You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
-Augustine, The Confessions




Lecture 18.
Christianity before the Reformation

The early church writers in the first few centuries after the time of the New Testament are called "the Fathers," and the writings they produced are known collectively as "Patristic Literature." (There were important women in these centuries, but they did not write Patristic Literature and they were not allowed to have formal positions of leadership in the Catholic Church.)

The Golden Age of Patristic Literature is from the Council of Nicea to the Council of Chalcedon. Some of the famous church writers of this period are Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine of Hippo. Ambrose and Chrysostom ("golden-mouth") were famous preachers and interpreters of scripture. Jerome translated the Vulgate (or large parts of it). The Vulgate became the standard Latin translation of the Bible. And Augustine ...

Augustine

Because we have limited time, we'll focus attention on Augustine of Hippo, an extraordinary figure who helped shape Western Christianity and indeed Western Culture in general.

Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 CE in North Africa. In 387, he was converted to Christianity and baptized in Milan. He then returned to North Africa, where he became a priest and then bishop of Hippo. During that period the Goths sacked Rome in 410, and then the Vandals ravaged Hippo in 430. In the same year, Augustine died of a fever. When Hippo was destroyed by fire, Augustine's library was rescued. Augustine had left behind hundreds of sermons and dozens of important writings, including the most famous: The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and The Confessions. His many writings were widely copied and became extraordinarily influential in Western Christianity.

The Confessions

The Confessions is a remarkably unusual book. For one thing, the entire book is presented in the form of a prayer. In it, Augustine tells God the story of his life, and praises God for the wonderful ways in which God had worked in his life. But at the same time, Augustine is letting the reader look over his shoulder as he talks to God.

There had been autobiographical writings before Augustine (perhaps Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is the most famous example), but The Confessions is probably the world's first psychological autobiography.

Augustine has been called "the first modern man." That's an overstatement, of course. Augustine was very much a child of his own age. But he did shape the modern world, and so some of his characteristics and thought seem remarkably modern.

One of those characteristics is what Krister Stendahl calls "the introspective conscience of the West." "Introspective conscience" refers to the way that Augustine's Confessions examine his acts and probe his motives for performing those acts. For example, early in The Confessions, Augustine tells how when he was about sixteen he and some buddies stole pears from a neighbor's tree. And then Augustine goes on for page after page analyzing why he stole those pears. He wasn't hungry. The pears were very good. He stole the pears simply because it was wrong. He did it because he decided to be evil. Well, that's a short summary of his reflections. The point is that ever since Augustine, Western Christians have been very preoccupied with their consciences and their motivations for sinning.

Augustine was raised by a Christian mother named Monica. But Augustine found that the Christianity did not satisfy his intellectual questions, especially with regard to the problem of evil. Augustine found the answers of Manichaeism more satisfying, at least for a few years.

Manichaeism was a religion begun by a third-century prophet named Mani. Influenced by Zoroastrianism, it taught a strict dualism between Light and Darkness. Bodies and the material world were considered the creations of demonic powers. Converts were to avoid sex and violence in their attempt to return to a heavenly world above the Milky Way.

As Augustine describes his early life, he was caught in a web of lust. While he was betrothed to one woman with good connections, he lived with another woman and had a child by her. After living with his mistress for several years, he sent her away. His appetite for sex then lead him into promiscuous relations with a number of women.

Meanwhile, Augustine's career had led him first to Rome and then to Milan, which was at that time the capital of the western half of the Roman Empire. There he meet Ambrose, the bishop of Milan and by any account a genius. (One day, Augustine was astounded to see Ambrose reading silently. Augustine had never seen anyone reading silently before. It was the normal practice in the ancient world to read out loud.) Ambrose had a much more sophisticated view of Christianity than Augustine had encountered in North Africa. For one thing, he was using Neo-Platonic writers as a resource and he was understanding Christianity in Neo-Platonic terms. He was able to resolve all of Augustine's intellectual problems with Christianity. For example, Augustine came to realize that there is no such "thing" as evil; evil is simply the absence of good.

At this point in his life, Augustine was intellectually converted to Christianity. But he realized that if he became a Christian he would have to give up his promiscuity. In fact, he believed he need to give up sex entirely. And he wasn't ready to take that step. The prayer he was praying was, "God, give me chastity ... but not yet."

The excerpt in our bulk pack is Book 8 of The Confessions, in which Augustine tells the story of his conversion to Christianity. We'll talk about it more in recitation.

The video excerpt (Jim O'Donnell's Augustine: Late Have I Love Thee) describes Augustine's influence and his view of God. It describes Augustine's attraction to the Manichees, his intellectual conversion under Ambrose, and speaks of the power of life within the church. O'Donnell mentions that Christians did not speak of what went on in church, because those proceedings were protected by the "disciplini arcani," a secrecy that grew out of reverence. (For more information, consult the script).

Augustine's "introspective conscience" and his reading of Paul have shaped the theology and perspectives of Western Christianity. Here is a sketch of Augustine's reading of Romans:

If this summary sounds very familiar, it should. With a few variations regarding Original Sin, this summary is the standard reading of Paul in Western Christianity and, in fact, the standard Western Christian understanding of the problem and solution of human life. Augustine is the first Christian writer to include a theory of the fall and of original sin as an essential part of the story of the human race and its need for salvation.

Christian Interpretation of Scripture

To talk about Christian interpretation of scripture, we need to back up in time and mention Origen, an important Christian writer from the beginning of the third century. Origen was a Middle Platonist. He taught that every scripture has an inner, spiritual meaning. This meaning is usually called "allegorical." Origen was a fundamental influence on latter interpreters.

For an example of allegory, let's consider Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs. If you've looked at the Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon), you know that this is the most erotic book in the Bible. It is filled with love poetry.

Now before Origen, Jewish interpreters had already understood the Song of Songs as the story of the love affair between Israel and God.

The first line of Song of Songs is, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." Origen says that on the surface level this is the cry of a young women who has received betrothal gifts sent from her fiance, but now she wishes to have a more personal token of his love: she longs for him to kiss her. Then Origen turns to the inner meaning of the verse. It is an allegory about the Christ and the Church: the Church has for many centuries received gifts (such as the Law and the Prophecies) but now longs for union with Christ himself. Then Origen gives another allegorical interpretation regarding Christ and the Soul: the human soul has also received gifts from Christ, but she longs for the full and perfect satisfaction of her love.

For, when her mind is filled with divine perception and understanding without the agency of human or angelic ministration, then she may believe she has received the kisses of the Word of God Himself.... Moreover, the plural, "kisses," is used in order that we may understand that the lighting up of every obscure meaning is a kiss of the Word of God bestowed upon the perfected soul.
Origen goes through the rest of the Song of Songs, interpreting the two lovers in it as Christ and the Church and then as Christ and the human soul. Origen's allegorical approach to scripture would be incredibly influential in both Eastern and Western Christianity. He himself would be condemned as a heretic at the Second Council of Constantinople (553 CE).

John Cassian's schema of Fourfold Interpretation is included in our textbook. The four levels of interpretation that he sees are:

There was a piece of doggerel to help medieval students remember the four levels of interpretation:
littera gesta docet,
quid credas allegoria,
moralis quid agas,
quo tendas anagogia.
       The letter teaches what happened,
allegory what you believe,
the moral what you do,
anagogy where you are going.
The classic example is Jerusalem. Understood according to the letter, Jerusalem is the city in Judea. Understood allegorically, Jerusalem is the church. Understood tropologically, Jerusalem is sanctification. Understood according to anagogy, Jerusalem is eternal life in heaven.

(Compare the four levels of medieval Christian interpretation with the four levels of medieval Jewish interpretation.)

Augustine discusses interpretation of scripture in his handbook, On Christian Doctrine. First, he explains that the fundamental concept of Christian doctrine is the double command to love God and one's neighbor as oneself. He then applies this fundamental principle to interpretation.

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived ... [Book One, Section 39]

... if he is deceived in an interpretation which builds up charity, which is the end of the commandments, he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads. But he is to be corrected and shown that it is more useful not to leave the road, lest the habit of deviating force him to take a crossroad or a perverse way. [Book One, Section 40]

Later in the same book, Augustine gives an example of allegorical interpretation of Song of Songs.
... it may be said that there are holy and perfect men with whose lives and customs as an exemplar the Church of Christ is able to destroy all sorts of superstitions in those who come to it and to incorporate them into itself, men of good faith, true servants of God, who, putting aside the burden of the world, come to the holy laver of baptism and, ascending thence, conceive through the Holy Spirit and produce the fruit of a twofold love of God and their neighbor. But why is it, I ask, that if anyone says this he delights his hearers less than if he had said the same thing in expounding that place in the Song of Songs where it is said of the Church, as she is being praised as a beautiful woman, "Thy teeth are as flocks of sheep that are shorn, which come up from the washing, all with twins, and there is none barren among them"? Does one learn anything else besides that which he learns when he hears the same thought expressed in plain words without this similitude? Nevertheless, in a strange way, I contemplate the saints more pleasantly when I envisage them as the teeth of the Church cutting off men from their errors and transferring them to her body after their hardness has been softened as if by being bitten and chewed. I recognize them most pleasntly as shorn sheep having put aside the burdens of the world like so much fleece, and as ascending from the washing, which is baptism, all to create twins, which are the two precepts of love, and I see no one of them sterile of this holy fruit. [Book Two, Section 6]

The Middle Ages

For lack of time, we now pass quickly through the Middle Ages, simply pointing out some of the major developments:

The High Middle Ages (12th-13th Centuries)

The Twelfth Century was a little renaissance before the Renaissance of the Fourteenth Century.

Francis of Assisi lived in the first part of the 1200's. His Canticle of Brother Sun (in the bulk pack) is an example of Christian mysticism. Francis is another person who lead a wild life and that converted wholly to Christianity. In Francis's case, the conversion was to absolute poverty in service to God and the world.

At the end of the 1200's we find Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas plays a role in Christianity similar to that Maimonides plays in Judaism. In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas adopts Aristotelian philosophy to give a systematic explanation of Christian theology. In the readings in the bulk pack, we see Aquinas affirm the fundamental importance of the historical (literal) meaning of scripture. After the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church would accept Aquinas's theology (Thomism) as the standard for Catholic theology.

Sources

For More Information

For more information about Augustine, consult James O'Donnell's Augustine web site.