invicem in deo.” Enchir. 29: “Contemplatio ejus artifices, qui vocat ea quæ non sunt tamquam ea quæ sunt, atque in mensura et numero et pondere cuncta disponit,” see 63. [225] Yet the conception of blessedness as peace undoubtedly involves a tendency to think primarily of the will. [226] The whole of Book XIX. of De civit. dei—it is perhaps on the whole the most important—comes to be considered here. In Ch. IV., it is expressly denied that virtue is the supreme good. [227] See De spiritu et lit. 5 (the passage follows afterwards). [228] That Augustine was able from this point of view to make the conscious feeling of blessedness a force entering into the affairs of this world, is shown by the passage De civit. dei XIX. 14, which, indeed, so far as I know, is almost unique. “Et quoniam (Christianus) quamdin est in isto mortali corpore, peregrinatur a domino, ambulat per fidem non per speciem; ac per hoc omnem pacem vel corporis vel animæ vel simul corporis et animæ refert ad illam pacem, quæ homini mortali est cum immortali deo, ut ei sit ordinata in fide sub æterna lege obœdientia. Jam vero quia duo præcipua præcepta, hoc est dilectionem dei et dilectionem proximi, docet magister deus . . . consequens est, ut etiam proximo ad diligendum deum consulat, quem jubetur sicut se ipsum diligere (sic uxori, sic filiis, sic domesticis, sic ceteris quibus potuerit hominibus), et ad hoc sibi a proximo, si forte indiget, consuli velit; ac per hoc erit pacatus, quantum in ipso est, omni homini pace hominum, id est ordinata concordia cujus hic ordo est, prinmm ut nulli noceat, deinde ut etiam prosit cui potuerit. Primitus ergo inest ei suorum cura; ad eos quippe habet opportuniorem facilioremque aditum consulendi, vel naturæ ordine vel ipsius societatis humanæ. Unde apostolus dicit: ‘Quisquis autem suis et maxime domesticis non providet, fidem denegat et est infideli deterior.’ Hinc itaque etiam pax domestica oritur, id est ordinati imperandi obœdiendique concordia cohabitantium. Imperaut enim, qui consulunt: sicut vir uxori, parentes finis, domini servis. . . . Sed in domo justi viventes ex fide et adhuc ab illa cælesti civitate peregrinantis etiam qui imperant serviunt eis, quibus videntur imperare. Neque enim dominandi cupiditate imperant, sed officio consulendi, nec principandi superbia, sed providendi misericordia.” [229] The element of “pax” obtains a value higher than and independent of knowledge (see above). That is shown also in the fact that the definitive state of the unsaved (De civit. dei, XIX., 28) is not described as ignorance, but as constant war: “Quod bellum gravius et amarius cogitari potest, quam ubi voluntas sic adversa est passioni et passio voluntati, ut nullius earum victoria tales inimicitiæ finiantur, et ubi sic confligit cum ipsa natura corporis vis doloris, ut neutrum alteri cedat? Hic [in terra] enim quando contingit iste conflictus, aut dolor vincit et sensum mors adimit, aut natura vincit et dolorem sanitas tollit. Ibi autem et dolor permanet ut affligat, et natura perdurat ut sentiat; quia utrumque ideo non deficit, ne pœna deficiat.” Undoubtedly, as regards the sainted (see Book, XXII.), the conception comes again and again to the front that their felicity will consist in seeing God. [230] Augustine has (De trin. I. 20) applied this comparison to the Churches of the future and present world; we may also adapt it to the relations of his doctrines of the Church and of God. [231] Ritschl published in his Treatise on the method of the earliest history of dogma (Jahrb. f. deutsche Theol., 1871) the grand conception that the Areopagite in the East, and Augustine in the West, were parallels; that the former founded a ritualistic ecclesiasticism, the latter an ecclesiasticism of moral tasks, in the service of a world-wide Christianity that both thus modified in the same direction, but with entirely different means, the old state of feeling (the bare hope of the future life). This conception is substantially correct If we keep firm hold of the fact that the traditional popular Catholic system was not modified by either to its utmost limit, and that both followed impulses which had been at work in their Churches even before their time. The doctrine regarding the Church was not Augustine’s “central idea,” but he took what every Catholic was certain of, and made it a matter of clearer, in part for the first time of any clear, conviction; and moved by very varied causes, he finally produced an ecclesiasticism whose independent value he himself never thoroughly perceived. [232] Solil. I. 5: “Nihil aliud habeo quam voluntatem; nihil aliud scio nisi fluxa et caduca spernenda esse, certa et æterna requirenda . . . si fide te inveniunt, qui ad te refugiunt, fidem da, si virtute, virtutem, si scientia, scientiam. Auge in me fidem, auge spem, auge caritatem.” De spiritu et lit., 5: “Nos autem dicimus humanam voluntatem sic divinitus adjuvari ad faciendam justitiam, ut præter quod creatus est homo cum libero arbitrio voluntatis, præterque doctrinam qua ei præcipitur quemadmodum vivere debeat, accipiat spiritum sanctum, quo fiat in animo ejus delectatio dilectioque summi illius atque incommutabilis boni quod deus est, etiam nunc cum adhuc per fidem ambulatur, nondum per speciem: ut hac sibi velut arra data gratuiti muneris inardescat inhærere creatori atque inflammetur accedere ad participationem illius veri luminis, ut ex illo ei bene sit, a quo habet ut sit. Nam neque liberum arbitrium quidquam nisi ad peccandum valet, si lateat veritatis via, et cum id quod agendum et quo nitendum est cœperit non latere, nisi etiam delectet et ametur, non agitur, non suscipitur, non bene vivitur. Ut autem diligatur, caritas dei diffunditur in cordibus nostris, non per arbitrium liberum quod surgit ex nobis, sed per spiritum sanctum qui datus est nobis.” L.c., 22: “Quod operum lex minando imperat, hoc fidei Iex credendo impetrat. Ipsa est illa sapientia quæ pietas vocatur, qua colitur pater luminum, a quo est omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum. . . . Lege operum dicit deus: Fac quod jubeo; lege fidei dicitur deo: Da quod jubes. . . . Non spiritum hujus mundi accepimus, ait constantissimus gratiæ prædicator, sed spiritum qui ex deo est, ut sciamus quæ a deo donata sunt nobis. Quis est autem spiritus mundi hujus, nisi superbiæ spiritus? . . . Nec alio spiritu decipiuntur etiam illi qui ignorantes dei justitiam et suam justitiam volentes constituere, justitiæ dei non sunt subjecti. Unde mihi videtur magis esse fidei filius, qui novit a quo speret quod nondum habet, quam qui sibi tribuit id quod habet. Colligimus non justificari hominem littera, sed spiritu, non factorum meritis, sed gratuita gratia.” _________________________________________________________________ 2. The Donatist Controversy. The Work: De civitate Dei. Doctrine of the Church, and Means of Grace. Augustine was still occupied with the controversy with the Manichæans, in which he so sharply emphasised the authority of the Catholic Church, [233] when his ecclesiastical position—Presbyter, A.D. 392, Bishop, A.D. 396, in Hippo—compelled him to take up the fight with the Donatists. In Hippo these formed the majority of the inhabitants, and so violent was their hatred that they even refused to make bread for the Catholics. Augustine fought with them from 393 to 411, and wrote against them a succession of works, some of these being very comprehensive. [234] We must here take for granted a knowledge of the course of the controversy at Synods, and as influenced by the intrusion of the Civil power. [235] It was carried on upon the ground prepared by Cyprian. His authority was accepted by the opponents. Accordingly, internal antitheses developed in the dispute which had remained latent in Cyprian’s theory. The new-fashioned Catholic theory had been already stated impressively by Optatus (see above, p. 42 ff.). It was reserved to Augustine to extend and complete it. But, as it usually happens in such questions, every newly-acquired position opened up new questions, and for one solution created any number of problems. And thus Augustine left more problems than he had solved. The controversy did not now deal directly with the hierarchical constitution of the Church. Episcopacy was an accepted fact. The competency of the Church was questioned, and therewith its nature, significance, and extent. That ultimately the constitution of the Church should be dragged into the same peril was inevitable; for the hierarchy is, of course, the tenderest part in a constitution based upon it. The schism was in itself the greatest evil. But in order to get over it, it was necessary to go to its roots and show that it was utterly impossible to sever oneself from the Catholic Church, that the unity, as well as truth of the Church, was indestructible. The main thesis of the Donatists was to the effect that the empirical is only the true Church when those who propagate it, the priests, are “pure”; for no one can propagate what he does not himself possess. [236] The true Church thus needs pure priests; it must therefore declare consecration by traditores to be invalid; and it cannot admit the efficacy of baptism administered by the impure—heretics, or those guilty of mortal sins; finally, it must exclude all that is manifestly stained and unworthy. This was followed by the breach with such Christian communions as did not strictly observe these rules, and by the practice of re-baptism. [237] Separation was imperative, no matter how great or small the extent of the Church. This thesis was supplemented, during the period of the State persecutions, by a second, that the persecuted Church was the true one, and that the State had nothing to do with the Church. Augustine’s counter-argument, based on Cyprian, Ambrosiaster, and Optatus, but partly disavowing, though with due respect, the first-named, went far beyond a bare refutation of the separatists. He created the beginnings of a doctrine of the Church, and means of grace, of the Church as institute of salvation, the organism of the good, i.e., of divine powers in the world. Nor did the Donatist controversy furnish him with his only motive for developing this doctrine. The dispute with the Manichæans had already roused his interest in the authority of the Church, and led him to look more closely into it than his predecessors (see above, p. 79 ff.), who, indeed, were quite at one with him in their practical attitude to the Church. The Pelagian controversy, the state of the world, and the defence of Christianity against heathen attacks, had an extremely important influence on conceptions of the Church. Thus Augustine created the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church on earth, and we attempt in what follows to give, as far as possible, a complete and connected account of it. Finally, the earthly Church was and remained absolutely nothing but a means for the eternal salvation of the individual, and therefore the doctrines of the Church was also meant to be nothing but a subsidiary doctrine. But if all dogmatic ran the risk, with its means and subsidiary conceptions, of obscuring the important point, the danger was imminent here. Does not the doctrine of salvation appear in Catholicism to be almost nullified by the “subsidiary doctrine,” the doctrine of the Church? [238] Grace and Authority—these two powers had, according to Augustine’s self-criticism, effected his conversion. The authority was the Church. Every one knew what the Church was: the empirical, visible Church, which had triumphed ever since the days of Constantine. A “logical definition” of the Church was therefore unnecessary. The important point was to show that men needed an authority, and why it was the authority. The weak intellect needed revelation, which brings truth to the individual, before he himself is capable of finding it; this revelation is bound up in the Church. The fact that the Church was the authority for doctrine constituted for long Augustine’s only interest in it. He produced in support of this principle proofs of subjective necessity and of an objective nature; yet he never reached in his exposition the stringency and certainty which as a Catholic he simply felt; for who can demonstrate that an external authority must be authoritative? The most important point was that the Church proclaimed itself to be the authority in doctrine. One was certainly a member of the Church only in so far as he submitted to its authority. There was no other way of belonging to it. Conversely, its significance seemed, on superficial reflection, to be entirely limited to doctrinal authority. We occupy our true relation to God and Christ, we possess and expect heavenly blessings only when we follow the doctrinal instructions given by the Church. Augustine embraced this “superficial reflection” until his ecclesiastical office and the Donatist controversy led him to more comprehensive considerations. He had arrived at his doctrine of predestinating grace without any external instigation by independent meditation on the nature of conversion and piety. The development of his doctrine regarding the Church, so far as it carried out popular Catholic ideas, was entirely dependent on the external circumstances in which he found himself placed. But he did not himself feel that he was stating a doctrine; he was only describing an actual position accepted all along by every Catholic, one which each had to interpret to himself, but without subtraction or addition. In addition to the importance of the Church as a doctrinal authority, he also felt its significance as a sacred institution which imparted grace. On its latter feature he especially reflected; but the Church appeared to him much more vividly after he had gained his doctrine of grace: it was the one communion of saints, the dwelling-place of the Spirit who created faith, love, and hope. We condense his most important statements. 1. The Catholic Church, held together by the Holy Spirit, who is also the bond of union in the Trinity, possesses its most important mark in its unity, and that a unity in faith, love, and hope, as well as in Catholicity. 2. This unity in the midst of the divisions existing among men is the greatest of miracles, the proof that the Church is not the work of men, but of the Holy Spirit. 3. This follows still more clearly when we consider that unity presupposes love. Love is, however, the proper sphere of the Spirit’s activity; or more correctly, all love finds its source in the Holy Spirit; [239] for faith and hope can be acquired to a certain extent independently—therefore also outside of the Church—but love issues only from the Holy Spirit. The Church, accordingly, because it is a unity, is the alliance of love, in which alone sinners can be purified; for the Spirit only works in “love the bond of unity” (in unitatis vinculo caritate). If then the unity of the Church rests primarily on faith, yet it rests essentially on the sway of the spirit of love alone, which presupposes faith. [240] 4. The unity of the Church, represented in Holy Scripture by many symbols and figures, obtains its strongest guarantee from the fact that Christ has made the Church his bride and his body. This relationship is so close that we can absolutely call the Church “Christ”; [241] for it constitutes a real unity with Christ. Those who are in the Church are thus “among the members of Christ” (in membris Christi); the means and bond of this union are in turn nothing but love, more precisely the love that resides in unity (caritas unitatis). 5. Heretics, i.e., those who follow a faith chosen by themselves, cannot be in the Church, because they would at once destroy its presupposition, the unity of faith; the Church, however, is not a society like the State, which tolerates all sorts of philosophers in its midst. Expelled heretics serve the good of the Church, just as everything must benefit those who love God, for they exercise them in patience (by means of persecutions), in wisdom (by false contentions), and in love to their enemies, which has to be evinced on the one hand in saving beneficence, and on the other in the terrors of discipline. [242] 6. But neither do the Schismatics, i.e., those who possessed the true faith, belong to the Church; for in abandoning its unity—being urged thereto by pride like the heretics—they show that they do not possess love, and accordingly are beyond the pale of the operations of the Holy Spirit. Accordingly the Catholic Church is the only Church. 7. From this it follows that salvation (salus) is not to be found outside the Church, for since love is confined to the visible Church, even heroic acts of faith, and faith itself, are destitute of the saving stamp, which exists through love alone. [243] Means of sanctification, a sort of faith, and miraculous powers may accordingly exist outside of the Church (see afterwards), but they cannot produce the effect and afford the benefit they are meant to have. 8. The second mark of the Church is holiness. This consists in the fact that it is holy through its union with Christ and the activity of the Spirit, possesses the means—in the Word and sacraments—of sanctifying its individual members, i.e., of perfecting them in love, and has also actually attained this end. That it does not succeed in doing so in the case of all who are in its midst [244] —for it will only be without spot or wrinkle in the world beyond—nay, that it cannot entirely destroy sin except in a very few, detracts nothing from its holiness. Even a preponderance of the wicked and hypocritical over the good and spiritual [245] does not lessen it, for there would be no Church at all if the Donatist thesis were correct, that unholy members put an end to the Church’s existence. The Donatists required to limit their own contention in a quite capricious fashion, in order to avoid destroying the Church. [246] 9. Although the tares are not to be rooted out, since men are not omniscient, and this world is not the scene of the consummation, yet the Church exercises its discipline, and in certain circumstances even excommunicates; but it does not do so properly in order to preserve its holiness, but to educate its members or guard them against infection. But the Church can also tolerate. “They do not know the wicked in the Catholic unity, or they tolerate those they know for the sake of unity.” [247] It can even suffer manifest and gross sinners, if in a particular case the infliction of punishment might result in greater harm. [248] It is itself secured from contamination by the profane by never approving evil, and always retaining its control over the means of sanctification. [249] 10. But it is indeed an attribute of its holiness also to beget actually holy members. It can furnish evidence of this, since a few have attained perfection in it, since miracles and signs have constantly been wrought, and a general elevation and sanctification of morals been achieved by it, and since, finally, its whole membership will in the end be holy. 11. Its holiness is, however, shown more clearly in the fact that it is only within the Church that personal holiness can be attained (see above sub. 7). [250] 12. The unholy in the Church unquestionably belong to it; for being in its unity they are subject to the operation of the means of sanctification, and can still become good and spiritual. Yet they do not belong to the inner court of the Church, but form a wider circle in it. [They are “vessels to dishonour in the house of God” (vasa in contumeliam in domo dei); they are not themselves, like the “vessels to honour” (vasa in honorem), the house of God, but are “in it”; they are “in the communion of the sacraments,” not in the proper society of the house, but “adjoined to the communion of the saints” (congregationi sanctorum admixti); they are in a sense not in the Church, because they are not the Church self; therefore the Church can also be described as a “mixed body” (corpus permixtum).] [251] Nay, even the heretics and schismatics, in so far as they have appropriated the Church’s means of sanctification (see under), belong to the Catholic Church, since the latter makes them sons without requiring to impart a second baptism. [252] The character of the Church’s holiness is not modified by these wider circles in the sphere to which it extends; for, as regards its foundation, means, and aim, it always remains the same, and a time will come when the holiness of all its members—for Augustine does not neglect this mark—will be an actual fact. 13. The third mark of the Church is Catholicity. It is that which, combined with unity, furnishes the most impressive external proof, and the surest criterion of its truth. That is, Catholicity—extension over the globe—was prophesied, and had been realised, although it must be described as a miracle, that an association which required such faith and obedience, and handed down such mysteries, should have obtained this extension. The obvious miracle is precisely the evidence of the truth. Donatists cannot be the Church, because they are virtually confined to Africa. The Church can only exist where it proves its Catholicity by union with Rome and the ancient Oriental Churches, with the communities of the whole globe. The objection that men’s sin hinders the extension is without weight; for that would have had to be prophesied. But it is the opposite that was prophesied and fulfilled. [253] The reminder, also, that many heresies were extended over the world is of no consequence; for, firstly, almost all heresies are national, secondly, even the most wide-spread heresy finds another existing at its side, and thereby reveals its falsehood. [This is the old sophism: on the one hand, disintegration is regarded as the essential characteristic of heresies; on the other, they are represented as forming a unity in order that the existence of others side by side with it may be urged against each in turn.] 14. The fourth mark of the Church is its apostolicity. It was displayed in the Catholic Church, (1) in the possession of apostolic writings, [254] and doctrine, (2) in its ability to trace its existence up to the Apostolic communities and the Apostles, and to point to its unity (communicatio) with the churches founded by the latter. [255] This proof was especially to be adduced in the succession of the Bishops, though their importance is for the rest not so strongly emphasised by Augustine as by Cyprian; indeed passages occur in his works in which the universal priesthood, as maintained by Tertullian, is proclaimed. [256] 15. While among the apostolic communities those of the East are also very important, yet that of Rome, and in consequence its Bishop, hold the first place. Peter is the representative of the Apostles, of Christians in general (Ep. 53, 2: “totius ecclesiæ figuram gerens”), of weak Christians, and of Bishops, or the Episcopal ministry. Augustine maintained the theory of Cyprian and Optatus regarding Peter’s chair: it was occupied by the Roman Bishop and it was necessary to be in accord with it, because it was the apostolic seat par excellence, i.e., the bearer of the doctrinal authority and unity of the Church. His statements as to the infallibility of the Roman chair are as uncertain and contradictory as those dealing with the Councils and Episcopate. He had no doubt that a Council ranked above the Roman Bishop (Ep. 43, 19). [257] 16. Augustine was convinced of the infallibility of the Catholic Church; for it is a necessary consequence of its authority as based on Apostolicity. But he never had any occasion to think out this predicate, and to establish it in the representation and decisions of the Church. Therefore he made many admissions, partly without thought, partly when hard pressed, which, logically understood, destroyed the Church’s infallibility. 17. So also he holds the indispensableness of the Church, for it follows from the exclusive relation to Christ and the Holy Spirit revealed in its unity and holiness. This indispensableness is expressed in the term “Mother Church” [258] (ecclesia mater or corpus Christi); on modifications, see later. 18. Finally, he was also convinced of the permanence of the Church, and therewith also of its primeval character; for this follows from the exclusive relation to God; yet ideas entered into the conception of permanence and primevalness, which did not flow from any consideration of the empirical Church (“the heavenly Church” on the one hand, the “city of God” on the other; on this see under). 19. The empirical Catholic Church is also the “Kingdom of God” (regnum dei, civitas dei). As a matter of fact these terms are primarily employed in a view which is indifferent to the empirical Church (see under); but since to Augustine there was ultimately only one Church, everything that was true of it was also applicable to the empirical Church. At all times he referred to the Catholic Church the old term which had long been applied to the Church, “the kingdom (city) of God,” of course having in mind not that the Church was the mixed, but the true body (corpus permixtum, verum). [259] 20. But Augustine gave a much stronger hold than his predecessors to the conception that the Church is the kingdom of God, and by the manner in which in his “Divine Comedy,” the “De civitate dei,” he contrasted the Church with the State, far more than his own expressed view, he roused the conviction that the empirical Catholic Church sans phrase was the kingdom of God, and the independent State that of the devil. That is, although primarily the earthly State (civitas terrena) consisted for Augustine in the society of the profane and reprobate, inclusive of demons, while the city of God (civitas dei) was the heavenly communion of all saints of all times, comprising the angels, yet he held that the former found their earthly historical form of expression and manifestation in the secular State, the latter in the empirical Church; for there were by no means two cities, kingdoms, temples, or houses of God. Accordingly the kingdom of God is the Church. And, carried away by the Church’s authority and triumph in the world, as also profoundly moved by the fall of the Roman world-empire, whose internal and external power manifestly no longer existed save in the Church, Augustine saw in the present epoch, i.e., in the Church’s History, the millennial kingdom that had been announced by John (De civit. XX.). By this means he revised, without completely abolishing, the ancient Chiliasm of the Latin Church. [260] But if it were once determined that the millennial kingdom was now, since Christ’s appearance, in existence, the Church was elevated to the throne of supremacy over the world; for while this kingdom consists in Christ’s reign, he only reigns in the present through the Church. Augustine neither followed out nor clearly perceived the hierarchical tendency of his position; yet he reasoned out the present reign of Christ which he had to demonstrate (XX. 9-13) by reflecting that only the “saints” (sancti) reign with Christ, and not, say, the “tares”; that thus only those reign in the kingdom who themselves constitute the kingdom; and that they reign because they aim at what is above, fight the fight of sanctification, and practise patience in suffering, etc. But he himself prepared the way directly for the sacerdotal interpretation of his thought, or positively expressed it, in two of his arguments. The one was drawn from him by exegesis, [261] the other is a result of a manifest view of his own. In the first place, viz., he had to show that Rev. XX. 4 (“those sitting on thrones judge”) was even now being fulfilled. He found this fulfilment in the heads of the Church, who controlled the keys of binding and loosing, accordingly in the clergy (XX. 9). Secondly, he prepared the way for the supremacy of the Church over the State [262] in his explicit arguments both against and in favour of the latter (XIX., and even before this in V.). The earthly State (civitas terrena) and accordingly secular kingdoms are sprung from sin, the virtue of the ambitious, and simply because they strive for earthly possessions—summed up in the pax terrena, carried out in all earthly affairs—they are sinful, and must finally perish, even if they be legitimate and salutary on earth. The secular kingdom is finally, indeed, a vast robbery (IV. 4): “righteousness being abolished, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”) [263] which ends in hell in everlasting war; the Roman Republic never possessed peace (XIX. 21). From this point of view the Divine State is the only legitimate association. But Augustine had yet another version to give of the matter. The establishment of earthly peace (pax terrena)—see its manifold forms in XIX. 13—is necessary upon earth. Even those who treasure heavenly peace as the highest good are bound to care on earth by love for earthly peace. (Already the Jewish State was legitimate in this sense; see the description IV. 34, and the general principle XV. 2: “We therefore find two forms in the earthly State, one demonstrating its present existence, the other serving to signify the heavenly State by its presence”; [264] here the Divine State is also to be understood by the earthly, in so far as the former is copied on earth.) The Roman kingdom has become Christian, and Augustine rejoices in the fact. [265] But it is only by the help of justitia that rests on love that the State can secure earthly peace, and lose the character of being a robbery (latrocinium). But righteousness and love only exist where the worship of the true God is found, in the Church, God’s State. [266] Accordingly the State must be dependent on the kingdom of God; in other words, those who, as rulers, administer the earthly peace of society, are legitimate and “blessed” (felices), when they make “their power subservient to the divine majesty for the extension as widely as possible of the worship of God, if they love that kingdom more, where they do not fear having colleagues.” [267] Rulers, therefore, must not only be Christians, but must serve the Church in order to attain their own object (pax terrena); for outside the Divine State—of love and righteousness—there are no virtues, but only the semblance of virtues, i.e., splendid vices (XIX. 25). However much Augustine may have recognised, here and elsewhere, the relative independence and title of the State, [268] the proposition stands, that since the Church is the kingdom of God it is the duty of the State to serve it, because the State becomes more legitimate by being, as it were, embodied in it. [269] It is especially the duty of the State, however, to aid the Church by forcible measures against idolatry, heretics, and schismatics; for compulsion is suitable in such cases to prevent the good from being seduced, to instruct the wavering and ignorant, and to punish the wicked. But it by no means follows from this that in Augustine’s view the State was to pursue anything that might be called an independent ecclesiastical or religious policy. It rather in matters of religion constantly supports the cause of the Church, and this at once implies that it is to receive its instructions from the Church. And this was actually Augustine’s procedure. His conception of the “Christian State” did not include any imperial papistical title on the part of the civil power; such a title was rather absolutely precluded. Even if the Church begged for clemency to heretics, against whom it had itself invoked the arm of the State, this did not establish the independent right of the latter to inflict punishment: it served the Church in punishing, and it gratified it in practising clemency. [270] II. 21. Augustine was compelled by the Donatist practice of re-baptism and re-ordination to examine more closely, following Optatus, the significance and efficacy of the functions of the Church. It was inevitable that in doing so he should give a more prominent place to the notion of the Church as the communion of the Sacraments, and at the same time have instituted extremely sophistical discussions on the Sacraments—which, however, he did not yet carry out to their conclusion—in order to prove their objectivity, and make them independent of men, yet without completely externalising them, while vindicating them as the Church’s exclusive property. 22. To begin with, it was an immense advance, only possible to so spiritual a man as Augustine, to rank the Word along with the Sacraments. It is to him we owe the phrase “the Word and Sacraments.” If he did not duly appreciate and carry out the import of the “Word,” yet he perceived that as gospel it lay at the root of every saving rite of the Church. [271] 23. Exhaustively as he dealt with the Sacraments, he was far from outlining a doctrine regarding them; he contented himself rather with empirical reflections on ecclesiastical procedure and its defence. He did not evolve a harmonious theory either of the number or notion of the Sacraments. [272] Every material sign with which a salvation-conferring word was connected was to him a Sacrament. “The word is added to the element, and a Sacrament is constituted, itself being, as it were, a visible word.” [273] The emphasis rests so strongly on the Word and faith (on John XXV. 12: “believe and thou hast eaten”) that the sign is simply described in many places, and indeed, as a rule, as a figure. But this view is modified by the fact that in almost as many passages the Word, with its saving power, is also conceived as a sign of an accompanying invisible entity, [274] and all are admonished to take whatever is here presented to the senses as a guarantee of the reality. But everything beyond this is involved in obscurity, since we do not know to what signs Augustine would have us apply his ideas about the Sacrament; in De doctr. Christ. he speaks as if Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were almost alone in question, but in other passages his language is different. [275] 24. He himself had no occasion to pursue his reflections further in this direction. On the other hand, the Donatist thesis that the efficacy of the Sacrament depended on the celebrant, and the Donatist practice of re-baptism, forced him to set up two self-contradictory positions. First, the Sacraments are only efficacious in the Church, but they are also efficacious in circles outside the Church. If he abandoned the former principle, he denied the indispensableness of the Church; if he sacrificed the second, he would have required to approve of re-baptism. Secondly, the Sacraments are independent of any human disposition, and they are inseparably attached to the Catholic Church and faith. To give up the one thesis meant that the Donatist was right; to doubt the other was to make the Sacrament a magical performance indifferent to Christianity and faith. In order to remove these contradictions, it was necessary to look for distinctions. These he found, not, say, by discriminating between the offer and bestowal of grace, but by assuming a twofold efficacy of the Sacraments. These were (1) an indelible marking of every recipient, which took place wherever the Sacrament was administered, no matter by whom, [276] and (2) an administration of grace, in which the believer participated only in the union of the Catholic Church. According to this he could teach that: the Sacraments belong exclusively to the Catholic Church, and only in it bestow grace on faith; but they can be purloined from that Church, since, “being holy in themselves,” they primarily produce an effect which depends solely on the Word and sign (the impression of an indelible “stamp”), and not on a human factor. [277] Heretics have stolen it, and administer it validly in their associations. Therefore the Church does not again baptise repentant heretics (schismatics), being certain that at the moment of faithful submission to the Catholic communion of love, the Sacrament is “efficacious for salvation” (ad salutem valet) to him who had been baptised outside its pale. [278] 25. This theory could not but leave the nature of the “stamp” impressed and its relation to the communication of grace obscure. [279] The legal claim of schismatics and heretics to belong to the Catholic Church appears to be the most important, and, indeed, the sole effect of the “objectivity” of the Sacraments outside the Church. [280] But the theory was only worked out by Augustine in baptism and ordination, though even here he did not succeed in settling all the problems that arose, or in actually demonstrating the “objectivity.” But in his treatment of the Lord’s Supper, e.g., it cannot be demonstrated at all. For since, according to him, the reality of the Sacrament (res sacramenti) was invisible incorporation in the body of Christ (Augustine deals with the elements symbolically), and the eucharistic sacrifice was the sacrifice of love or peace, the co-operation of the Catholic Church is always taken to be essential to the Lord’s Supper. Accordingly there is here no “stamp” independent of the Church. [281] But in the case of Baptism, he could assume that it could establish, even outside of the Church, an inalienable relation to the triune God, whose place could not be supplied by anything else, which in certain circumstances created a kind of faith, but which only bestowed salvation within the pale of the Church. [282] And in the case of Ordination he could teach that, properly bestowed, it conveyed the inalienable power to administer the Sacraments, although the recipient, if he stood outside the Church, only officiated to his own perdition. [283] In both cases his view was determined by the following considerations. First, he sought to defend the Church, and to put the Donatists in the wrong. Secondly, he desired to indicate the mark of the Church’s holiness, which could not, with certainty, be established in any other way, in the objective holiness of the Sacraments. And, thirdly, he wished to give expression to the thought that there must exist somewhere, in the action of the Church, an element to which faith can cling, which is not supported by men, but which sustains faith itself, and corresponds to the assurance which the believer rests on grace. Augustine’s doctrine of grace has a very great share in his doctrine of the sacraments, or, more accurately, of the sacrament of baptism. On the other hand, he had by no means any sacerdotal interest in this conception. But it could not fail afterwards to develop in an essentially sacerdotal sense. But, at the same time, men were impelled in quite a different direction by the distinction between the outward rite and accompanying effect, by the value given to the “Word” and the desire to maintain the objectivity of the Sacrament. The above distinction could not but lead in later times to a spiritualising which refined away the Sacraments, or, on the other hand, centred them in the “Word,” where stress was laid on a given and certain authority, and therewith on the supremacy of the Word. Both these cases occurred. Not only does the Mediæval Catholic doctrine of the Sacraments go back to Augustine, but so do the spiritualists of the Middle Ages, and, in turn, Luther and Calvin are indebted to him for suggestions. [284] _________________________________________________________________ Augustine’s conception, above described, of the visible Church and means of grace is full of self-contradictions. His identification of the Church with the visible Catholic Church was not a success. He meant that there should be only one Church, and that none but believers should belong to it; but the wicked and hypocrites were also in it, without being it; nay, even heretics were in a sense in it, since they participated in the Sacraments. But in that case is the Church still visible? It is—in the Sacraments. But the Church which is visible in the Sacraments is certainly not the bride and body of Christ, the indispensable institution of salvation; that is alone the Church which is possessed by the spirit of love; and yet it is masked by the presence of the wicked and hypocritical. And the Sacrament cannot be relied upon; for while it is certainly not efficacious for salvation outside the Catholic Church, it is by no means certainly efficacious within it. The one Church is the true body of Christ, a mixed body, and the outward society of the Sacraments; in each instance we have a different circle; but it is as essential and important that it should be the one as the other. What is the meaning, then, “of being in the Church” (in ecclesia esse)? Every speculation on the notions of things is fated to stumble on contradictions; everything can be something else, anything is everything, and everything is nothing. The speculation surprises us with a hundred points of view—that is its strength—to end in none of them being really authoritative. But all Augustine’s deliverances on this subject are seen to be merely conditional in their value, not only from their self-contradictions, but from the fact that the theologian is not, or is only to a very limited extent, expressing his religious conviction. He felt and wrote as he did because he was the defender of the practice of the Church, whose authority he needed for his faith. But this faith took quite other directions. Even those inconsistencies, which indeed were partly traditional, show that his conception of the Church was penetrated by an element which resisted the idea that it was visible. This element, however, was itself by no means congruous throughout, but again cornprehended various though intertwined features. 1. The Church is heavenly; as bride and body of Christ it is quite essentially a heavenly society (cælestis societas). This ancient traditional idea stood in the foreground of Augustine’s practical faith. What the Church is, it cannot at all be on earth; it possesses its truth, its seat, in heaven. There alone is to be found the true sphere of its members; a small fragment wander as pilgrims here upon earth for a time. It may indeed be said that upon earth we have only the copy of the heavenly Church for in so far as the earthly fragment is a “civitas terrena” (an earthly state) it is not yet what it will be. It is united with the heavenly Church by hope. It is folly to regard the present Church as the Kingdom of Heaven. “What is left them but to assert that the kingdom of heaven itself belongs to the temporal life in which we now exist? For why should not blind presumption advance to such a pitch of madness? And what is wilder than that assertion? For although the Church even as it now exists is sometimes called the kingdom of heaven, it is surely so named because of its future and eternal existence?” [285] 2. The Church is primeval, and its members are therefore not all included in the visible institution of the Catholic Church. We now meet with the conception expounded by Augustine in his great work “De civitate dei,” at which he wrought for almost fifteen years. The civitas dei, i.e., the society in which there rules “the love of God to the contempt of self” (amor dei usque ad contemptum sui, XIV. 28), and which therefore aspires to “heavenly peace” (pax cælestis), began in the angelic world. With this the above conception (see sub. 1) is combined: the city of God is the heavenly Jerusalem. But it embraces all believers of the past, present, and future; it mingled with the earthly State (civitas terrena) before the Deluge, [286] ran through a history on earth in six periods (the Deluge, Abraham, David, the Exile, Christ, and Christ’s second Advent), and continues intermingled with the secular State to the end. With the transcendental conception of the City of God is thus combined, here and elsewhere, [287] the universalist belief applied to the present world: [288] Christianity, old as the world, has everywhere and in all ages had its confessors who “without doubt” have received salvation; for the “Word” was ever the same, and has always been at work under the most varied forms (“prius occultius, postea manifestius”) [289] down to the Incarnation. He who believed on this Word, that is Christ, received eternal salvation. [290] 3. The Church is the communion of those who believe in the crucified Christ, and are subject to the influences of his death, and who are therefore holy and spiritual (sancti et spiritales). To this view we are conducted by the conclusion from the previous one, the humanist and universalist element being stript away. If we ask: Where is the Church? Augustine answers in innumerable passages, wherever the communion of these holy and spiritual persons is found. They are Christ’s body, the house, temple, or city of God. Grace on the one hand, faith, love, and hope on the other, constitute accordingly the notion of the Church. Or briefly: “the Church which is on earth exists by the remission of sins,” or still more certainly “the Church exists in love.” [291] In any number of expositions Augustine ignores every idea of the Church except this, which leads him to think of a spiritual communion alone, and he is as indifferent to the conception of the Church being an outward communion of the Sacraments as to the last one now to be mentioned. [292] 4. The Church is the number of the elect. The final consequence of Augustine’s doctrine of grace (see next section) teaches that salvation depends on God’s inscrutable predestination (election of grace) and on that alone. Therefore the Church cannot be anything but the number of the elect. This is not, however, absolutely comprehended in the external communion of the Catholic Church—for some have been elect, who were never Catholics, and others are elect who are not yet Catholics. Nor is it simply identical with the communion of the saints (that is of those who submit themselves in faith to the operation of the means of grace); for these may include for the time such as will yet relapse, and may not include others who will ultimately be saved. Thus the thought of predestination shatters every notion of the Church—that mentioned under 2 can alone to some extent hold its ground—and renders valueless all divine ordinances, the institution and means of salvation. The number of the elect is no Church. The elect of God are to be found inside and outside the Church, under the operation and remote from the operation of sacramental grace; God has his subjects among the enemy, and his enemies among those who for the time being are “good.” [293] Augustine, the Catholic, did not, however, venture to draw the inexorable consequences of this conception; if he was ever led to see them he contented himself with bringing more closely together the notions of the external communion, communion of saints, Christ’s body, city of God, kingdom of heaven, and number of elect, and with thus making it appear as if they were identified. He stated his conviction that the number of the elect was substantially confined to the empirical Catholic Church, and that we must therefore use diligently all its benefits. But on the other hand, the faith that actuated his own life was too personal to let him bind grace, the source of faith, love, and hope, indissolubly to mechanical means and external institutions, and he was too strongly dominated by the thought of God’s majesty and self-sufficiency to bring himself to examine God narrowly as to the why and how of his actions. He never did maintain that predestination was realised by means of the Church and its communication of grace. [294] Augustine’s different conceptions of the Church are only united in the person of their originator, whose rich inner life was ruled by varied tendencies. The attempts to harmonise them which occur in his writings are, besides being few in number, quite worthless. But the scholastic endeavour to combine or pack together the different notions by new and flimsy distinctions leads to theological chatter. Even Augustine’s opponents apparently felt only a small part of the inconsistencies. Men at that time were far from seeking in religious conceptions that kind of consistency which is even at the present day felt as a want by only a small minority, and in any case is no necessary condition of a sincere piety. Perhaps the most important consequence of Augustine’s doctrine of the Church and Sacraments consists in the fact that a complex of magical ceremonies and ideas, which was originally designed to counter-balance a moralistic mode of thought based on the doctrine of free-will, now held its ground alongside of a religious frame of mind. The Sacrament had a deteriorating effect on the latter; but, on the other hand, it was only by this combination that it was itself rendered capable of being reformed. It is impossible to mistake, even in the case of Augustine himself, that the notion of the Church in which his own life centred was swayed by the thought of the certainty of grace and earnestness of faith and love, and that, similarly, his supreme intention, in his doctrine of the means of grace, was to establish the comfort derived from the sure grace of God in Christ, which was independent of human agency. Augustine subordinated the notions of the Church and Sacraments to the spiritual doctrine of God, Christ, the gospel, faith and love, as far as that was at all possible about A.D. 400. _________________________________________________________________ [233] The Manichæans professed, in the controversy of the day, to be the men of “free inquiry” (“docendi fontem aperire gloriantur” De utilit. 21). We cannot here discuss how far they were; Augustine did not conscientiously feel that his breach with them was a breach with free inquiry. Therefore the efforts from the outset to define the relations of ratio and auctoritas, and to save what was still possible of the former. [234] Psalmus c. partem Donati—C. Parmeniani epist. ad Tichonium b. III.—De bapt. c. Donatistas, b. VII.—C. litteras Petiliani, b. III.—Ep. ad Catholicos c. Donatistas—C. Cresconium, b. IV.—De unico bapt. c. Petilianum—Breviculus Collationis c. Donatistis—Post collationem ad Donatistas. Further, at a later date Sermo ad Cæsareensis ecclesiæ plebem—De gestis cum Emerito—C. Gaudentium Donatistam episcopum, b. II. The Sermo de Rusticiano is a forgery by the notorious Hieronymus Viguerius. [235] Augustine supported, at least from A.D. 407, the suppression by force of the Donatists by the Christian state in the interest of “loving discipline.” The discussion of A.D. 411 was a tragi-comedy. Last traces of the Donatists are still found in the time of Gregory I., who anew invoked the aid of the Civil power against them. [236] C. Litt. Petil I. 3: “Qui fidem a perfido sumpserit non fidem percipit, sed reatum.” I. 2: “Conscientia dantis adtenditur, qui abluat accipientis.” Other Donatistic theses ran (l.c.) “Omnes res origine et radice consistit, et si caput non habet aliquid, nihil est.” “Nec quidquam bene regenerat, nisi bono semine (boni sacerdotis) regeneretur.” “Quæ potest esse perversitas ut qui suis criminibus reus est, alium faciat innocentem?” [237] The Donatists, of course, did not regard it as re-baptism, l.c. “non repetimus quod jam erat, sed damus quod non erat.” [238] Doctrine is, strictly speaking, inaccurate; for Catholicism does not know of any “doctrines” here, but describes an actual state of matters brought about by God. [239] Grace is love and love is grace: “caritas est gratia testamenti novi.” [240] C. Crescon. I. 34: “Non autem existimo quemquam ita desipere, ut credat ad ecclesiæ pertinere unitatem eum qui non habet caritatem. Sicut ergo deus unus colitur ignoranter etiam extra ecclesiam nec ideo non est ipse, et fides una habetur sine caritate etiam extra ecclesiam, nec ideo non est ipse, ita et unus baptismus, etc.” God and faith also exist extra ecclesiam but not “pie.” The relevant passages are so numerous that it would give a false idea to quote singly. The conception given here constitutes the core of Augustine’s doctrine of the Church: The Holy Ghost, love, unity, and Church occupy an exclusive connection: “caritas christiana nisi in unitate ecclesiæ non potest custodiri, etsi baptismum et fidem teneatis” (c. Pet. litt. II. 172). [241] De unit eccl. 7: “totus Christus caput et corpus est.” De civit. XXI. 25. De pecc. mer. I. 59: “Homines sancti et fideles fiunt cum homine Christo unus Christus, ut omnibus per ejus hanc gratiam societatemque adscendentibus ipse unus Christus adscendat in cælum, qui de cælo descendit.” Sermo 354, I: “Prædicat Christus Christum.” [242] De civit. dei, XVIII. 51, X. [243] Ep. 173, 6: “Foris ab ecclesia constitutus et separatus a compagine unitatis et vinculo caritatis æterno supplicio puniveris, etiam si pro Christi nomine vivus incenderis.” [244] The Biblical texts are here used that had been already quoted against Calixtus and the Anti-Novatians (Noah’s Ark, The Wheat and Tares, etc.). [245] Augustine seems to have thought that the bad were in the majority even in the Church. He at anyrate held that the majority of men would be lost (Enchir. 97). [246] De bapt. II. 8: If the Donatists were right, there would have been no Church even in Cyprian’s time; their own origin would therefore have been unholy. Augustine often reproaches them with the number of gross sinners in their midst. Their grossest sin, it is true, was—schism (c. litt. Pet. II. 221). [247] C. Petil. I. 25: “Malos in unitate catholica vel non noverunt, vel pro unitate tolerant quos noverunt.” [248] Here and there in Augustine the thought occurs that the new covenant was throughout milder than the old. [249] C. litt. Pet. III. 4: “Licet a malis interim vita, moribus, corde ac voluntate separari atque discedere, quæ separatio semper oportet custodiatur. Corporalis autem separatio ad sæculi finem fidenter, patienter, fortiter exspectatur.” [250] Sermo 4, 11: “Omnes quotquot fuerunt sancti, ad ipsam ecclesiam pertinent.” [251] “Corpus permixtum” against the second rule of Tichonius, who had spoken of a bipartite body of the Lord, a term rejected by Augustine. Not a few of Augustine’s arguments here suggest the idea that an invisible Church present “in occulto” in the visible was the true Church (De bapt. V. 38). [252] De bapt. I. 13: The question of the Donatists was whether in the view of Catholics baptism begot “sons” in the Donatist Church. if the Catholics said it did, then it should follow that the Donatists had a Church, and since there was only one, the Church; but if the question was answered in the negative, then they drew the inference: “Cur ergo apud vos non renascuntur per baptismum, qui transeunt a nobis ad vos, cum apud nos fuerint baptizati, si nondum nati sunt?” To this Augustine replies: “Quasi vero ex hoc generet unde separata est, et non ex hoc unde conjuncta est. Separata est enim a vinculo caritatis et pacio, sed juncta est in uno baptismate. Itaque est una ecclesia, quæ sola Catholica nominatur; et quidquid suum habet in communionibus diversorum a sua unitate separatis, per hoc quod suum in eis habet, ipsa utique general, non illæ.” [253] A Donatist, “historicus doctus,” indeed urged the telling objection (Ep. 93, 23) “Quantum ad totius mundi pertinet partes, modica pars est in compensatione totius mundi, in qua fides Christiana nominatur.” Augustine, naturally, was unable really to weaken the force of this objection. [254] We have already remarked that Augustine held these to have—at least in many respects—an independent authority; see Doctrina Christ. and Ep 54, 55. In not a few expositions it seems as if the appeal to the Church was solely to the Church that possessed Scripture. [255] Besides the whole of the anti-Donatist writings, see, e.g., Ep. 43, 21; 44, 3; 49, 2, 3; 51, 5; 53, 3. [256] De civit. dei, XX. 10: Distinction between sacerdotes and proprie sacerdotes. [257] Augustine’s attitude to the Roman Bishop, i.e. to the infallible Roman tradition, is shown clearly in his criticism of Zosimus (Reuter p. 312 ff., 325 ff.) and in the extremely valuable 36 Epistle, which discusses the work of an anonymous Roman writer, who had glorified the Roman Church along with Peter (c. 21 “Petrus, apostolorum caput, cœli janitor, ecclesiæ fundamentum”), and had declared statutory institutions of the Roman Church to be universally binding. [258] C. litt. Pet. III. 10: “deum patrem et ejus ecclesiam matrem habere.” [259] Perhaps the most cogent evidence of this is Ep. 36, 17. The anonymous Roman Christian had appealed to the verse “Non est regnum dei esca et potus,” and simply identified “regnum dei” with “ecclesia,” to prove that the Roman command to fast on the Sabbath was apostolic. Augustine does not reject this identification, but only the inference drawn from it by the anonymous writer. Here, however, ecclesia is manifestly the Catholic Church. In De trinit. I. 16, 20, 21, Augustine has no doubt that the regnum, which Christ will hand over to the Father, “omnes justi sunt, in quibus nunc regnat mediator,” or the “credentes et viventes ex fide; fideles quippe ejus quos redemit sanguine suo dicti sunt regnum ejus.” That is the Church; but at the same time it is self-evident that its “wrinkles” are ignored, yet not so its organisation; see on Ps. CXXVI. 3: “Quæ autem domus dei et ipsa civitas? Domus enim dei populus dei, quia domus dei templum dei . . . omnes fideles, quæ est domus dei, cum angelis faciunt unam civitatem. Habet custodes. Christus custodiebat, custos erat. Et episcopi hoc faciunt. Nam ideo altior locus positus est episcopis, ut ipsi superintendant et tamquam custodiant populum.” [260] How far he went in this is shown by observing that in B. XX. he has connected with the present, as already fulfilled, not a few passages which plainly refer to Christ’s Second Advent; see c. 5: “Multa præterea quæ de ultimo judicio ita dici videntur, ut diligenter considerata reperiantur ambigua vel magis ad aliud pertinentia, sive scilicet ad eum salva oris adventum, quo per totum hoc tempus in ecclesia sua venit, hoc est in membris suis, particulatim atque paulatim, quoniam tota corpus est ejus, sive ad excidium terrenæ Hierusalem, quia et de illo cum loquitur, plerumque sic loquitur tamquam de fine sæculi atque illo die judicii novissimo et magno loquatur.” Yet he has left standing much of the dramatic eschatology. [261] See Reuter, Studie III. [262] Augustine had already written in Ep. 35 (A.D. 396, c. 3): “Dominus jugo suo in gremio ecclesiæ toto orbe diffuso omnia terrena regna subjecit.” [263] “Remota justitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia”? [264] “Invenimus ergo in terrena civitate dual formas, unam suam præsentiam demonstrantem, alteram cælesti civitati signifcandæ sua præsentia servientem.” [265] It is not, accordingly, involved under all circumstances in the notion of the earthly State that it is the organism of sin. Passages on the Christian State, Christian ages, and Catholic emperors, are given in Reuter, p. 141. [266] Augustine, indeed, also holds that there is an earthly justitia, which is a great good contrasted with flagitia and facinora; he can even appreciate the value of relative blessings (Reuter, p. 135 ff.), but this righteousness finally is dissipated, because, not having itself issued from “the Good,” it cannot permanently institute anything good. [267] V. 24: If they “suam potestatem ad dei cultum maxime dilatandum majestati ejus famulam faciunt, si plus amant illud regnum, ubi non timent habere consortes.” [268] What holds true of the State applies equally, of course, to all particular blessings marriage, family, property, etc. [269] Augustine, therefore, hold; a different view from Optatus (see above, p. 48); at least, a second consideration is frequent, in which the Church does not exist in the Roman empire, but that empire is attached to the Church. In matters of terrena felicitas the Church, according to Augustine, was bound to obey the State. [270] On the relation of Church and State, see Dorner, pp. 295-312, and the modifications considered necessary by Reuter in Studien, 3 and 6. Augustine did not at first approve the theory of inquisition and compulsion (c. Ep. Man. c. 1-3), but he was convinced of its necessity in the Donatist controversy (“coge intrare”). He now held all means of compulsion legitimate except the death penalty; Optatus approved of the latter also. If it is not difficult to demonstrate that Augustine always recognised an independent right of the State to be obeyed, yet that proves little. It may, indeed, be the case that Augustine valued the State relatively more highly than the ancient Christians, who were still more strongly influenced by eschatological views. But we may not forget that he advanced not only the cælestis societas, but the catholica, in opposition to the State. [271] Ep. 21, 3: “sacramentum et verbum dei populo ministrare.” Very frequently verbum = evangelium = Christ and the first cause of regeneration. C. litt. Pet. I. 8: “Semen quo regeneror verbum dei est.” The objective efficacy of the Word is sharply emphasised, but—outside of the Church it does not succeed in infusing love. C. Pet. III. 67: “minister verbi et sacramenti evangelici, si bonus est, consocius fit evangelii, si autem malus est, non ideo dispensator non est evangelii.” II. 11: “Nascitur credens non ex ministri sterilitate, sed ex veritatis fœcunditate.” Still, Luther was right when he included even Augustine among the new-fashioned theologians who talk much about the Sacraments and little about the Word. [272] “Aliud videtur aliud intelligitur” (Sermo 272) is Augustine’s main thought, which Ratramnus afterwards enforced so energetically. Hahn (L. v. d. Sacram., p. 11 ff.) has detailed Augustine’s various statements on the notion of the Sacrament. We learn, e.g., from Ep. 36 and 54, the strange point of view from which at times he regarded the conception of the Sacrament: see 54, 1: “Dominus noster, sicut ipse in evangelio loquitur, leni jugo suo nos subdidit et sarcinæ levi; unde sacramentis numero paucissimis, observatione facillimis, significatione præstantissimis societatem novi populi colligavit.” Baptism and the Lord’s Supper follow “et si quid aliud in scripturis canonicis commendatur. . . . Illa autem quæ non scripta, sed tradita custodimus, quæ quidem toto terrarum orbe servantur, datur intelligi vel ab ipsis apostolis, vel plenariis conciliis, quorum est in ecclesia saluberrima auctoritas, commendata atque statuta retineri, sicut quod domini passio et resurrectio et ascensio in cælum et adventus de cælo spiritus sancti anniversaria sollemnitate celebrantur, et si quid aliud tale occurrit quod servatur ab universa, quacumque se diffundit, ecclesia.” [273] On John T. 80, 3: “Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tamquam visibile verbum. [274] De catech. rud. 50: “Signacula quidem rerum divinarum esse visibilia, sed res ipsas invisibiles in eis honorari.” [275] Hahn (p. 12) gives the following definition as Augustinian: “The Sacrament is a corporeal sign, instituted by God, of a holy object, which, from its nature, it is adapted by a certain resemblance to represent, and by means of it God, under certain conditions, imparts his grace to those who make use of it.” [276] Ep. 173, 3: “Vos oves Christi estis, characterem dominicum portatis in Sacramento.” De bapt. c. Donat. IV. 16: “Manifestum est, fieri posse, ut in eis qui sunt ex parte diaboli sanctum sit sacramentum Christi, non ad salutem, sed ad judicium eorum . . . signa nostri imperatoris in eis cognoscimus . . . desertores sunt.” VI. 1: “Oves dominicum characterem a fallacibus deprædatoribus foris adeptæ.” [277] De bapt. IV. 16: “Per se ipsum considerandus est baptismus verbis evangelicis, non adjuncta neque permixta ulla perversitate atque malitia sive accipientium sive tradentium . . . non cogitandum, quis det sed quid det.” C. litt. Pet. I . 8: “(Against various Donatist theses, e.g., ‘conscientia dantis adtenditur, qui abluat accipientis’) Sæpe mihi ignota est humana conscientia, sed certus sum de Christi misericordia . . . non est perfidus Christus, a quo fidem percipio, non reatum . . . origo mea Christus est, radix mea Christus est . . . semen quo regeneror, verbum dei est . . . etiam si ille, per quem audio, quæ mihi dicit ipse non facit . . . me innocentem non facit nisi qui mortuus est propter delicta nostra et resurrexit propter justificationem nostram. Non enim in ministrum, per quem baptizor, credo, sed in eum, qui justificat impium.” [278] We have to emphasise the distinction between “habere” and “utiliter habere” often drawn in the writings against the Donatists; c. Cresc. I. 34: “Vobis (Donatistis) pacem nos annuntiamus, non ut, cum ad nos veneritis, alterum baptismum accipiatis, sed ut eum qui jam apud vos erat utiliter habeatis,” or “una catholica ecclesia non in qua sola unus baptismus habetur, sed in qua sola unus baptismus salubriter habetur.” De bapt. c. Donat. IV. 24: “Qui in invidia intus et malevolentia sine caritate vivunt, verum baptisma possunt et accipere et tradere. (Sed) salus, inquit Cyprianus, extra ecclesiam non est. Quis negat? Et ideo quæcumque ipsius ecclesiæ habentur, extra ecclesiam non valent ad salutem. Sed aliud est non habere, aliud non utiliter habere.” [279] In the Catholic Church the seal and salvation coincide where faith is present. Augustine’s primary concern was that the believer should receive in the Sacrament a firm conviction of the mercy of Christ. [280] Augustine did not really lay any stress on legal relation; but he did, as a matter of fact, a great deal to set matters in this light. [281] Sermo 57, 7: “Eucharistia panis noster quotidianus est; sed sic accipiamus illum, ut non solum ventre sed et mente reficiamur. Virtus enim ipsa, quæ ibi intelligitur, unitas est, ut redacti in corpus ejus, effecti membra ejus, simus quod accipimus.” 272: “panis est corpus Christi . . . corpus Christi si vis intelligere, apostolum audi: vos estis corpus Christi.” Augustine maintains the traditional conception that, in speaking of the “body of Christ,” we may think of all the ideas connected with the word (the body is pneumatikon, is itself spirit, is the Church), but he prefers the latter, and, like the ancient Church, suffers the reference to forgiveness of sins to fall into the background. Unitas and vita (De pecc. mer. I. 34) occupy the foreground. Therefore in this case also, nay, more than in that of any other signum, the sign is wholly irrelevant. This “sacramentum unitatis” assures believers and gives them what they are, on condition of their possessing faith. (On John XXVI. 1: “credere in eum, hoc est manducare panem vivum”; De civit. XX I. 25.) No one has more strongly resisted the realistic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, and pointed out that what “visibiliter celebratur, oportet invisibiliter intelligi” (On Ps. XCVIII. 9 fin.). “The flesh profits nothing,” and Christ is not on earth “secundum corporis præsentiam.” Now it is possible that, like the Greeks, Augustine might here or there have entertained the thought that the sacramental body of the Lord must also be identified with the real. But I have found no passage which clearly supports this (see also Dorner, p. 267 ff.). All we can say is that not a few passages at a first glance can be, and soon were, understood in this way. Augustine, the spiritual thinker, has in general greatly weakened the dogmatic significance of the Sacrament. He indeed describes it, like Baptism, as necessary to salvation; but since he hardly ever cites the argument that it is connected with the resurrection and eternal life, the necessity is reduced to the unity and love which find one expression along with others in the Lord’s Supper. The holy food is rather, in general, a declaration and assurance, or the avowal of an existing state, than a gift. In this Augustine agrees undoubtedly with the so-called pre-Reformers and Zwingli. This leads us to the import of the rite as a sacrifice (“sacrificium corporis Christi”). Here there are four possible views. The Church presents itself as a sacrifice in Christ’s body; Christ’s sacrificial death is symbolically repeated by the priest in memory of him; Christ’s body is really offered anew by the priest; and Christ, as priest, continually and everywhere presents himself as a sacrifice to the Father. Of these views, 1, 2, and 4 can certainly be instanced in Augustine, but not the third. He strictly maintains the prerogative of the priest; but there is as little mention of a “conficere corpus Christi” as of Transubstantiation; for the passage (Sermo 234, 2) to which Catholics delight to appeal: “non omnis panis sed accipiens benedictionem fit corpus Christi,” only means that, as in all Sacraments, the res is now added to the panis, and makes it the signum rei invisibilis; by consecration the bread becomes something different from what it was before. The res invisibilis is not, however, the real body, but incorporation into Christ’s body, which is the Church. According to Augustine, the unworthy also obtain the valid Sacrament, but what they do receive is indeed wholly obscure. I could not say with Dorner (p. 274): “Augustine does not know of any participation in the real (?) body and blood on the part of unbelievers.” [282] It is now the proper administration of baptism (rite) that is emphasised. The Sacrament belongs to God; therefore it cannot be rendered invalid by sin or heresy. The indispensableness of baptism rests of sheer necessity on the “stamp,” and that is the most fatal turn it could take, because in that case faith is by no means certainly implied. The “Punici” are praised in De pecc. mer. I. 34, because they simply call baptism “salus”; but yet the indispensableness of the rite is not held to consist in its power of conferring salvation, but in the stamp. This indispensableness is only infringed by the baptism of blood, or by the wish to receive baptism where circumstances render that impossible. In the corresponding line of thought baptism rightly administered among heretics appears, because possessed unlawfully, to be actually inefficacious, nay, it brings a judgment. The Euphrates, which flows in Paradise and in profane countries, only brings forth fruit in the former. Therefore the controversy between Dorner and Schmidt, whether Augustine did or did not hold the Sacrament to be dependent on the Catholic Church, is idle. It is independent of it, in so far as it is necessary; dependent, if it is to bestow salvation. Yet Dorner (l.c. p. 252 f., and elsewhere) seems to me to be advancing not an Augustinian conception, but at most a deduction from one, when he maintains that Augustine does not contradict the idea that the Church is rendered holy by its membership, by emphasising the Sacraments, but by laying stress on the sanctity of the whole, namely the Church. He repeatedly makes the suggestion, however, in order to remove the difficulties in Augustine’s notion of the Sacraments, that he must have distinguished between the offer and bestowal of grace; even the former securing their objective validity. But this is extremely questionable, and would fall short of Augustine; for his correct religious view is that grace operates and does not merely make an offer. Augustine, besides, has wavered to such an extent in marking off the place of the stamp, and of saving efficacy in baptism, that he has even supposed a momentary forgiveness of sin in the case of heretics (De bapt. I. 19; III. 18: “rursus debita redeunt per hæresis aut schismatis obstinationem et ideo necessarium habent hujusmodi homines venire ad Catholicam pacem;” for, on John XXVII. 6: “pax ecclesiæ dimittit peccata et ab ecclesiæ pace alienatio tenet peccata; petra tenet, petra dimittit; columba tenet, columba dimittit; unitas tenet, unitas dimittit”). The most questionable feature of Augustine’s doctrine of baptism (within the Church) is that he not only did not get rid of the magical idea, but strengthened it by his interest in infant baptism. While he intended that baptism and faith should be connected, infant baptism made a cleavage between them. He deduced the indispensableness of infant baptism from original sin, but by no means also from the tendency to make the salvation of all men dependent on the Church (see Dorner, p. 257). In order to conserve faith in baptism, Augustine assumed a kind of vicarious faith on the part of god-parents, but, as it would appear, he laid no stress on it, since his true opinion was that baptism took the place of faith for children. However, the whole doctrine of baptism is ultimately for Augustine merely preliminary. Baptism is indispensable, but it is, after all, nothing more. The main thing is the active presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul; so that, from this point of view, baptism is of no real importance for salvation. But Augustine was far from drawing this inference. [283] Little reflection had hitherto been given in the Church to ordination. The Donatists furnished a motive for thinking about it, and it was once more Augustine who bestowed on the Church a series of sacerdotal ideas, without himself being interested in their sacerdotal tendency. The practice had indeed for long been sacerdotal; but it was only by its fateful combination with baptism, and the principle that ordination did not require (as against Cyprian) a moral disposition to render it valid, that the new sacrament became perfect. It now conferred an inalienable stamp, and was, therefore, if it had been properly administered, even though outside the Church, not repeated, and as it communicated an objective holiness, it gave the power also to propagate holiness. From Book I. c. 1 of De bapt. c. Donat. onwards, the sacramentum baptismi and the sacramentum baptismi dandi are treated in common (§ 2: “sicut baptizatus, si ab unitate recesserit, sacramentum baptismi non amittit, sic etiam ordinatus, si ab unitate recesserit, sacramentum dandi baptismi non amittit.” C. ep. Parm. II. 28: “utrumque in Catholica non licet iterari.” The clearest passage is De bono conjug. 32: “Quemadmodum si fiat ordinatio cleri ad plebem congregandam, etiamsi plebis congregatio non subsequatur, manet tamen in illis ordinatis sacramentum ordinationis, et si aliqua culpa quisquam ab officio removeatur, sacramento domini semel imposito non carebit, quamvis ad judicium permanente”). The priests are alone appointed to administer the sacraments (in c. ep. Parm. II. 29 we have the remarkably tortuous explanation of lay-baptism; Augustine holds that it is a veniale delictum, even when the necessity is urgent; he, at least, believes it possible that it is so. But baptism, even when unnecessarily usurped by laymen, is valid, although illicite datum; for the “stamp” is there. Yet Augustine warns urgently against encroaching on the office of the priest.) None but the priest can celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That was ancient tradition. The judicial functions of priests fall into the background in Augustine (as compared with Cyprian). We do not find in him, in a technical form, a sacrament of penance. Yet it actually existed, and he was the first to give it a substructure by his conception that the gratia Christi was not exhausted in the retrospective effect of baptismal grace. In that period, baptism and penance were named together as if they were the two chief Sacraments, without the latter being expressly called a Sacrament; see Pelagius’ confession of faith (Hahn, § 133): “Hominem, si post baptismum lapsus fuerit, per pænitentiam credimus posse salvari;” which is almost identical with that of Julian of Eclanum (l.c. § 535): “Eum, qui post baptismum peccaverit, per pænitentiam credimus posse salvari;” and Augustine’s (Enchir. 46): “Peccata, quæ male agendo postea committuntur, possunt et pænitendo sanari, sicut etiam post baptismum fieri videmus;” (c. 65): “Neque de ipsis criminibus quamlibet magnis remittendis in sancta ecclesia dei misericordia desperanda est agentibus pænitentiam secundum modum sui cujusque peccati.” He is not speaking of baptism, but of the Church’s treatment of its members after baptism, when he says (l.c. c. 83): “Qui vero in ecclesia remitti peccata non credens contemnit tantam divini muneris largitatem et in hac obstinatione mentis diem claudit extremum, reus est illo irremissibili peccato in spiritum sanctum.” [284] A passage in Augustine’s letter to Januarius (Ep. 55, c. 2) on the nature of the sacrament became very important for after ages: “Primum oportet noveris diem natalem domini non in sacramento celebrari, sed tantum in memoriam revocari quod natus sit, ac per hoc nihil opus erat, nisi revolutum anni diem, quo ipsa res acta est, festa devotione signari. Sacramentum est autem in aliqua celebratione, cum rei gestæ commemoratio ita fit, ut aliquid etiam signfcari intelligatur, quod sancte accipiendum est. Eo itaque modo egimus pascha ut non solum in memoriam quod gestum est, revocemus, id est, quod mortuus est Christus et resurrexit, sed etiam cetera, quæ circa ea adtestantur ad sacramenti significationem non omittamus.” [285] De virgin. 24: “Quid aliud istis restat nisi ut ipsum regnum cælorum ad hanc temporalem vitam, in qua nunc sumus, asserant pertinere? Cur enim non et in hanc insaniam progrediatur cæca præsumptio? Et quid hac assertione furiosius? Nam etsi regnum cælorum aliquando ecclesia etiam quæ hoc tempore est appellatur ad hoc utique sic appellatur, quia futuræ vitæ sempiternæque colligitur.” It is needless to quote more passages, they are so numerous. [286] See on this above, p. 151. [287] E.g., Ep. 102, quæst 2, esp. § 12. [288] See above, p. 152, n. 2. [289] Formerly more hiddenly, afterwards more manifestly. [290] In this line of thought the historical Christ takes a very secondary place; but it is quite different in others; see Sermo 116, 6: “Per Christum factus est alter mundus.” [291] “Per remissionem peccatorum stat ecclesia quæ est in terris.” “In caritate stat ecclesia.” [292] We see here that the assumption that the Church was a corpus permixtum or an externa communio sacramentorum was only a make-shift conception; see the splendid exposition De baptis. V. 38, which, however, passes into the doctrine of predestination. [293] De bapt. V. 38: “Numerus ille justorum, qui secundum propositum vocati sunt, ipse est (ecclesia). . . . Sunt etiam quidam ex eo numero qui adhuc nequiter vivant aut etiam in hæresibus vel in gentilium superstitionibus jaceant, et tamen etiam illic novit dominus qui sunt ejus. Namque in illa ineffabili præscientia dei multi qui foris videntur, intus sunt, et multi, qui intus videntur, foris sunt.” We return to this in dealing with Augustine’s doctrine of predestination. [294] Here Reuter is entirely right as against Dorner. _________________________________________________________________ 3. The Pelagian Controversy. The Doctrine of Grace and Sin. Augustine’s doctrine of grace and sin was constructed independently of the Pelagian controversy. It was substantially complete when he entered the conflict; but he was by no means clear as to its application in separate questions in the year of his conversion. At the time of his fight with Manichæism (see the Tres libri de libero arbitrio) he had rather emphasised, following the tradition of the Church teachers, the independence of human freedom, and had spoken of original sin merely as inherited evil. It was his clerical office, a renewed study of Romans, and the criticism of his spiritual development, as instituted in the Confessions, that first led him to the Neoplatonic Christian conviction that all good, and therefore faith, came from God, and that man was only good and free in dependence on God. Thus he gained a point of view which he confessed at the close of his life he had not always possessed, and which he opposed to the earlier, erroneous conceptions [295] that friends and enemies frequently reminded him of It can be said that his doctrine of grace, in so far as it was a doctrine of God, was complete as early as A.D. 387; but it was not, in its application to Bible history, or to the problem of conversion and sanctification (in the Church), before the beginning of the fifth century. It can also be shown that he was at all times slightly influenced by the popular Catholic view, and this all the more as he was not capable of drawing the whole consequences of his system, which, if he had done so, would have led to determinism. This system did not evoke Pelagianism. Pelagius had taken offence, indeed, before the outbreak of the controversy, at Augustine’s famous sentence: “Grant what thou commandest, and command what thou dost desire,” and he had opposed it at Rome; [296] but by that date his doctrine was substantially settled. The two great types of thought, involving the question whether virtue or grace, morality or religion, the original and inalienable constitution of man, or the power of Jesus Christ was supreme, did not evolve themselves in the controversy. They gained in clearness and precision during its course, [297] but both arose, independently of each other, from the internal conditions of the Church. We can observe here, if anywhere, the “logic” of history. There has never, perhaps, been another crisis of equal importance in Church history in which the opponents have expressed the principles at issue so clearly and abstractly. The Arian dispute before the Nicene Council can alone be compared with it; but in this case the controversy moved in a narrow sphere of formulas already marked off by tradition. On the other hand, in spite of the exegetical and pseudo-historical materials that encumbered the problems in this instance also, there is a freshness about the Pelagian controversy and disputants that is wanting in the Greek contentions. [298] The essentially literary character of the dispute, the absence of great central incidents, did not prejudice it any way; the main issue was all the freer of irrelevant matter. But it is its most memorable feature that the Western Church so speedily and definitely rejected Pelagianism, while the latter, in its formulas, still seemed to maintain that Church’s ancient teaching. In the crucial question, whether grace is to be reduced to nature, or the new life to grace, in the difficulty how the polar antitheses of “creaturely freedom and grace” are to be united, [299] the Church placed itself resolutely on the side of religion. In doing so it was as far from seeking to recognise all the consequences that followed from this position as it had been a hundred years earlier at Nicæa; indeed it did not even examine them. But it never recalled—perhaps it was no longer possible to recall—the step taken as soon as rationalistic moralism clearly revealed its character. Not only is the inner logic of events proved by the simultaneous and independent emergence of Augustinianism and Pelagianism, but the how strikes us by its consistency. On the one side we have a hot-blooded man who had wrestled, while striving for truth, to attain strength and salvation, to whom the sublimest thoughts of the Neoplatonists, the Psalms, and Paul had solved the problems of his inner life, and who had been over-powered by his experience of the living God. On the other, we have a monk and a eunuch, [300] both without traces of any inner struggles, both enthusiasts for virtue, and possessed by the idea of summoning a morally listless Christendom to exert its will, and of leading it to rnonachist perfection; equally familiar with the Fathers, desirous of establishing relations with the East, and well versed in Antiochene exegesis; [301] but, above all, following that Stoic and Aristotelian popular philosophy—theory of knowledge, psychology, ethics and dialectics—which numbered so many adherents among cultured Christians of the West. The third member of the league, Julian of Eclanum, the early widowed Bishop, was more active and aggressive than the reserved and prudent Pelagius, [302] more circumspect than Cælestius, the agitator, and more cultured than either. Overbearing in manner, he had a talent for dialectics, and, more stubborn than earnest, was endowed with an insatiable delight in disputing, and a boyish eagerness to define conceptions and construct syllogisms. He was no monk, but a child of the world, and jovial by nature. He was, indeed, the first, and up to the sixteenth century, the unsurpassed, unabashed representative of a self-satisfied Christianity. Pelagius and Cælestius required the aid of Julian, if the moralistic mode of thought was not to be represented from one side alone—the religious view needed only one representative. Certainly no dramatist could have better invented types of these two contrasted conceptions of life than those furnished by Augustine on the one hand, and the two earnest monks, Pelagius and Clestius, and the daring, worldly bishop Julian on the other. [303] We have thus already indicated the origin of Pelagianism. It is the consistent outcome of the Christian rationalism that had long been wide spread in the West, especially among the more cultured, that had been nourished by the popular philosophy influenced by Stoicism and Aristotelianism, [304] and had by means of Julian received a bias to (Stoic) naturalism. [305] (We may not overlook the fact that it originally fell back upon monachism, still in its early stages in the West, and that the two phenomena at first sought a mutual support in each other.) [306] Nature, free-will, virtue and law, these—strictly defined and made independent of the notion of God—were the catch-words of Pelagianism: self-acquired virtue is the supreme good which is followed by reward. Religion and morality lie in the sphere of the free spirit; [307] they are won at any moment by man’s own effort. The extent to which this mode of thought was diffused is revealed, not only by the uncertain utterances of theologians, who in many of their expositions show that they know better, [308] but above all by the Institutes of Lactantius. [309] In what follows we have first to describe briefly the external course of the controversy, then to state the Pelagian line of thought, and finally to expound Augustine’s doctrine. [310] I. We first meet with Pelagius in Rome. In every century there have appeared preachers in Italy who have had the power of thrilling for the moment the vivacious and emotional Italians. Pelagius was one of the first (De pecc. orig. 24: “He lived for a very long time in Rome”). Roused to anger by an inert Christendom, that excused itself by pleading the frailty of the flesh and the impossibility of fulfilling the grievous commandments of God, he preached that God commanded nothing impossible, that man possessed the power of doing the good if only he willed, and that the weakness of the flesh was merely a pretext. “In dealing with ethics and the principles of a holy life, I first demonstrate the power to decide and act inherent in human nature, and show what it can achieve, lest the mind be careless and sluggish in pursuit of virtue in proportion to its want of belief in its power, and in its ignorance of its attributes think that it does not possess them.” [311] In opposition to Jovinian, whose teaching can only have encouraged laxity, he proclaimed and urged on Christians the demands of monachism; for with nothing less was this preacher concerned. [312] Of unquestioned orthodoxy, [313] prominent also as exegete and theologian in the capital of Christendom, [314] so barren in literary work, he was so energetic in his labour that news of his success penetrated to North Africa. [315] He took to do with the practical alone. Apparently he avoided theological polemics; but when Augustine’s Confessions began to produce their narcotic effects, he opposed them. Yet positive teaching, the emphasising of the freedom of the will, always remained to him the chief thing. On the other hand, his disciple and friend Cælestius [316] seems to have attacked original sin (tradux peccati) from the first. His converts proclaimed as their watchword that the forgiveness of sin was not the object of infant baptism. [317] When Alaric stormed Rome, the two preachers retreated by Sicily to North Africa. They intended to visit Augustine; but Pelagius and he did not meet either in Hippo or Carthage. [318] Probably the former left suddenly when he saw that he would not attain his ends in Africa, but would only cause theological strife. On the other hand, Cælestius remained, and became candidate for the post of Presbyter in Carthage. But as early as A.D. 412 (411) he was accused by Paulinus, Deacon in Milan (afterwards Ambrose’s biographer), at a Synod held in Carthage before Bishop Aurelius. [319] The points of the complaint, reduced to writing, were as follows:—He taught “that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he had or had not sinned—that Adam’s sin injured himself alone, and not the human race—infants at birth are in that state in which Adam was before his falsehood—that the whole human race neither dies on account of Adam’s death or falsehood, nor will rise again in virtue of Christ’s resurrection—the law admits men to the kingdom of heaven as well as the gospel—even before the advent of our Lord there were impeccable men, i.e., men without sin—that man can be without sin and can keep the divine commands easily if he will.” [320] Cælestius declared at the conference that infants needed baptism and had to be baptised; that since he maintained this his orthodoxy was proved; that original sin (tradux peccati) was at any rate an open question, “because I have heard many members of the Catholic Church deny it, and also others assent to it.” [321] He was, nevertheless, excommunicated. In the Libellus Brevissimus, which he wrote in his own defence, he admitted the necessity of baptism if children were to be saved; but he held that there was a kingdom of heaven distinct from eternal life. He would not hear of forgiveness of sin in connection with infant baptism. [322] He was indisputably condemned because he undid the fixed connection between baptism and forgiveness, thus, as it were, setting up two baptisms, and offending against the Symbol. He now went to Ephesus, [323] there became Presbyter, and afterwards betook himself to Constantinople. Pelagius had gone to Palestine. He followed different tactics from his friend, who hoped to serve the cause by his maxim of “shocking deeply” (fortiter scandalizare). Pelagius desired peace; he wrote a flattering letter to Augustine, who sent him a friendly but reserved answer. [324] He sought to attach himself to Jerome, and to give no public offence. He plainly felt hampered by Cælestius with his agitation for the sinlessness of children, and against original sin. He wished to work for something positive. How could anyone thrust a negative point to the front, and check the movement for reform by precipitancy and theological bitterness? He actually found good friends. [325] But his friendly relations with John, Bishop of Jerusalem, could not please Jerome. Besides, reports of Pelagius’ questionable doctrines came from the East, where, in Palestine, there always were numerous natives of the West. Jerome, who at the time was on good terms with Augustine, broke with Pelagius, [326] and wrote against him the Ep. ad Ctesiphontem (Ep. 133), and the Dialogi c. Pelag., writings which constitute a model of irrational polemics. He put in the foreground the question, “whether man can be without sin,” and at the same time did all he could to connect Pelagius with the “heretic” Origen and other false teachers. But still greater harm was done to Pelagius [327] by the appearance, at this precise moment, of the work already known to us, in which Cælestius played so regardlessly the rôle of the enfant terrible of the party (see above). [328] Augustine’s disciple, the Spanish priest Orosius, who had come to Jerome in order to call his attention to the dangers of Pelagianism, ultimately succeeded in getting John of Jerusalem to cite Pelagius, and to receive a formal report on his case in presence of his presbyters (A.D. 415). But the inquiry ended with the triumph of the accused. Orosius referred to the authority of his celebrated teacher, and to that of Jerome and the Synod of Carthage, but without success, and when Pelagius was charged with teaching that man could be sinless and needed no divine help, the latter declared that he taught that it was not possible for man to become sinless without divine grace. With this John entirely agreed. Now since Orosius for his part would not maintain that man’s nature was created evil by God, the Orientals did not see what the dispute was all about. The conference, irregular and hampered by Orosius’ inability to speak Greek, was broken off: it was said that the quarrel might be decided in the West, or more precisely in Rome. [329] Pelagius had repelled the first attack. But his opponents did not rest. They succeeded, in December, 415, in getting him brought before a Palestinian Synod, presided over by Eulogius of Cæsarea, at Diospolis, where, however, he was not confronted by his accusers. [330] He was at once able to appeal to the favourable testimonies of many Bishops, who had warmly recognised his efforts to promote morality. He did not disown the propositions ascribed to him regarding nature and grace, but he succeeded in explaining them so satisfactorily, that his judges found him to be of blameless orthodoxy. The extravagant sentences taken from the letter to Livania he in part set right, and in part disowned, and when the Synod required him expressly to condemn them, he declared: “I anathematise them as foolish, not as heretical, seeing it is no case of dogma.” [331] Hereupon the Synod decided: “Now since with his own voice Pelagius has anathematised the groundless nonsense, answering rightly that a man can be without sin with the divine help and grace, let him also reply to the other counts.” [332] There were now laid before him the statements of Cælestius as to Adam, Adam’s sin, death, new-born children, the perdition of the rich, sinlessness of God’s children, the unessential character of divine assistance—in short, all those propositions which had either been already condemned at Carthage, or were afterwards advanced by Cælestius in a much worse form. Pelagius was in an awkward position. He hated all theological strife; he knew that Christian morality could only lose by it; he wished to leave the region of dogma alone. [333] Cælestius had only said, indeed, what he himself had described as correct when among his intimate friends; but the former had spoken publicly and regardlessly, and—“the tone makes the music.” Thus Pelagius considered himself justified in disowning almost all those statements: “but the rest even according to their own testimony was not said by me, and for it I am not called upon to give satisfaction.” But he added: “I anathematise those who hold or have held these views.” With these words he pronounced judgment on himself; they were false. The Synod rehabilitated him completely: “Now since we have been satisfied by our examination in our presence of Pelagius the monk, and he assents to godly doctrines, while condemning those things contrary to the faith of the Church, we acknowledge him to belong to our ecclesiastical and Catholic Communion.” [334] No one can blame the Synod: [335] Pelagius had, in fact, given expression to its own ideas; Augustinianism was neither known nor understood; and the “heresy of Cælestius” [336] was condemned. [337] But Pelagius now found it necessary to defend himself to his own adherents. While on the one hand he was zealous in promoting in the West the effect of the impression produced by the decision in his favour, he wrote to a friendly priest, [338] that his statement, “that a man can be without sin and keep the commands of God easily [339] if he will,” had been recognised as orthodox. His work, De natura, made its appearance at the same time, and he further published four books, De libero arbitrio, [340] which, while written with all caution, disclosed his standpoint more clearly than his earlier ones. [341] But North Africa [342] did not acquiesce in what had taken place. The prestige of the West and orthodoxy were endangered. Synods were held in A.D. 416 at Carthage and Mileve, Augustine being also present at the latter. Both turned to Innocent of Rome, to whom Cælestius had appealed long before. Soon after the epistles of the two Synods (Aug. epp. 175, 176,) the Pope received a third from five African Bishops, of whom Augustine was one (Ep. 177). [343] It was evidently feared that Pelagius might have influential friends in Rome. [344] The letters referred to the condemnation, five years before, of Cælestius; they pointed out that the Biblical doctrine of grace and the doctrine of baptism were in danger, and demanded that, no matter how Pelagius might express himself, those should be excommunicated who taught that man could overcome sin and keep God’s commands by virtue of his own nature, or that baptism did not deliver children from a state of sin. It was necessary to defeat the enemies of God’s grace. It was not a question of expelling Pelagius and Cælestius, but of opposing a dangerous heresy. [345] The Pope had, perhaps, never yet received petitions from North African Synods which laid such stress on the importance of the Roman Chair. Innocent sought to forge the iron while it was hot. In his four replies (Aug. Epp. 181-184 = Innoc. Epp. 30-33) he first congratulated the Africans on having acted on the ancient rule, “that no matter might be finally decided, even in the most remote provinces, until the Roman Chair had been informed of it, in order that every just decision might be confirmed by its authority;” for truth issued from Rome, and thence was communicated in tiny streams to the other Churches. The Pope then praised their zeal against heretics, declared it impious to deny the necessity of divine grace, or to promise eternal life to children without baptism; he who thought otherwise was to be expelled from the Church, unless he performed due penance. “Therefore (Ep. 31, 6) we declare in virtue of our Apostolic authority that Pelagius and Cælestius are excluded from the communion of the Church until they deliver themselves from the snares of the devil;” if they did so, they were not to be refused readmission. Any adherents of Pelagius who might be in Rome would not venture to take his part after this condemnation; besides, the acquittal of the man in the East was not certain; nothing indubitably authentic had been laid before him, the Pope, and it appeared even from the proceedings, if they were genuine, that Pelagius had got off by evasions; if he felt himself to be innocent, he would have hastened to Rome that he might be acquitted by us; he would not summon him, however; those among whom he resided might try him once more; if he recanted, they could not condemn him; there lurked much that was blasphemous, but still more that was superfluous, in the book, De Natura; “what orthodox believer might not argue most copiously about the potentiality of nature, free-will, the whole grace of God and daily grace?” [346] He who can read between the lines will readily observe that the Pope left more than one back-door open, and had no real interest in the controversy. [347] Pelagius now sent his remarkably well-composed confession of faith [348] to Rome, along with an elaborate vindication of himself. [349] The accusation that he refused baptism to children, or promised them admission to heaven without it, and that he taught that men could easily fulfil the divine commands, he declared to be a calumny invented by his enemies. As already at Diospolis, so now he guarded himself against the worst charges, though they were not indeed unwarranted, partly by mental reservations, and partly by modifications; but we cannot say that he was unfaithful to his main conception. He declared that all men had received the power to will aright from God, but that the divine aid (adjutorium) only operated in the case of Christians. It was blasphemous to maintain that God had given impossible commands to men. He took his stand between Augustine and Jovinian. This letter did not reach Innocent, he having died. It was thus received by his successor Zosimus. Cælestius, who had come to Rome and submitted a Libellus fidei that left nothing to be desired in point of submission to the Pope, vindicated himself to the latter. Cælestius, on the whole, seems now, when matters had become critical, to have sounded the retreat; [350] he at least modified his statements, and took care not to come into conflict with the theory, deducible from the Church’s practice, that infant baptism did away with sin. [351] After these similar declarations of the two friends, Zosimus did not see that the dogma or Church practice of baptism was endangered in any respect. At a Roman Synod (417), Cælestius, who was ready to condemn everything banned by the Pope, was rehabilitated; [352] and Pelagius, for whom Orientals interceded, was likewise declared to have cleared himself. The complainants were described as worthless beings, and the Africans were blamed for deciding too hastily; they were called upon to prove their charges within two months. This result was communicated in two letters [353] to the African Bishops. [354] They were told that Pelagius had never been separated from the Church, and that if there had been great joy over the return of the lost son, how much greater should be the joy of believing that those about whom false reports had been circulated were neither dead nor lost (Ep. 4, 8)! The Carthaginians were indignant, but not discouraged. A Synod (417) determined to adhere to the condemnation until it was ascertained that both heretics saw in grace not merely an enlightenment of the intellect, but the only power for good (righteousness), without which we can have absolutely no true religion in thought, speech, and action. [355] This resolution was conveyed to Zosimus. Paulinus of Milan declared at the same time in a letter to the Pope that he would not come to Rome to prosecute Cælestius, for the case had been already decided. [356] This energetic opposition made the Pope cautious. In his reply, [357] he glorified Peter and his office in eloquent language, but changed his whole procedure, declaring now that the Africans were under a mistake if they believed that he had trusted Cælestius [358] in everything, and had already come to a decision. The case had not yet been prejudiced, and was in the same position as before (March, 418). Immediately after the arrival of this letter in Africa, a great Council was held there—more than 200 Bishops being present—and Pelagianism was condemned, without consulting the Pope, in 8 (9) unequivocal Canons; [359] indeed, such was the indignation felt against Zosimus—and on different grounds—that the Council, in its 17 Canon, threatened with excommunication any appeal to Rome. [360] But it had first assured itself of the Emperor’s support, who had published on the 30th April, 418, an edict to the Prefect of the Prætorium, banishing the new heretics with their followers from Rome, permitting their prosecution, and threatening the guilty with stringent penalties. [361] Zosimus, whose action had been hitherto influenced by the strength of Pelagius’ party in Rome, now laid down his arms. In his Ep. tractatoria to all the Churches, [362] he informed them of the excommunication of Cælestius and Pelagius, was now convinced that the doctrines of the absolute importance of justifying grace, and of original sin, belonged to the faith (de fide), and required all Bishops to signify their assent by their signatures. But eighteen Bishops refused; [363] they appealed to a General Council, and recalled with reason the fact that the Pope had himself formerly considered a thorough conference to be necessary. In their name Julian of Eclanum wrote two bold letters to the Pope, [364] while also rejecting the propositions once set up by Cælestius. [365] From now onwards the stage was occupied by this “most confident young man,” for whom Augustine, a friend of his family, possessed so much natural sympathy, and whom, in spite of his rudeness, he always treated, as long as the case lasted, affectionately and gently. [366] At the instigation of the new Pope, Boniface, Augustine refuted one of the letters sent to Rome and circulated in Italy, as well as another by Julian (addressed to Rufus of Thessalonica) in his work c. duas epp. Pelagianorum (420). Julian, who had resigned or been deposed from his bishopric, now took up his sharp and restless pen. No one else pressed Augustine so hard as he; he compelled him to work out the consequences of his line of thought; he displayed inexorably the contradictions in his works, and showed how untenable was the great man’s doctrine when it was fully developed; he pointed out the traces of a Manichæan type of thinking in Augustine, traces of which the latter tried in vain to get rid. He could indeed explain that he did not mean them, but could not show that they were not there. Julian’s charge that Augustine’s teaching desecrated marriage had made an impression on the powerful Comes Valerius in Rome. Augustine sought to weaken the force of the charge in his writing, De nuptiis et concupiscentia, Lib. I.; but Julian now wrote a work in four volumes against the treatise. Augustine based a reply on extracts from the latter (De nupt. et concup., 1. II.), and when he received the work itself, he substituted, for this preliminary answer, a new work: Libri sex c. Julianum hæresis Pelagianæ defensorem. Julian replied to the “Preliminary pamphlet” with a work in eight volumes (written already in Cilicia). Augustine was engaged with the answer to this work, Opus imperf. c. Julianum (l. sex), up to his death. Since he follows Julian almost sentence by sentence, we possess the most accurate information as to the latter’s positions. [367] In his latest years, Augustine composed other four writings which are not aimed directly at the Pelagians, but discuss objections raised against his own doctrine by Catholics or Semi-Pelagians [368] (De gratia et libero arbitrio; De correptione et gratia: to the monks of Hadrumetum; De prædestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiæ: to Prosper and Hilary as against the Gallic monks). In these works the doctrine of predestinating grace is worked out in its strictest form. The Pelagians nowhere came to form a sect or schismatical party. [369] They were suppressed in the years after A.D. 418, without it being necessary to apply any special force. The Emperor once more published a sharp edict. Cælestius, who had hitherto escaped punishment, was still chiefly dealt with. He was forbidden to reside in Italy, and sentence of exile was pronounced on anyone who should harbour him. Pelagius is said to have been condemned by a Synod in Antioch. But this information, given by Marius, is uncertain. He disappears from history. [370] Julian and other Pelagians took refuge with Theodore in Cilicia. There they were at first left in peace; for either the controversy was not understood, or the attitude to Augustinianism was hostile. The indefatigable Cælestius was able in A.D. 424 to demand once more an inquiry in Rome from Bishop Cælestine, but then betook himself, without having obtained his object, to Constantinople, where, since Julian and other friends were also assembled, the party now pitched their headquarters. [371] The Patriarch Nestorius joined hands with them, a proceeding fatal to both sides; for Nestorius thereby incurred the displeasure of the Pope, and the Pelagians fell into the ranks of the enemies of the dominant party in the East (Cyril’s). Marius Mercator agitated successfully against them at the Court, and in the comedy at Ephesus Cyril obliged the Roman legates by getting the Council to condemn the doctrine of Cælestius, Rome having concurred in his condemnation of Nestorius. [372] Thus Pelagianism had brought upon itself a kind of universal anathema, while in the East there were perhaps not even a dozen Christians who really disapproved of it, [373] and the West, in turn, was by no means clear as to the consequences to which it would necessarily be led by the condemnation of the Pelagians. II. As regards the history of dogma, the “system” of Pelagianism, i.e. of Julian of Eclanum, is tolerably indifferent; for it was only produced after the whole question was already decided, and its author was a theologian, who, by renouncing his ecclesiastical office, had himself thrown away much of his claim to be considered. From the standpoint of the history of dogma, the controversy closed simply with rejection of the doctrines, (1) that God’s grace (in Christ) was not absolutely necessary—before and after baptism—for the salvation of every man, and (2) that the baptism of infants was not in the fullest sense a baptism for remission of sins (in remissionem peccatorum). The contrary doctrines were the new “dogmas.” But, since those two doctrines and the main theses of Pelagianism involved a multitude of consequences, and since some of these consequences were even then apparent, while others afterwards occupied the Church up till and beyond the Reformation, it is advisable to point out the fundamental features of the Pelagian system, and the contrary teaching of Augustinianism. [374] In doing so we have to remember that Pelagius would have nothing to do with a system. To him “De fide” (of the faith) meant simply the orthodox dogma and the ability of man to do the good. All else were open questions which might be answered in the affirmative or negative, among the rest original sin, which he denied. He laid sole stress on preaching practical Christianity, i.e., the monastic life, to a corrupt and worldly Christendom, and on depriving it of the pretext that it was impossible to fulfil the divine commands. Cælestius, at one with his teacher in this respect, attacked original sin more energetically, and fought by the aid of definitions and syllogisms theological doctrines which he held to be pernicious. But Julian was the first to develop their mode of thought systematically, and to elevate it into a Stoic Christian system. [375] Yet he really added nothing essential to what occurs scattered through the writings of Pelagius and Cælestius. He only gave it all a naturalistic tendency, i.e., he did away with the monastic intention of the type of thought. But even in Pelagius, arguments occur which completely contradict the ascetic monastic conception. In his letter to Demetrius he shows that fasting, abstinence and prayer are not of such great importance; they should not be carried to excess, as is often done by beginners; moderation should be observed in all things, therefore even in good works. The main thing is to change one’s morals and to practise every kind of virtue. And thus no one is to think that the vow of chastity can let him dispense with the practice of spiritual virtues and the fight with anger, vanity, and pride, etc. It was the actual development of the character in goodness on which he laid stress. The monastic idea appears subordinate to this thought, which in some passages is expressed eloquently. The ancient call to wise moderation has not a naturalistic impress in Pelagius. In treating the thought of these three men as a whole we have to remember this distinction, as also the fact that Pelagius and Cælestius for the most part paid due heed to Church practice, and besides avoided almost entirely any appeal to the ancient philosophers. [376] They were all actuated by a courageous confidence in man’s capacity for goodness, along with the need for clearness of thought on religious and moral questions. 1. God’s highest attributes are his goodness and justice, and, in fact, righteousness is the quality without which God cannot be thought of at all; indeed, it can even be said that there is a God, because there is righteousness. [377] “Justice, as it is wont to be defined by the learned (s. Aristotle) and as we can understand, is (if the Stoics will allow us to prefer one to the other) the greatest of all virtues, discharging diligently the duty of restoring his own to each, without fraud, without favour.” [378] Its genus is God; its species are the promulgation and administration of the laws; its difference consists in its being regulated by circumstances; its modus in its not requiring from anyone more than his powers permit, and in not excluding mercy; its quality in sweetness to pious souls. This notion of righteousness is so sure that it appears also to be ideally superior to Holy Scripture (see Op. imperf. II. 17): “Nothing can be proved by the sacred writings which righteousness cannot support.” [379] 2. It follows, from the goodness and righteousness of God, that everything created by him is good—and that not only at the beginning—but what he now creates is likewise good. [380] Accordingly, the creature is good, and so also are marriage, the law, free will, and the saints. [381] 3. Nature, which was created good, is not convertible, “because the things of nature persist from the beginning of existence (substance) to its end.” [382] “Natural properties are not converted by accident.” [383] Accordingly, there can be no “natural sins” (peccata naturalia); for they could only have arisen if nature had become evil. 4. Human nature is thus indestructibly good, and can only be modified accidentally. To its constitution belongs—and that was very good—the will as free choice; for “willing is nothing but a movement of the mind without any compulsion.” [384] This free choice, with which reason is implied, [385] is the highest good in man’s constitution, “he who upholds grace praises human nature.” [386] We know that Pelagius always began in his sermons by praising man’s glorious constitution, his nature which shows itself in free will [387] and reason, and he never wearied of extolling our “condition of willing” (conditio voluntatis), as contrasted with the “condition of necessity” (conditio necessitatis) of irrational creatures. “Nature was created so good that it needs no help.” [388] With reason as guide (duce ratione) man can and should do the good, i.e., righteousness (jus humanæ societatis). [389] God desires a voluntary performer of righteousness (voluntarius executor justitiæ); it is his will that we be capable of both, and that we do one. According to Pelagius freedom of will is freedom to choose the good; according to Julian it is simply freedom of choice. The possibility of good as a natural faculty is from God, [390] willing and action are our business; [391] the possibility of both (possibilitas utriusque) is as a psychological faculty inevitable (a necessario); for this very reason a continual change is possible in it. [392] 5. Evil, sin, is willing to do that which righteousness forbids, and from which we are free to abstain, [393] accordingly what we can avoid. [394] It is no element or body, no nature—in that case God would be its author; nor is it a perverted nature (natura conversa), but it is always a momentary self-determination of the will, which can never pass into nature so as to give the to an evil nature. [395] But if this cannot happen, so much the less