The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  In Augustine’s writings in the 380s there are indications that he accepts the existence of free will. In the opening of On Free Will, begun in 388, he argues that “what each one chooses to pursue and embrace is within the power of his will to determine.” Man must take responsibility for the evil he commits. This was in line with established thinking on the issue. Earlier Christian commentators had stressed how Jesus’ exhortations to his followers (in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance) seem to take for granted that they could act freely in making the choice to care or not to care for those around them. The essence of Jesus’ message appears to be that human beings have choice, and he, in his teachings, is pointing out the way in which that choice should be exercised.24 As he continued to write On Free Will over the next eight or nine years, however, Augustine’s position changed. The later parts of the book accept only one true instance of the exercise of free will: Adam’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit. (There remains a significant issue. If Adam was the perfect man, created as such by God, why did he give in to temptation so easily?) As a result of the Fall, Adam becomes imbued with sin, “original sin,” as it came to be known, which he then passed down to the human race. The power of this sin is so debilitating that it even limits the extent to which human beings can enjoy free will. Mankind is now, Augustine writes in his Letter to Simplicianus (397), no more than “a lump,” infused with the guilt of Adam. As a result of this corruption all are deprived of the power to save themselves. Here Augustine follows in the tradition of human sinfulness stressed by Athanasius, although it is possible that he may still have been influenced by Manicheism, with its own stress on the power of evil. The effect of being burdened by sin is profound; it not only makes our lives on earth ones of certain wrongdoing that our own efforts can do little to avoid, it makes damnation (which Augustine, drawing on Jesus’ words in Matthew, believes to be eternal) very likely.

  While Augustine retained the idea that human beings had a sense of the truth of God and yearned for it—in De Trinitate he argued that God had provided the soul with the means of recognizing him when grace was offered—the truth could not be gained except through God’s grace. Grace was possible through the sacraments, but even baptism did not necessarily relieve (fallen) man of sin, nor could good works. Augustine rejected the idea that those who are in the church are more likely to be saved than those who are not. “Many who seemed to be without are within, many who seem to be within are without.” Good and bad, saved and unsaved, are mingled together on earth, until the last judgment divides them. God alone knows who will be saved; as one of Augustine’s critics remarked, “God does not desire all men to be saved, but only the fixed number of the predestined.” Sin is passed on through sexual intercourse; so once again sexual desire is woven into evil, this time through its very transmission.25

  This is the doctrine of a deeply pessimistic, isolated and guilt-ridden mind, although there were precedents for Augustine in the north African theological tradition. Augustine had moved far from an optimistic assessment of human nature. “The consoling, confidence-inspiring certainties of a rationally ordered universe, controlled and subject to man’s free will, which Augustine had enjoyed in his earlier works, were now taken from under his feet,” as Carol Harrison puts it. By the late 390s Augustine’s rejection of reason and the wider philosophical tradition of the classical world had led him to a philosophical dead end. The scriptural backing for original sin was flimsy; only five texts from the whole of scripture can be claimed to support it, and it has been argued that three of those, including the crucial verse from Romans, rest on mistranslations into Latin from the original Greek. To accept original sin is to accept that one generation can be held responsible for the guilt of another, an assumption alien to most ethical systems. As guilt is independent of any action, good or bad, by the individual, even a baby can be damned to eternal fire. Augustine’s God, for all his apparent “love,” is credited with little in the way of compassion. Later Augustine even argued that we should be grateful that God is prepared to save even a minority, so terrible was the sinfulness of mankind as a result of the Fall.26 Augustine expects human beings to fail.

  Augustine’s theology was, of course, challenged. His first major opponent was Pelagius. Pelagius, who originally came from Britain, is first recorded as living in Rome in the 390s and subsequently in Jerusalem. He knew Jovinian and Rufinus and was sympathetic to their views, hence giving Jerome the opportunity to condemn him—in his usual robust way—as “that fathead bloated with Scotch porridge.” Pelagius stressed the possibility that human beings might conduct their own salvation through the power of reason and the exercise of free will. “By our reason, we are superior to those who live by their senses.” The Fall had had no effect on the natural abilities of human beings. “It is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory [sic] of the rational mind is based.”27 Given free will, the individual was not dependent for salvation on the grace of God, although Pelagius argued that those who had set out to find God would be helped to do so. He provided the analogy of a man who sets out of his own accord to row across a lake but who is helped by God, symbolised as a following wind. For Pelagius the sacrament of baptism was crucial in that it ensured forgiveness of prior sins and released the power of reason, enabling the individual to turn to God. Essentially he offered optimism as a contrast to the pessimism of his adversary. The path Pelagius offered was not, however, an easy one. Despite his connections with Jovinian, Pelagius was profoundly ascetic, critical of corruption and social injustice, and he expected his followers to be as well. According to him, we have free will to be perfect and therefore perfection is obligatory. The weakness of Pelagianism was that it was designed for an ascetic elite who, in the tradition of Christian asceticism, declared themselves in opposition to contemporary society. It was always an unsettling movement, and it has been noted that Pelagianism attracted more supporters in areas where invasion and social breakdown had been prevalent than it did in the more settled areas of the empire.

  In 415 the debate over free will and original sin burst into open conflict. It seems that Pelagius cited Augustine to defend his own position, thus demanding a response from Augustine and his supporters. It was soon apparent that the church was divided. One synod, at Jerusalem, condemned Pelagius; another endorsed his views. Two councils in north Africa (where both the tradition of original sin and Augustine’s own influence were strongest) condemned the Pelagians in 416. They were supported by the bishop of Rome, Innocent, after Augustine wrote to him suggesting that too great a stress on the free will of an individual threatened to undermine the authority of the bishops. However, Innocent’s successor, Zosimus, a Greek with no loyalties to Augustine or the African tradition, proved sympathetic to Pelagius, who had come to Rome to plead his case personally. The emperor Honorius, apparently disturbed by news of rioting in Rome that was blamed on Pelagius’ supporters, but that the Pelagians themselves attributed to the supporters of Augustine, condemned the Pelagians in an imperial edict of April 418 and ordered them to leave Rome. Honorius’ motives are unclear, but it appears that he took exception to Pelagius’ forceful condemnation of corruption. It was also said that a colleague of Augustine’s, the bishop of his home town, Thagaste, employed bribery at the court in his cause. The imperial condemnation was then endorsed by a synod of north African bishops held in Carthage. At this juncture Zosimus changed sides and himself condemned Pelagianism; there was further disarray when eighteen of the Italian bishops refused to support him. Few issues of doctrine have been settled less satisfactorily. Pelagius, forbidding though his strictures were, was entirely sincere in his commitment to Christianity. He was certainly no heretic. Once again it was the emperor, whose primary concern was good order, who settled the issue.

  One of the eighteen dissenting Italian bishops, Julian of Eclanum, who was forced into exile by the debate, set out the clearest and most powerful objection to Augustine’s position in
a letter addressed to Augustine himself.

  Babies, you say, carry the burden of another’s sin, not any of their own . . . Explain to me, then, who this person is who sends the innocent to punishment. You answer, God . . . God, you say, the very one who commends his love to us, who has loved us and not spared his son but handed him over to us, he judges us in this way; he persecutes new born children; he hands over babies to eternal flames because of their bad wills, when he knows that they have not so much formed a will, good or bad . . . It would show a just and reasonable sense of propriety to treat you as beneath argument: you have come so far from religious feeling, from civilized standards, so far indeed from common sense, that you think your Lord capable of committing kinds of crime which are hardly found among barbarian tribes. 28

  Augustine’s confusing concept of God, a loving but punitive deity, was exposed with great clarity. Augustine nevertheless stood firm and was preaching to worried and perplexed enquirers on the issue until his death.

  Running alongside Augustine’s battles with the Pelagians were disagreements with the Donatists, the largest Christian community in north Africa; Augustine’s orthodox Christian church was much smaller. The battles arose, of course, because the state had decreed that there could only be one orthodox church, which would have undisputed access to state patronage. It was a particularly difficult issue in that, quite apart from their size, the Donatists had a compelling case for representing the Christian church in north Africa. Their bishops were the leaders of those communities who had refused to bow to persecution and surrender their scriptures. Their pedigree was unchallengeable. Their bishops and clergy held their offices in direct descent from the original Apostles, and they argued that they drew on a purer tradition than the orthodox church in that they had never compromised with the Roman state, the state that had, after all, been responsible for the execution of Jesus. They had adopted orthodox doctrine and so could not be classed as heretics (who by now were beyond the law), and they preached austerity in the tradition of Tertullian. They would welcome back those whose faith had lapsed under persecution so long as a rebaptism took place (any orthodox Christian converting to Donatism needed to be baptized because the original baptism was not valid). Here again they represented tradition, in that rebaptism had been required by Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage martyred in the third century, whose own prestige and authority was immense. While Cyprian had stressed the need for unity in the church, the Donatists argued that unity had been undermined by those Christians who surrendered the sacred scriptures to the authorities. Crucial to the Donatists was their sense of being a national African church, representing African traditions against those of the more cosmopolitan orthodox church, with its ties to the imperial government. Although many Donatist bishops were sophisticated men, presiding over wealthy city sees, Donatism reached far into the rural areas in a way orthodox Christianity did not. Yet Donatism should not be idealized. The Donatists were also prone to internal dissensions and schism, and outside the cities Donatists, perhaps as much imbued with anti-imperialist as with anti-orthodox feeling, often used violence against orthodox Christians, even though their bishops tried to discourage them. Constantine had isolated the Donatists by refusing them state patronage. Now, ninety years on, it was increasingly difficult for a state that had taken the radical and unprecedented step of insisting on religious uniformity to allow them to persist, yet one could hardly deny that they were committed Christians. Any attempt to persecute them would only confirm their belief in themselves as the true church, that of the martyrs. It was a matter of some embarrassment to orthodox Christians that the Donatists could claim the backing of the influential Cyprian, whom the orthodox themselves wanted to use as champion of episcopal authority. Augustine found himself in the difficult position of having to distinguish the Donatists from the minority orthodox church in such a way as to allow the former to be condemned. And yet this could be done only by declaring them to be heretics, which they were clearly not. Augustine was reduced to inadequate statements such as “Anyone separated from the church would end by saying false things” and “A characteristic of heretical sects is to be incapable of seeing what is obvious to everyone else.”29

  Once again the state had come to the rescue of the orthodox church. In 405 Honorius issued an edict ordering the unity of both churches, branding the Donatists as heretics, partly on the grounds of their insistence on rebaptism, thus making them subject to the rigour of the law. Their property was to be confiscated, their services forbidden and their clergy exiled. Augustine ejected the Donatists from Hippo and, taking over their bare churches—they did not believe in decoration and whitewashed their church walls—he posted his own anti-Donatist texts on the walls. When persecution was relaxed, Augustine petitioned the emperor to summon a conference, and this, presided over as it was by an orthodox Christian, Marcellinus, could only end in a further condemnation of the Donatists, who were represented by nearly 300 bishops. Donatism in itself became a criminal offence (only just over a hundred years previously, of course, the last edicts of Diocletian treated Christianity as a whole in a similar way), and Donatists were now actively compelled to join the orthodox church.30

  In his earlier works Augustine was reluctant to condone the compelling of outsiders into the church. “Words should be our instruments, arguments our weapons, reason our means of conquest [sic] and we should avoid making enforced Catholics out of those whom we had known as open heretics.” There was no support from New Testament texts for persecution (in fact, the Donatists were to taunt Augustine with Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake . . .”), and Christianity itself had its own recent memories of how destructive persecution could be. The saintly and highly orthodox Gregory of Nazianzus had specifically condemned coercion: “Whatever is done against one’s will, under the threat of force, is like an arrow artificially tied back, or a river dammed in on every side of its channel. Given the opportunity it rejects the restraining force. What is done willingly, on the other hand, is steadfast for all time. It is made fast by the unbreakable bonds of love.” 31 However, the works of Athanasius and the edicts of 380 and 381 enforcing Trinitarian orthodoxy were loaded with condemnation of “heretics.” It was Augustine who developed a rationale of persecution.

  Augustine’s earlier, more tolerant, views were to change in the early fifth century. He began with the argument that Donatism intimidated many ordinary Christians and it was the duty of the “true” church to release them from such coercion. Furthermore, his experience of ordinary former Donatists was that most became excellent Christians when forced to do so. Therefore, compulsion was permissible. Just as God could punish in the exercise of his love, so too could the church, knowing as it did so that it was saving sinners from everlasting hell fire. “What then does brotherly love do? Does it, because it fears the short-lived fires of the furnace for the few, abandon all to the eternal fires of hell? And does it leave so many . . . to perish everlastingly . . . whom ‘others’ [i.e. the Donatists] will not permit to live in accordance with the teaching of Christ?” 32 Not for the last time in Christian history, fantasies about hell fire were being used as a means of manipulating Christian behaviour on earth. As for coercion, God himself had shown the way. The conversion of Paul had been effected by God throwing him to the ground; Augustine finds comparable examples of forced conversions in the Old Testament. Yet Augustine’s views on the sinfulness of every individual left him with a problem. Since even orthodox Christians were still burdened with sin, how was it possible to be sure that persecution was not an exercise of sinfulness? Augustine fell back on assertions that the church was divinely inspired and that any action undertaken in “love” must have God’s support. While Augustine pleaded for restraint (he never condoned the death penalty, for instance, on the grounds that it deprived the sinner of the possibility of repentance), he had nevertheless provided a rationale for persecution, however circumscribed, which w
as to be exploited in the centuries to come. By the thirteenth century a papal legate reported on the extermination of the Cathars, a sect which preached a return to the ascetic ideals of early Christianity: “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword regardless of age and sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.” 33

  The Donatist dispute challenged Augustine to develop another line of thinking. The Donatists, drawing on the teachings of Cyprian, argued that baptism at the hands of a priest or bishop who had apostatized could not be valid. Those who ministered the sacraments must be worthy men, in fact the church itself must be a community of saints. So long as the orthodox church, whose bishops had their succession from those who had lapsed, was, so far as the Donatists were concerned, in schism, their ministers could not be worthy. Augustine was forced to argue in reply that the quality of the minister was not essential to the sacrament. It was a direct expression of the grace of God and passed from God to the recipient without losing its purity (as water passed down a stone channel). So long as the sacrament was administered in the name of Christ and the correct form was used, it was valid (although as already seen, baptism did not necessarily free the recipient of original sin, so that Augustine raised the possibility of a “valid” sacrament that brought no benefit to its recipient!). The church could be made up of sinners without losing its unique role as the conduit of God’s grace. However badly its members, even those in the hierarchy, behave, the church can never lose its true role as guardian of orthodoxy. The role of the church was further elaborated in Augustine’s last and perhaps greatest work, The City of God, finally completed just four years before he died, in 426.