CHAPTER 8

God and Humankind in
Western Theology: Ambrose
and Augustine

(FOURTH TO FIFTH CENTURIES)

Ambrose was right at the centre of things in his bishopric in Milan and this was because Milan was right at the centre of the changes in the political geography of the Empire in the west. Rome had gradually lost importance as the hub of the Empire as, first, Constantinople assumed more and more influence and, second, the attention of emperors was drawn ever more insistently out to the borders of the Empire. Successive emperors used Milan as a base, so that by the time Ambrose became governor of Aemilia and Liguria around 372 there was a fairly well-established imperial court there.¹ Some time before 355 there had been constructed in Milan the ‘new basilica’, a huge structure with a wide central nave and two aisles on each side, which could hold a congregation of some 3,000. At 80 by 40 metres it is the largest known church in north Italy of that era and comes close in size to Constantine’s Lateran Basilica in Rome.²

As the last chapter suggested, relations among Christians in Milan were complicated by different loyalties arising from the Arian controversies – a situation which was complicated by the influence of the court. In the 350s Constantius II presided over the whole Empire and, in the hope that he could unite the divided Christian communities under one creed, he actively promoted the cause of the homoians – those Christians who thought that one should describe the Son as like (homoios) the Father. Constantius had an active role in the removal in 355 of the pro-Nicene Bishop Dionysius of Milan, who was exiled to Armenia and replaced by the ‘Arian’ Bishop Auxentius. Auxentius held his post until his death in 374, during which time imperial policy had tended to be relatively even-handed towards both Christian parties, regardless of the personal persuasion of the emperors. In particular, Auxentius enjoyed the support of Valentinian I, much to the annoyance of the pro-Nicene Damasus, Bishop of Rome.³ Despite Auxentius’ long tenure of office, however, there clearly was a significant community of pro-Nicene Christians in Milan which led to the disputed succession upon Auxentius’ death. When Ambrose showed his concern to keep the peace in Milan, the crowd may have demanded him because they thought that he, like the Emperor Valentinian, would maintain a neutral position on the question of homoios vs homoousios.⁴

However, Bishop Ambrose quickly revealed his true colours, taking various steps to strengthen the pro-Nicene cause in Milan and the north of Italy. Although Hilary of Poitiers had argued tirelessly for the Nicene formula, he lacked widespread influence. By contrast, as Bishop of Milan, Ambrose was in a better position to make a difference. First, he was involved with a series of synods in Italy which endorsed the pro-Nicene viewpoint and those bishops which held it.⁵ In particular, he attended a synod at Rome in 382 which was intended to be a western equivalent of the Council of Constantinople the year before (which had been attended by relatively few western bishops).

It is important to be clear about what one means by ‘Arianism’ in this context. Auxentius in fact denounced Arius himself,⁶ and he certainly did not advocate the idea that the Son was unlike (anomoios) the Father (as Eunomius and his anomoian followers did). Nevertheless, history, with the lack of precise labelling that is usually the lot of heretics, has tended to label Hilary’s and Ambrose’s opponents in Italy as ‘Arians’. This is due not least to the rhetoric of pro-Nicene writers of the time: Hilary, for example, has a clear tendency to label as ‘Arian’ anyone who disagreed with his formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity.⁷

It was in this theological and political context that, a couple of years after the Synod of Rome, a young man from North Africa arrived in Milan to take up a post as public orator. He was later to credit the experience of hearing Ambrose preach as one of the turning points in his road to conversion to Christianity. Aurelius Augustinus, known to us as Augustine of Hippo, had been born 30 years earlier to a pagan father and a Christian mother in the town of Thagaste in North Africa. After a thorough education, he had begun to teach rhetoric first in his home town and then in Carthage. Obviously a talented and ambitious young man, he had left Africa to teach in Rome, where he had impressed the pagan senator and prefect of Rome, Symmachus, who recommended him for the appointment in Milan.

While his career path had been relatively smooth, Augustine’s spiritual travels had been much more complicated. He implied that his mother, Monica, had taught him the rudiments of the faith (as was common practice for the women in Christian families).⁸ Yet he had not been baptized as an infant, and Augustine suggested that it was not a living faith for him in his youth. In his Confessions, he relates various tumultuous episodes of his early life:

I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. … I was in love with love. … I was captivated by theatrical shows. They were full of representations of my own miseries and fuelled my fire.⁹

He became involved with a group of youths, who, whilst proclaiming their urbane sophistication, took delight in vandalism. Augustine longed to be accepted by his peers, yet was appalled by their behaviour: ‘I lived among them shamelessly ashamed of not being one of the gang. I kept company with them … though I always held their actions in abhorrence.’ ¹⁰

Although these are perhaps not particularly remarkable exploits for any young man, the public exposure of his faults in a work written many years later when Augustine was a recently ordained bishop is at first sight more surprising. Yet a careful reading reveals the purpose of Augustine’s self-exposure. The Confessions is one of the world’s great works of literature: combining biography, theology and philosophy, Augustine leads his reader through an account of his life and way to faith in a way which is intended not just to persuade intellectually but also to turn (or ‘convert’) his reader towards God, through sharing in Augustine’s two-fold confession: the confession of his former way of life and his confession of faith in and love of God.

The artful construction of the work might lead one to doubt it as a historical source, yet there is no reason fundamentally to doubt the basic narrative of Augustine’s early life as he presents it. Particularly interesting for a study of this period are his reflections about the various influences on his intellectual and spiritual journey. An early influence was classical philosophy, especially various forms of Platonism. Augustine recounts reading Cicero’s Hortensius, which asks what the sources of happiness are and recommends philosophy as a way of finding out. In the Confessions, Augustine quotes Cicero’s words, ‘do not study one particular sect but love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found’ – words which set him on his search for wisdom over the next years.¹¹ The Hortensius (in standard Platonic fashion) warned that in such a search one should always choose what is really beautiful over that which merely seems so. Ironically, it was in this period that Augustine’s reading of Scripture seems to have convinced him that the lack of beauty in the Bible’s written style was an obstacle to Christian faith:

[I found it] a text lowly to the beginner, but on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries. … It seemed unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness. Yet the Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disclaimed to be a little beginner. Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a mature adult.¹²

Also around about this time, when he was aged about 18, Augustine became involved with the Manichees. By the mid-fourth century, the influence of Mani’s teachings had spread all around the Mediterranean. Augustine seems to have been attracted to them for several reasons: first, their exposition of the Christian Bible matched Augustine’s own judgement; second, the faith’s bookishness and regard for eloquence appealed to the young Augustine’s intellectual snobbery; third, their rigid moral code with its strict vegetarian diet, teetotalism and rejection of sex (at least for the elite ranks) seemed to give him the structure and discipline he craved after his years of – as he saw it – excessive freedom.

The other enormous influence on Augustine’s life was Latin literature. Although he claims not to have learnt well at school (supposedly being distracted by ‘ball games’), in fact the beatings he mentions were normal for any schoolboy in this period. A more honest confession, perhaps, is his great love of the Latin classics, especially Virgil’s Aeneid. Book IV of this epic describes how its hero Aeneas spent some time in Carthage enamoured of Queen Dido, before leaving again for Italy, driven on by the gods to fulfil his – and Rome’s – destiny. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Augustine both felt a deep sympathy with Aeneas as a character – passionate, but driven by a profound sense of vocation – and constructed the Confessions partly to echo the themes and structures of the Aeneid. (For example, the passage in Book V where Augustine leaves Africa having deceived his mother as to his departure deliberately echoes Aeneas’ leave-taking of Dido.)

By contrast, Augustine had an ambivalent attitude to Greek literature all his life. At school, he wrote, he hated learning it; later on, he claimed that he was hardly proficient in it. The scholarly consensus now is that Augustine knew more Greek literature (of both pagan and Christian varieties) than he admitted to. Although he rarely mentions sources by name, he seems to have been aware of the writings of Philo, Origen, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa.¹³ Some if not all of these he would have read in Latin translations or indirectly through their being quoted or adapted by Latin theologians; nevertheless, it seems that he was aware at the very least of Greek theological terminology and – probably – of some Greek texts.

Ambrose, of course, had had a similar literary and rhetorical training a generation earlier, and his preaching was famed for its polished and elegant style. By the time he arrived in Milan, Augustine had tired intellectually of the Manichees: he had continued to read the philosophers and considered their systems of cosmology and astronomy far more convincing than those of Mani. Furthermore, he thought that the Manichees’ negative biblical criticism and their verbal eloquence were distractions which masked a basic vacuum in their thought. This realization is encapsulated in Augustine’s encounter with Faustus, the leading thinker of the Manichees. By this time, Augustine asserts, ‘I was interested not in the decoration of the vessel in which his discourse was served up, but in the knowledge put before me to eat. … What could this most presentable waiter do for my thirst by offering precious cups?’ ¹⁴ By contrast, he was deeply impressed with Ambrose’s preaching:

I used enthusiastically to listen to him [Ambrose] preaching to the people, not with the intention which I ought to have had, but as if testing out his oratorical skill to see whether it merited the reputation it enjoyed or whether his fluency was better or inferior than it was reported to be. I hung on his diction in rapt attention, but remained bored and contemptuous of the subject-matter. My pleasure was in the charm of his language. It was more learned than that of Faustus, but less witty and entertaining, as far as the manner of his speaking went. But in content there could be no comparison. Through Manichee deceits Faustus wandered astray. Ambrose taught the sound doctrine of salvation. From sinners such as I was at that time, salvation is far distant. Nevertheless, gradually, though I did not realise it, I was drawing closer.¹⁵

It was in this period that Augustine had returned to reading ‘Platonic books’.¹⁶ In the passage quoted above he is playing with the Platonic idea of true beauty and apparent beauty: while Faustus’ words had only the latter, Ambrose’s sermons were both externally beautiful and pointed Augustine to an inner beauty. Through their use of allegorical interpretation, Ambrose’s sermons even helped Augustine on the way to discovering the beauty hidden in the rather plain or crude style of the Bible.

Within a short space of time Augustine had retreated to a villa outside Milan to read and discuss Christianity with his friends. Even in that retreat, however, his progress was not without a struggle: he presents himself as both willing and unwilling to take the final step towards a final conversion. Famously, in the Confessions he records his prayer:

But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed to you for chastity and said: ‘Grant me chastity and continence but not yet.’ ¹⁷

It is easy to respond to this on the human level with a knowing (or sarcastic) smile: the structure of Augustine’s writing calculated on a sympathetic human response. But behind this prayer lies a very important point – that for Augustine conversion to Christianity in effect meant conversion to an ascetic Christian life. There was no logical reason why this should be so – Augustine could have converted, been baptized and carried on his life in rhetoric or another profession.¹⁸ But for the Augustine who sat in the garden of Cassiacum reading Scripture, the choice was all or nothing: either become a Christian and commit to an ascetic life or do not become a Christian at all.

Augustine chose, and on being baptized in Milan left Italy in 388 with the intention of forming a small monastic community back in Thagaste, with the two friends who had been converted with him. He was successful in this intention for a few years – the monastic Rule attributed to him may date from the experience of this period; but by 391 his talents had been recognized and he was called to the priesthood at the town of Hippo, of which he later became bishop in 395. Like Ambrose, he appears to have been a not entirely willing agent in his ordination. And like Ambrose he proved himself to excel in the vocation.

It is impossible to give a fully rounded picture of a thinker who produced so many writings and whose thought is so complex. Here, it will suffice merely to approach his theology from five different perspectives: Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity, his concept of the Church, his theology of grace and his idea of salvation-history. These themes will introduce some of Augustine’s most important works and will contextualize his thought in the most pressing controversies and crises of the day.

As we have seen, Augustine structured his conversion narrative in the Confessions partly around the issue of biblical exegesis. As a young adult, he was put off by a text which was both unscholarly in tone (suggesting its simplicity) and at the same time profoundly puzzling (showing its complexity). How could a text be both childish and opaque? The Manichees interpreted the Old Testament in an over-literal way, mainly with the aim of dismissing it, much like Marcion had done. For a while this tactic attracted Augustine, but when he tired of the Manichees he still had no method of solving his problem with reading Scripture. Ambrose’s preaching seemed to offer a solution. Ambrose’s method of exegesis followed a broadly Origenistic method, in which some (but by no means all) passages in Scripture were read allegorically in order to prevent a fundamental misunderstanding of the main point of the text. The Manichees objected in particular to the creation account in Genesis, which seemed to them to imply that God had a material, anthropomorphic shape: he was said to walk in the garden and humans were said to be created in his image. Ambrose’s sermons on Genesis, on the other hand, rejected such interpretations.

The text of Genesis continued to fascinate Augustine throughout his life, and after his baptism in Milan he produced no fewer than three commentaries on it, which provide us with a unique insight into the development of his exegesis. In the first, On Genesis against the Manichees, he was obviously most keen to dismiss the Manichees’ over-literal interpretation of the Bible. Thus he launched a vociferous attack on the idea that Christians believe that human beings are created in the image of God with respect to their physical make-up. He also complained that the Manichees used the first verse of Genesis, ‘In the beginning [when] God created the heavens and the earth’, to ask inappropriate questions about what God was doing ‘before’ he created – another example of anthropomorphism, which did not reckon with the fact that, as creator, God transcended time. This commentary is divided into interpretations which are labelled ‘historical’ (secundum historiam) and ‘prophetic’ (secundum prophetiam). These do not map neatly on to the modern distinction between literal and non-literal interpretation. For example, one of the historical interpretations put forward by Augustine was that the first verse, which declared that God created the world ‘in the beginning’, meant that God created the world ‘in Christ’ – an interpretation reached by reading Genesis 1.1 alongside John 1.1 in a manner which most modern exegetes would not recognize as a ‘literal’ reading. The historical reading for Augustine seems to have meant the basic, true meaning of the text – in many cases, what really happened. In this commentary Augustine thought that ‘in the beginning’ truly meant ‘in Christ’, because an over-literal reading of ‘in the beginning’ would suggest that there was time in God. The ‘prophetic’ meaning, on the other hand, concerned the text’s application either to the life of the believer or to salvation-history as a whole. Thus he interpreted the six days of creation as meaning the six ages of world history or the six stages in a believer’s progress in faith. The first day, for example, indicated the infancy of the human race (the period from Adam to Noah) or the initial stages of faith when Christians ‘begin by believing visible things’. Regarding the seventh day, the meaning for the world and for the individual coincided, for it referred to the eschaton when the faithful will take their rest with Christ. This kind of exegesis in On Genesis against the Manichees used an allegorical technique which was familiar from the writings of Ambrose, the Cappadocians and of Origen himself.

In his two later commentaries on Genesis, Augustine was much more cautious about such allegorical interpretation – a point which is indicated by the fact that they are both entitled as commentaries ‘according to the letter’ (ad litteram). The first of these (which was left unfinished when Augustine got to Genesis 1.26) commented that the six days of creation were not days in the ordinary sense. But Augustine saw this as a clarification of the historical sense of the text (a warning against over-literal interpretation of the word ‘day’), and he offered no additional prophetic meanings of the six days as in his work against the Manichees.¹⁹ In the later Literal Meaning of Genesis Augustine explained that it was appropriate for the author to say that the world was created in six days, because six is a perfect number.²⁰ Again, there were no further meanings offered.

Thus there is a clear sense that in these two works Augustine was shying away from prophetic meanings or allegorical readings of the text of Genesis. However, this did not mean that every phrase or word (like ‘day’) should be read absolutely literally. Nor did it mean that Augustine rejected Christo-logical interpretation of the text. In his Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine offered multiple suggestions for what ‘in the beginning’ might mean, but he was more insistent than before that Genesis 1 should be interpreted as referring not only to Christ but to the Spirit. The words ‘a wind from God swept over the face of the water’ refer to the Holy Spirit and thus, Augustine asserted, readers ‘recognize the complete indication of the Trinity’.²¹ In such readings as these, Christological, pneumatological and Trinitarian readings of the Old Testament are affirmed throughout Augustine’s theology and, crucially, are affirmed as historical readings of the biblical text.

In his work On Christian Teaching (which was begun shortly before the Confessions) Augustine aimed to provide the reader with certain guidelines on how to read the Bible.²² In this, he wrote at the end of the preface, he hoped to be like a teacher: a good teacher does not just tell children about the content of a book but teaches them the alphabet so that they can read it for themselves.²³ This is an interesting variation on the theme expressed in the Confessions that to a certain extent one needs to be child-like to read Scripture – not in the sense that one should be naive or credulous but in the sense that one should be humble enough to accept that one needs to learn how to read it without impiety.²⁴ Having said that, however, Augustine was always quite clear that even the most simple believer could grasp enough from Scripture. Scripture, he wrote, was like a body of water, whose surface shines to attract the ‘simple’ person but whose depths attract the more thoughtful reader:

What wonderful profundity there is in your utterances! The surface meaning lies open before us and charms beginners. Yet the depth is amazing, my God, the depth is amazing.²⁵

In order to explain how Scripture can have such depth, Augustine uses the notion of signs (or symbols). Words are signs, but objects can themselves be signs (as an engagement ring is a sign of a promise to marry). In spoken or written language, of course, it is often the case that words refer to objects which refer to other things. Thus a complex web of signs is built up. In On Christian Teaching, Augustine argued that Scripture was just such a web of signs and that the complexity of that web led to the profundity of the text.

As we have just seen, Augustine was increasingly cautious about the use of allegorical interpretation in his commentaries. His theory of signs seems to have been developed first as a challenge to Origen’s (overly allegorical) way of reading the Bible, but also as a method which allowed readers to avoid an overly literal reading of the text. Origen, as argued in Chapter 4, attributed three different levels of meaning to Scripture. While he agreed with Augustine that even the most simple believer could learn enough for their salvation from reading (or, more likely, hearing) Scripture, his notion of levels of meaning tended to suggest that such readers only grasped one level of meaning and failed to grasp the rest. It is hard not to make this sound elitist. For Augustine, however, it was not really the case that a word or phrase had different levels of meaning: rather, a word (e.g. ‘lamb’) signified an object (a young sheep), and that object signified something else (Jesus Christ). There was a sense then that the word ‘lamb’ contained the other significations within it, and that the reader/hearer who understood that the word ‘lamb’ signified a young sheep potentially grasped the possibility that the animal signified something else, even though the reader/hearer might not have yet made that connection. To use a rather crude analogy: on one reading of his exegesis, the meanings of Scripture for Origen might be seen as related but separate objects that one is encouraged to ‘collect’. For example, the levels of meaning could be compared to three chairs: the first is the bare essential, necessary but plain; the second is more comfortable, practically and elegantly constructed for its purpose; the third is a more luxurious designer chair, built of the best materials by a master craftsman, satisfying both in terms of comfort and beauty. Despite the fact that Origen consistently argued that one needed to keep all three levels of meaning together, there is the constant danger that his theology suggests that once one has the third level of meaning, the other two are unnecessary. For Augustine, on the other hand, the multiple meanings were like a series of Russian dolls packed one inside the other: one might possess one doll without realizing that others are inside, but in possessing the one, one in fact has all the others in one’s hands without realizing it.²⁶

This theory might seem rather strange until it is placed next to Augustine’s notion of sacraments, which also relies on an understanding of signs. A sacrament is the outward, tangible sign of an inward spiritual gift, in the same way that the visible or audible word ‘lamb’ signifies an animal (even if the animal is not present). Augustine believed that the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist worked not because of some power of the person administering them, nor because of the virtues of the person receiving them. Instead they had their effect by virtue only of God choosing them to be signs of his saving grace. Furthermore, for Augustine, the bread and wine of the Eucharist did not just point towards or remind one of the body and blood of Jesus Christ; rather they contained the body and blood of Jesus Christ within them.²⁷

This understanding of the sacraments was crucial in his debates with the Donatists. The Donatist Church had not just survived but thrived in Africa from the time of the schism in the bishopric of Cyprian of Carthage.²⁸ In Augustine’s time, it still had a claim to be the major church in North Africa, even though it was repudiated as schismatic by Augustine’s church – the Catholic (‘whole’, ‘universal’) church. Augustine wrote several treatises regarding the Donatists, but at the heart of them was his understanding that they and he understood ‘Church’ to mean two completely different things. The Donatists traced their origins back to the church of the martyrs in North Africa, and despite the Constantinian change, they still tended to see the Church as fundamentally opposed to the ‘world’: the Church was an ark rescuing the pure from the stormy and corrupt seas of the world. Augustine had an entirely more realistic notion of human nature and a very much more nuanced picture of the members of the Church: it contained both saints and sinners. One could not even say that the clergy were pure; but this did not threaten the efficacy of the sacraments, for they did not depend on the holiness of the one who administered them but on God’s grace.

Shortly after writing the Confessions, Augustine began work on the huge treatise On the Trinity, which was completed after 20 years’ work in 419. The work has two interlinked aims. The first, as Augustine puts it in his introduction, is to give reasons: ‘to account for the one and only true God being a trinity, and for the rightness of saying, believing, understanding that the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are of one and the same substance or essence’.²⁹ Even after the affirmation of the Nicene formula at Constan-tinople in 381 and Rome in 382, it was no mere academic matter to give such an account. Ambrose’s struggles with Arians at the Milanese court in the mid-380s were enough to show that Arianism (or, more precisely, support for the homoios formula) was not dead. But in the period in which Augustine was writing, the stakes had got even higher. The Empire was being threatened by various tribes who had previously been restricted to territories east of the Rhine and north of the Danube. Two of the most important of these, the Vandals and the Visigoths, were Arian. For centuries Romans had boasted of the contrast between, on the one hand, the civilized, strong Empire under the rule of law and protected by its gods and, on the other, the wild barbarians, divided into many warring tribes, lawless adherents of mysterious and primitive religions. Such a clear contrast was of course largely fictional, but its language was imported by Catholic Christians as they contrasted themselves as citizens of a Christian empire with the Arian tribes who were threatening the stability of the Empire on several sides. The Vandals did not invade North Africa until 428, shortly before Augustine’s death and a decade after On the Trinity had been completed. Nevertheless, signs of the future threat were present: in 406 there was a huge influx of Germanic tribes into the Empire over the Rhine. Over the next few years they gained power over substantial territory in Gaul and Spain. Famously, Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome in 410; although his armies retreated with their plunder, the event sent shock-waves through the Empire.

A defence of the Trinity against Arianism was not, therefore, just an academic point. But there was a second purpose to On the Trinity: like the Confessions it is carefully constructed in a way which suggests that Augustine intended its reading to be a spiritual, not just an academic, exercise – although it undoubtedly contains much learned theology and complex philosophy. The spiritual intention can be detected from the way in which Augustine frames the question: it is not just a case of ‘how can one know that God is three in one?’, but ‘how can one love the God who is three in one?’ As we shall see, that answer is tied up with his method, which is to proceed through a series of psychological analogies which centre on a person’s knowledge and love of him or herself. Finally, Augustine ties his question (‘how to know and love God?’) together with his method (‘how do I know and love myself?’). He suggests not only that one can understand a little more about the three-in-oneness of God through reflection on one’s knowledge and love of oneself, but that – paradoxically – the best love and knowledge of self springs from the love and knowledge of God.

Before he reaches the climax of his argument, however, Augustine spends a long time in preparation.³⁰ In Books I–IV, he systematically works through the classic texts which had been at the centre of Trinitarian debate since Arius and Athanasius: for example, the prologue to John’s Gospel, which could be interpreted to indicate the Word’s full divinity; various other passages from John (such as 14.28) which were used by Arius and others to suggest that the Son was less than the Father; and finally some passages which were used by Marcellus in connection with his radically unified doctrine of the Trinity. The originality and subsequent theological influence of the last books of On the Trinity can sometimes obscure the importance of these early books, but it is crucial to remember that for Augustine the main reason for believing that God is three in one is that it is a doctrine that lay at the heart of the Church’s teaching in the Bible and in the baptism of its members. It is no coincidence that the work which began with intensive study of the biblical sources of the doctrine ends by reflecting – in a prayer – on ‘the text which presents this Trinity to us most plainly’:³¹

O Lord our God, we believe in you, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Truth would not have said ‘Go and baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ unless you were a triad.³²

In Books V–VII, Augustine laid out some groundwork of a more philosophical kind. In particular, he investigated the language used to speak of the Father, Son and Spirit: how should one reply when faced with the question ‘Three whats?’ ³³ Famously, Augustine is cautious about the Greek solution, one ousia and three hypostases. This is because one natural way of translating this into Latin would be ‘one essentia, three substantiae’ (one being/essence, three substances) – a confusing formulation because, as Augustine puts it, ‘in our language … “being” and “substance” do not usually mean anything different’. The Greek answer to ‘three whats?’, then, is unsatisfactory, because it might suggest three substances – that is, three gods. Augustine asserted that the Latin alternative was ‘one being (essentia) or substance (substantia) and three persons (personae)’, but he is also extremely cautious about the use of the term ‘person’, lest it suggest too great a similarity between the kind of persons that the Father, Son and Spirit are, and the kind of persons that human beings are. In the end, Augustine accepted the term, but with the caveat that although Scripture did not ban it, it was not affirmed by Scripture either.

Augustine’s hesitation here reflected a fluidity in Latin theological language. It has sometimes been assumed that the west uniformly used a ‘one nature (natura) and three persons (personae)’ formula because it is found in both Tertullian and Hilary. But in fact their terminology was more varied: Hilary himself sometimes wrote of God’s one nature (natura), sometimes of one substance (substantia). At other times, confusingly, he wrote of the Father, Son and Spirit as three substances (substantiae).³⁴ Two important points emerge from this confusion. First, as a modern commentator has noted, in the doctrine of God, ‘the logic of unity and distinction could be adopted before a consistent terminology for that distinction was used’.³⁵ Secondly, with his caution over the language used, Augustine was highlighting the fact that, as he himself wrote, people used these terms ‘for the sake of talking about inexpressible matters, that we may somehow express what we are completely unable to express’.³⁶

It is precisely this difficulty that led Augustine to frame the key question in Book VIII: humans are commanded to love God, but how can they love what they do not know?

For ‘since we are walking by faith and not by sight’ (II Corinthians 5.7) we do not yet see God … ‘face to face’ (I Corinthians 13.12). Yet unless we love him even now, we shall never see him. But who can love what he does not know?³⁷

Augustine offered a solution to the problem by meditating on the nature of love – or rather the structure of loving:

Love is of someone who loves, and something is loved with love. So then there are three: the lover, the beloved, and the love. What else is love, therefore, except a kind of love which binds or seeks to bind some two together?³⁸

Augustine warned his readers that this was not yet a direct analogy for the Trinity. Nevertheless, it was an analogy for an activity with three aspects: loving. It could not express unity because it described love between two beings; so Augustine moved forward to consider the activity of love in one mind. What happens if one person loves herself? The triad (love, lover, beloved) collapses into a pair (love and lover). Yet, Augustine argued, ‘the mind cannot love itself unless it also knows itself’.³⁹ So he moved to the idea of a mind loving and knowing itself – the second analogy:

But just as there are two things, the mind and its love, when it loves itself, so there are two things, the mind and its knowledge, when it knows itself. Therefore, the mind itself, its love and its knowledge are a kind of trinity; these three are one, and when they are perfect then they are equal.⁴⁰

With his second analogy Augustine did not just establish a triad in one mind but also attempted to convey three other points which are crucial for his argument. First, he argued that, although inseparable, love and knowledge are distinct to the consciousness and that therefore each exists substantially (substantialiter) in the mind. Secondly, by extension from the first analogy, the mind is introduced not as a neutral agent but as a lover and as a knower: these actions define what the mind is. This allowed Augustine to argue that it was impossible to conceive of a knower without its knowledge, nor a lover without its love. (The importance of this to the doctrine of the Trinity becomes clearer when one thinks of Athanasius’ argument that it is impossible to think of a father without a son: begetting defines who the father is.) The action of loving not only links a mind with its love but also logically distinguishes a mind from its love. Thirdly, the action of loving is not just mutually defining (love defines what the lover is, the lover’s loving defines what love is) but it is reflexive: the mind loves itself. It is that which, for Augustine, makes the three ‘equal’, for he assumes (along with many of his pagan contemporaries) that the only love which completely possesses its object is mind’s love of itself and that the only knowledge that can completely possess its object is the mind’s love and knowledge of itself.

Yet there remained a problem. Augustine had established that the mind was permanently related to but logically distinct from its love, and that the mind was permanently related to but logically distinct from its knowledge. But could not someone argue that the mind’s knowledge is the same thing as its love? Could not the triad of mind, knowledge and love in fact collapse into a pair of mind and its loving, knowing reflection on itself? After all, Augustine had assumed in his own treatise that knowledge and love were very close to each other. This difficulty moved Augustine on to his third analogy. In this he moved from a model of a mind with two actions to the model of three interrelated actions of one mind. These actions were memory, understanding (or knowledge) and will (or love). To put it very simply, the second model had suggested one thing doing two actions: one noun and two verbs. The third model suggested three interrelated actions: three verbs. Augustine suggested that in the mind, memory, understanding and will were connected in such a way that their interrelations both defined each other and united each other: memory was always a memory of something, knowledge was always knowledge of something, will always willed something. As one could not conceive of a lover without love, so one could not conceive of will without that which it willed. Furthermore, they were totally equal because in memory, understanding and will the activity of the mind was completely reflexive: the removal of the mind as one of the three, the one which ‘did’ things, seemed to remove all trace of the idea that one was superior to the other two. This idea is perhaps easiest to express in terms of thinking of memory, understanding and will as verbs again: the interrelation occurs because all three can be both reflexive verbs (one can remember, understand and will/love oneself), but they are also all auxiliary verbs: it makes sense to say ‘I remember that I have memory, understanding, and will’, ‘I understand that I understand, will and remember’, ‘I will that I will, remember and understand’. The equality of the three depends on the fact that I remember my whole understanding and will, I understand my whole memory and will, I will my whole memory and understanding. Their distinction depends on the fact that what I do not remember, I do not know nor will; what I do not understand I do not know nor will; what I do not will, I do not remember nor understand.⁴¹

Of course the crucial question remained of whether this model – even if it made sense with regard to the human mind – could appropriately apply to the Trinity. Augustine argued that it did because of several prior assumptions that he made throughout On the Trinity. Despite his anxiety about language, he did assume that some literal language of God was possible: relational language (father–son; lover–love) was a prime example. Crucially, as we saw in relation to his exposition of Genesis, he thought that humans were created in the image of God, with respect to their soul or mind. Thus for Augustine one should expect to find traces (‘vestiges’) of the Trinity in the human mind, however imperfectly. Furthermore, Augustine argued that these traces were found more perfectly in those minds which know God. For Augustine, it was only in knowing God that we fully and perfectly know and love ourselves – that is only in knowing God do people act in full and complete reflexivity.

So, all of a sudden, Augustine pulled the rug out from under his readers’ feet: he first produced the analogy of the mind in order to understand more about God; he concluded by affirming that in fact that deeper aim of the work is to know and love God so that the image of God could be renewed in his readers’ minds. Of course, the treatise is still ‘about’ a correct doctrine of the Trinity, otherwise the biblical quotations at the beginning would not make sense; nevertheless, for Augustine there is more to it than that. The aim of the treatise is to draw the reader into a close relationship with the divine, by a progression through various stages: a study of the psychological self (about which Augustine, like Descartes, thinks one cannot be mistaken); a move to God (based on the idea of humanity being created in the image of God and the assumption that the terms Father, Son and Spirit are relational in a similar way to the way memory, understanding and will are relational); a move back to the spiritual self in order to purify it by adding the ‘vertical’ axis of knowledge and love of God to the ‘horizontal’ axis of knowledge and love of self.⁴²

Although on the surface very different, the Confessions and On the Trinity share a similar dynamic: although seeming to be about one thing (Augustine’s own life, the doctrine of the Trinity), the way they are constructed is designed to draw the reader into the narrative. In this way, without ceasing to be about Augustine’s life or the Trinity, they also become about the reader herself and her relationship to God in love. They show Augustine at the height of his theological and literary powers.

Augustine was not, however, immune from the controversies which demanded the time of so many of the Church Fathers. One of these involved Pelagius, a British man, who came to Rome around 380 and probably learnt his theology there.⁴³ By the turn of the century he was established in Rome as an advisor on asceticism to various, often wealthy, Roman Christians. He is said to have been scandalized by hearing an excerpt from Augustine’s Confessions (an interesting comment, besides anything else, on the influence that Augustine’s work was already having). The particular aspect of the Confessions that exercised Pelagius was not the revelations about Augustine’s youth, but Augustine’s description of his response to God. The Confessions’ narrative described Augustine as thoroughly caught up in his sinful life: a captive who was at once willing (‘I was in love with love’) and struggling to escape. The famous episode in which Augustine described how he and some friends stole some pears from a garden, not because they wanted to eat them but because of the sheer naughtiness of the deed, exemplified for Augustine the way in which he – like all humans – was unable to resist sinning. A consequence of this for Augustine was that when conversion came, it could be seen in no way as a reward for good behaviour – it was entirely due to the generosity of God:

Is not human life a trial in which there is no respite? My entire hope is exclusively in your very great mercy. Grant what you command and command what you will. You require continence. A certain writer has said, ‘… no one can be continent except God grants it …’ (Wisdom 8.21). O love (amor), you ever burn and are never extinguished. O charity (caritas), my God set me on fire. You command continence; grant what you command and command what you will.⁴⁴

The final sentence is said to have provoked Pelagius. It may be that the initial provocation was the fact that the words were being quoted out of context by a bishop who appeared to be condoning the sexual behaviour of some of his congregation (that is, Augustine’s words were taken to mean ‘if God wants you to be continent, he will make it happen’).⁴⁵ For Pelagius, whose life was bound up with encouraging tough physical and spiritual discipline on his followers, this laxity was outrageous. But whatever the original circumstances, it rapidly became clear that there was a huge gulf between Pelagius’ and Augustine’s understandings of the human response to God.

Pelagius probably heard those words in Rome around 405, a decade after Augustine’s consecration as Bishop of Hippo. In 409 Alaric the Visigoth besieged Rome and, like many others, Pelagius and a friend Caelestius escaped. They travelled to North Africa, where they preached in various cities, including Hippo and Carthage. After a while Pelagius left to visit Palestine, leaving Caelestius behind to continue preaching. Clearly they caused a stir, as it was around this time that Caelestius was excommunicated by a council in Carthage in 411 and Augustine began to denounce Pelagius and his teachings.

The six complaints of the council at Carthage against Caelestius can be summarized under four headings: Adam’s condition before the Fall, the rest of humanity’s relation to Adam, the possibility of virtue and the means of salvation.

It is important to remember that Pelagius and Augustine were both enthusiastic about asceticism. Both thought that a disciplined life in obedience to God was an important part of the Christian faith. Both were profoundly interested in the realities of everyday existence in which humans were faced with sin and temptation. Their differences lay in how they conceived the possibilities of the present life – particularly in comparison with the life which was lived by Adam and Eve before the Fall. In brief, Pelagius saw a significant continuity between the pre-Fall Adam and himself, while Augustine saw a deep gulf.

Pelagius’ whole strategy as a spiritual guru was based on the assumption that Christians had some kind of choice over the kind of life they led: ‘Man can be without sin, and can keep the commandment of God if he so wishes.’ ⁴⁶ But keeping God’s command required disciplined effort: it was for this reason that Pelagius was most appalled by Augustine’s ‘grant what you command’, for it seemed to him to deny that effort. In fact, contrary to his enemies’ accusations, Pelagius appears to have thought it doubtful, if not impossible, that anyone (apart from Jesus Christ) had actually been sinless throughout their life. He did, however, seem to suggest that a pure life after conversion and baptism might be logically possible, if unlikely.

Pelagius was keen to emphasize that it was God who helped humans in their pursuit of the good and indeed that it was God who had implanted in humans the possibility of choosing the good in the first place (‘man’s power to will the good and effect it, is of God alone’ ⁴⁷). Furthermore he recognized that sin could become an ingrained habit, both for individuals and for humanity as a whole. Nevertheless, he thought that sin could not utterly corrupt or obstruct the will, and he asserted that subsequent humans were not so different from Adam. Specifically Pelagius argued that humans did not inherit from Adam some ‘congenital evil’: all humans beings were created with the same human nature with which Adam was created.⁴⁸ Thus even though humans were not born into the same context as Adam, since they were born into a society which has inherited a habit of sinning, Pelagius emphasized the importance of the fact that as individuals they had not inherited a predetermination to sin.

In this system Pelagius understood divine grace primarily as the gift of creating humans able to do good:

God wished to bestow on his rational creation the privilege of doing good voluntarily, and the power of free choice, by implanting in man the possibility of choosing either side; and so he gave him … the power of being what he wished to be; so that he should be naturally capable of good and evil, that both should be within his power, and that he should incline his will towards one or the other.⁴⁹

He thought that each human must then actualize this possibility by willing something good and then doing it. A secondary sense of grace in his system, therefore, was the help God gave humans in their willing and doing, for example, God’s gift of moral law (both natural law and that revealed in the New and Old Testaments). He also acknowledged the grace of forgiveness of sins and the grace which illuminated the mind to give it wisdom: these aspects of grace were most apparent in baptism, which he thought cleansed the soul of sins the believer had committed and regenerated it for a life of future virtue. It would not be correct, therefore, to think that Pelagius had no place for grace. But all these senses of grace viewed it as something external: some force which operated in the creation of human nature or in assisting human nature. Just as Pelagius denied that sin could become internal to human nature (through being inherited from Adam), so he denied that grace could operate directly on or in human nature. It seems as if either inherited sin or internal grace would, to Pelagius’ mind, have biased human choice in a way contrary to humans’ God-given freedom of will.

Central to Pelagius’ arguments were his convictions first that God would not command what humans were unable to will or perform and, second, that God would punish those who disobeyed his laws.⁵⁰ Underlying his theology seems to be a clear expectation of divine rewards and punishments – rewards and punishments which in some cases seem to be directly proportional to the amount of sin or virtue. Thus, for example, Pelagius’ interpretation of the ‘many dwelling places’ of John 14.2⁵¹ was that there would be different ranks in heaven to reward those of varying degrees of virtue. As one of Augustine’s modern biographers remarks, this concept of ‘religious meritocracy’ brings to Pelagius’ theology an unattractive focus on ‘superhuman morality’ – however appealing his focus on the freedom of the will.⁵²

Augustine’s response to Pelagius was to deny neither human freedom nor divine grace, but rather to offer an alternative account of them – an account which Augustine felt fitted with both his experience and the Church’s understanding of the Bible.⁵³ The only humans who truly had the freedom to choose between good and evil were Adam and Eve. After their disobedience, all humans inherited from them the consequences of their sin – death, guilt and the corruption of human nature – which meant that humans were henceforth biased towards the choice of sin. This was in addition to being born into a world which had become corrupted by the human habit of sinning. Thus, in Augustine’s theology, humans shared the guilt of Adam’s sin and they bore the guilt of their own sins. For this, Augustine argued, humanity en masse deserved the punishment ordained by God: not just biological death but the ‘second death’ of hell.

This might seem a pretty desperate situation for humankind, but the idea of all humans inheriting Adam’s original sin (or rather his original guilt) reflected a strong strand of western (especially North African) theology and to Augustine seemed also to reflect his own personal experience. Similarly his feeling that his call back to God was completely undeserved seems to have informed his concept of election. Because of sin, he argued, all humans deserve the divine punishment; through Christ, however, God had chosen some to be saved:

The individual members of this race would not have been subject to death, had not the first two … merited it by their disobedience. So great was the sin of those two that human nature was changed by it for the worse; and so bondage to sin and the necessity of death were transmitted to their posterity. Now the sway of the kingdom of death over men was so complete that all would have been driven headlong, as their due punishment, into that second death to which there is no end, had not some of them been redeemed by the unmerited grace of God.⁵⁴

This theory inevitably raises the question: why are some saved and not others? Augustine’s main answer is that since all sinned in Adam, all deserve the consequences. One should praise God for those who are saved, instead of presumptuously criticizing his failure to save them all.⁵⁵ In particular, one should not believe that God chose a certain group because of their virtue. This is because God’s choice (or election) is not dependent on human good actions. Augustine illustrated this point with reference to the story of Cain and Abel. Many exegetes before him had puzzled over the question of why God had rejected the offering from one and accepted that of the other. Augustine’s answer was simply that one had been chosen and the other had not:

Now Cain was the first son born to those two parents of the human race, and he belonged to the City of man; the second son, Abel, belonged to the City of God. … Each man, because he derives his origin from a condemned stock, is at first necessarily evil and fleshly, because he comes from Adam; but if, being reborn, he advances in Christ, he will afterwards be good and spiritual. So it is also with the whole human race. When those two cities began to run through their course of birth and death, the first to be born was a citizen of this world, and the second was a pilgrim in this world, belonging to the City of God. The latter was predestined by grace and chosen by grace; by grace he was a pilgrim below and by grace he was a citizen above. So far as he himself is concerned, he arises from the same lump which was wholly condemned originally; but God like a potter … made out of the same lump, one vessel unto honour, and the other unto dishonour.⁵⁶

Thus, while for Pelagius there was a clear connection between humans’ actions and their ultimate destiny, Augustine seemed to have cut that connection: God chose some ‘unto honour’ not because they deserved it, but simply because that was his eternal choice.

But this theology raises a further question: if Augustine believed that God predestined some for salvation, did he think that that meant those people could behave immorally without fear of punishment or, more specifically, without fear of losing their salvation? Here Augustine’s answer is complex, and one needs to return to the idea of the moral connection between humans’ actions and their salvation. Augustine seemed to have cut the connection between them; in fact though, it is better to say that he understood the connection in a different way. For Pelagius, moral behaviour merited a reward in heaven: one’s salvation was caused by one’s actions. For Augustine, too, one could not enter heaven unless one was pure of heart; but one’s purity of heart was dependent on one’s election to salvation. That is, Augustine believed that God had chosen him, had given him the grace of faith to receive the offer of salvation, the grace of the remission of the guilt from Adam in baptism and the grace to do good. Through Christ, the believer is freed from being completely enslaved to a corrupt will and is liberated to do good.⁵⁷

Augustine did not mean that Christians always did good – such a claim would be ridiculous, flying in the face of all the evidence. Nor did he mean that they did good without an effort: the corrupt will was still present and Augustine wrote frequently of the necessity and the difficulty of resisting it. Nevertheless, he asserted that although people must make the effort to resist evil, any good they do is due to the grace of God working within them. This is a difficult concept to understand. This is partly because there was an asymmetry in Augustine’s theology between sin (for which humans are responsible although they are enslaved to it) and virtue (which God enables humans to attain freely). But Augustine’s theory is also difficult to grasp because he was introducing a radical notion of what freedom truly was: ‘The choice of the will, then, is truly free only when it is not the slave of vice and sins.’ ⁵⁸ In the present life, the freedom promised in Christ was partial: it existed in believers but was mixed with the lack of freedom brought by the corruption of human nature in the Fall. Ultimately, however, Augustine thought that the grace of salvation would be perfected so that eventually those who were predestined for heaven would be no longer able to sin. Thus humans would not return to their original, natural state (as supposed by Origen and other Greek theologians) but would transcend even that good condition to a new graced state in which sin would be impossible. Augustine expressed this in terms of a movement from ‘being able to sin’, to ‘not being able not to sin’, to ‘not being able to sin’.⁵⁹

Augustine’s theology of grace and freedom is difficult on more than one count. It is extremely difficult for many readers to reconcile themselves to the idea that God might freely choose to elect some and not others for a reason not connected to their moral desert. His concept of freedom is philosophically complex. These difficulties are exacerbated when Augustine’s theology is simplified and summarized. A more sympathetic perspective comes, perhaps, from considering his views from a more personal perspective, when the complexity is more clearly a reflection of humans’ morally complex lives. Augustine thought that, like Abel, all those chosen by God would be ‘citizens above’, but he was more eloquent about those who were in the meantime ‘pilgrims below’. Some of this is evident in Augustine’s prayer for his mother Monica, in the Confessions (IX.xiii.34–5):

But, now, on behalf of your maidservant, I pour out to you, our God, … tears [which] flow from a spirit struck hard considering the perils threatening every soul that ‘dies in Adam’ (I Corinthians 15.22). She, being ‘made alive’ in Christ’, though not yet delivered from the flesh, so lived that your name is praised in her faith and behaviour. But I do not dare to say that, since the day when you regenerated her through baptism, no word came from her mouth contrary to your precept. It was said by the Truth, your Son: ‘If anyone says to his brother, Fool, he will be liable to the gehenna of fire’ (Matthew 5.22). Woe even to those of praiseworthy life if you put their life under scrutiny and remove mercy. But because you do not search our faults with rigour, we confidently hope for some place with you. If anyone lists his true merits to you, what is he enumerating before you but your gifts? … Therefore, God of my heart, my praise and my life, I set aside for a moment her good actions for which I rejoice and give you thanks. I now petition you for my mother’s sins. ‘Hear me’ (Psalms 142.1) through the remedy for our wounds who hung upon the wood and sits at your right hand to intercede for us (Romans 8.34).

Predestination to salvation, then, did not mean the predestination of individuals’ particular actions. Monica still had to struggle after baptism. In his prayer, Augustine was following traditions of penance and prayers for the dead, which thought that sin after baptism had to be ‘made good’. Although salvation is not a reward, good deeds and salvation are connected, because Augustine believes that the elect will be given the grace of perseverance in their lives as pilgrims, so that eventually they will reach the final grace of the perfection of their salvation in heaven, the final City of God.

So far Augustine’s theology has been considered more from an individualistic perspective: an individual like Monica, according to Augustine, was a pilgrim in this life because her life had a ‘mixed’ quality in which she was not quite liberated from the slavery of sin. For Augustine, this mixed quality also affected the Church as a whole: although one hoped that all those within it would eventually reach the City of God in heaven, Augustine was quite clear that one could not completely identify the Church with heaven on earth, because it was almost bound to contain those who would not remain true to their baptism. Just as he feared that Monica’s sins after baptism might have meant that she was ‘liable to the gehenna of fire’, so he believed that it was possible that in the Church there were those who had not been given the grace to persevere in their faith.⁶⁰ (The question ‘why?’ could only be answered, as before, by reference to humans’ inability to understand the workings of God’s grace, and the whole of humanity’s inheritance of sin.) For this reason, although he did believe that Christ dwells in the Church on earth through the Holy Spirit,⁶¹ Augustine never forgot that the Church was a human institution with all the failings which followed from that. He particularly warned against identifying God’s kingdom with any human institution, whether the Church or the Empire or any future earthly realm. His subtle theory of human law and government follows from this caution.

In Augustine’s theology, the ‘City of man’ was the mass of humanity who had deserved the second death because of sharing in the sin of Adam. The ‘City of God’ was the sum of those who, despite also sharing in Adam’s sin, were chosen from that mass by God for his kingdom. In his monumental work The City of God, Augustine traced the course of the two cities through history from Adam to the eschaton – the end of all things. Although the present age since Adam was characterized by the conflict caused by the rule of sin and the mixing of the two cities,⁶² the Last Judgement would be the point at which the two cities would be divided for ever. The ‘lot of those who do not belong in the City of God will be everlasting misery’ (the nature of this punishment Augustine detailed in Book XXI).⁶³ The just would see the vision of God in heaven (the subject of Book XXII). Only this division by divine judgement will bring everlasting peace.

Although the two cities were thus distinguished by their destinies, more profoundly they were characterized by the different objects of their love:

Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self.⁶⁴

People in the earthly city put created things before the creator, and Augustine therefore thought that they would be punished by being eternally separated from the creator. In hell, they are not only separated from God, but they are finally aware of the impossibility of their earthly loves ever being satisfied: their punishment of eternal fire, although Augustine treats it as literal fire, is surely also symbolic of the unquenchable fires of their passions. In heaven, however, those in the City of God will be ever satisfied in their love, for God will be ‘all in all’.⁶⁵