ology The val Augustine and Medie Augustine and Medieval ...ology The val Augustine and Medie...

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Transcript - CH511 Augustine and Medieval Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 20 of 24CH511

Augustine’s City of God, Part 2

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Hello again. I hope all is going well with you. It’s my pleasure to meet with you one more time and to continue talking about Saint Augustine and his work today, The City of God. And we will finish our overview of that work and our thinking about it. We’ll also then take a step back and summarize Augustine’s literary achievements and his contributions to the life of the mind, particularly for the life of the mind of Christians. But as our habit’s been, let’s begin with prayer.

Our Father, we pause before You, and we ask Your blessings on us. We ask Your blessing on the student, his or her work, their family and friends, and activities of their life and ministry. Father, we pray that You would guide our steps that we might be of pleasing service to You. Thank You for Your grace in our lives and the grace that has been exhibited in the life of Saint Augustine. We now pause before this work and pray that our heart mind’s eye would be open as we contemplate this literary achievement and the possible implications that it has in our life of ministry and service. We invoke You now as Your children and objects of Your love to smile on our work. And continue to bless us as we try to show our gratitude to You through service. We ask these things in the name of our Intercessor. Amen.

It’s good to be with you again. You’ll recall last time we were talking about The City of God. You know, you think about musicians, and they summarize their career around gold records hanging on the wall. And it may be with artists’ masterpieces, playwrights or directors, their particular hits. You have here with Augustine some outstanding works this man has written that have in some way altered the course of how people considered issues from then on and not just one work but a number of works along that line. It would be enough for one to write one Confessions or one treatise On the Trinity or on the issue of grace and free will or now, in this case, contemplation of the universe and spiritual realm versus a physical, material realm. And we’re going to, at the end of our

Scott T. Carroll, PhD Experience: Professor of Ancient History,

Cornerstone University



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discussion today, take a step back and think about the different literary contributions of Augustine. But our first objective will be to conclude our summary of The City of God and our reflection on it.

I will then, after we’ve gone through it a section at a time, take a look at it, and think about the possible implications that it might have in our own lives and ministry. Then we’ll step on and look at a summary of Augustine’s works. But you’ll recall last time that we were together, we were just beginning talking about The City of God. You’ve had opportunity to be reading in it, and we’ll be concluding your readings in it by the time we meet again.

Let’s pick up where we left off. We were looking at how the work fit in its literary genre and historical setting. And we began to look at issues relating to man’s quest for a kind of utopia on earth. We’ve thought about this kind of paradise lost and that theme. And we’ve thought about the influences both on Augustine and then Augustine’s influence later. I think it might be fair to say that The City of God in some ways is a treatise articulating for the first time a comprehensive Christian worldview. That’s quite a popular kind of buzz phrase nowadays in educational circles. And here we have back in the fifth century Saint Augustine working through these things. Not unlike the other issues in his life, it was crisis that forced him to come to grips with this. He was not setting out to write a treatise on synthesizing a kind of worldview, but it was the criticisms leveled against Christians and the church at large that were coming from the realm of Roman paganism. It was his observation of the great crisis taking place during his lifetime with the fall of the Roman Empire. He is thinking about issues that relate to faith to help to encourage believers to see a structure of providing stability amid a life that appeared to be crumbling around them. And so with those earliest recipients of this great book, let’s look to see what Augustine might have for us.

The book itself, you’ll recall, was written over a long period of time. It was at least fifteen years in the making. And in its genesis, the precipitating factor was the Gallic invasion of Rome. The refugees were coming down into North Africa as they were fleeing these barbarian forces. To give you a little bit of a setting here, the political capital, we’ve thought about this earlier, in the Roman Empire under Diocletian had been compartmentalized and split into an eastern and a western sphere which becomes the origins of the Eastern empire and the Western empire, and



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their two churches that are related to those. The Western church was known later as the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern church was the Greek Orthodox Church. These two are developing along a parallel line now. And as one is thinking of Rome itself, a populated, busy city overrun and dirty, the affairs of state in the West had shifted north to the city of Milan. And we saw Augustine in the early part of his career and his activities there with Ambrose and his conversion to Christianity.

Increasingly as we move along into the early medieval period, there are political attractions that are turning the focus of the Mediterranean world away from the south and the east and more toward the north. And these spheres are centripetally pulling the political activities to the north. There’s more and more as the northern barbarian tribes, for a variety of reasons, these peoples are in motion and movement. There are external forces causing huge population shifts, and territories are not yet defined there. This gave the Romans increased nightmares from the time of Caesar onward. They were continually worried about the northern frontier. And some of these peoples were early in the Christian period converted to Christianity. But of those converted, they fell underneath the influence of Arian theology. And so to a Roman who was a Christian, rooted one might hope to expect in orthodoxy, these sinister forces to the north had both an earthly dimension and a sinister spiritual dimension as well. They made their way into Italy, and city after city fell to them as they conquered and moved southward. Refugees were forced out to the south and jammed the southern part of the Italian boot and made their way across to North Africa. Horrific tales spread by word of mouth as people were worrying and wondering is this the end of the world if you’re from a Christian perspective. Is this something from a pagan perspective that Sybil may have predicted? And fingers of blame were being pointed. So in this context, we have Augustine, who’s going to take pen and parchment and is going to begin to write a discourse trying to address these things for a Christian audience, for a pagan audience.

In terms of the organization of The City of God, it can be organized around two spheres. The first part consisting of ten books is the defense of the faith. It’s an apologetic work, and we’ve talked about that before. It doesn’t mean an apology but a strong word of defense. It contains an exposition of true religion and a coverage of pagan history and religion and how those two are warped together. The second part of this work consists of twelve books. It contains the history of two cities, as it were: one city which is of



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the earthly sphere and the other city which is spiritual. It is a city that the eye of faith sees. It’s the heavenly city and citizenship. And how do these two interrelate? Those are the two parts of the work that we’ll analyze. Let me say that around this attempt to systematically put together a sense of a Christian worldview, we have a number of related issues that are at play here. Augustine will be one of the first thinkers to try to synthesize faith and history to try to bring an eye of faith to the historical record so as to bring meaning to it and articulate it and to bring understanding to it, to exegete it by the eye of faith. And for those of you who may be interested in history and pursuing church history, this is a very important work for that reason.

It’s the reflecting earliest thoughts on the integration of faith and history, which is an important area of contemplation.

We’ve talked a little bit about dualism last time. It’s not as if one wears the hat of the world and then they take that off on Sundays and they put on the hat of church, a mitre-shaped kind of hat. And they live in two realms. There are many people who kind of lapse into that, a kind of, especially in our modern day, a kind of Protestant asceticism or dualism which, if not carefully contained, lapses into almost a Gnosticism. These people live in a religious sphere on a Sunday, maybe a Wednesday night or some other time; and they then live in the world. And the two are separated by a chasm as wide as that which separated Lazarus and the rich man. They live their worldly life behind fences they construct. And the rules that they live by that order their life are not impacted by the Christian influence. Instead they make these little distinctions and compartments, and they set up their own little sphere. Augustine cuts to the quick of that. And he says no, he’s infusing a faith understanding into the realm of the world. And so for those of us who are historians, it can sometimes appear as a simple way of handling things: there’s secular history, and that’s put over here in this box. Then we have religious history, and that’s put in this box. And we have theology, that’s over here. Philosophy goes over there, and we have these neat, nice little packages. One of the rude awakenings that I had when I went on to my doctoral work, I was trained and had a master’s degree in church history. And I focused on the Christian backgrounds in patristics. When I went on into a very secular doctoral program, I had a professor who I have a great deal of admiration and respect for who is Jewish and is a medievalist. She would challenge the assumption that you have religious history that’s separate from political and economic history. And I’d encourage you that these



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two are melded together in some way. It’s the Christian historian becomes a technician who works with the tool of faith to bring understanding to events in this life and to cast a kind of light that is a Christian perspective on those things. Consequently, the research topics that we choose, the endeavors that we pursue, those things we ought to have our eye fixed on things that bring eternal reward. Some things are more meaningful than other things to study. And yet in God’s realm, they’re all important when understood as an outplay, a panoply of His creation.

For Augustine, in a very real sense, and you may have heard this adage before, history is His story. It’s a kind of story of redemption and revelation. Augustine will look at this thing from beginning to end. That’s not uncommon, as we kind of give you a background here. Augustine’s not that dissimilar from perhaps Josephus writing at this point who himself tried to provide a universal history as an apologetic articulation for the Roman world.

For Augustine, he does the same, but he doesn’t stop in contemporaneous time but instead goes all the way to the end. And so for Augustine, there is an eschatological end-times sphere that the historian contemplates. And so it’s both beginning and end that are important. This is an important aspect as we begin looking at his works. A second aspect is important. The first is this idea that faith and history are melded together, and we develop around it a worldview that as historians we enter into the arena of the study of history with certain Christian perspectives and values. We work with integrity to try to introduce those to the sources as we bring understanding to it.

The second area happens to do with the issue of ethics. I mean that in the broadest sense in terms of human behavior. But in particular in this work, what is the relationship between the citizen of heaven and the civic responsibilities that the citizen has here in the city of the world? Augustine will work to develop a kind of handbook for the Christian to follow and to live by here in this fallen realm. And this becomes like the first issue, a very important issue as it relates to the responsibility of the Christian in politics. These are areas that are debated in our country and in contemporary politics. So he’s touching on some themes that are lasting themes as he moves into this work. And those are two important ones to keep in mind. Let’s look at the first part, the ten books that are designed as a defense of the faith, and summarize briefly the content that you’re encountering in your reading.



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He begins with issues relating to Christianity in book 1. One might say that books 1 through 5 deal with a kind of Roman history and 6 to 10 deal with Roman religion. And in book 1 he starts right out by saying that Christianity is not the mitigating cause for the crisis that was taking place in their empire. Can you imagine for a pagan who saw a very close connection between their religion and their politic to see it all crumble before their very eyes? And for a pagan to crumble at the hands in some cases of not only Christians but now these Arian Christians from the north—this was a bad dream come true. So here the world was collapsing around them, and Augustine in the first book will make a strong defense for Christianity, that it was not the cause for this crisis, and it did not aggravate it in any way. The second book analyzes the relationship between Roman religion and Roman prosperity. There’s a very close relationship between anyone’s idea of religion and what happens in their life. And there are very fine lines that separate true religion from magic and superstition. The magical and superstitious jumps to conclusions not rooted in objective fact and works based on impressions. Conclusions are drawn from perceived evidences.

And so there was in the Roman mind as common in the minds of many people, Christian and non-Christian today, they looked around them at their prosperity. They looked around them at their purported peace that they enjoyed, although that is probably a political myth, the whole idea of the Pax Romana. They would tie it very closely to their religious system and say that these are a result of their faithful devotion and the continuity of the cults of the Roman gods. This is reflected earlier in the anxiety that we hear in the time of Diocletian, for instance, or even earlier when the Romans began a systematic persecution of the Christian church and other non-syncretistic sects. Syncretism, you’ll remember, is the idea of inclusiveness in religion, breaking down boundaries that separate and a permission that allows them all to mold and meld together and to take the best of each area and to be permissive of any area. Not just in a kind of a tolerance of grace but a celebration of the other religion. It would be very similar today to our idea of driving motivation of Eastern religion. And the Romans were alarmed at in this case the Christians’ resistance to syncretism and their exclusiveness and what they perceived that was a Christian kind of pride and haughtiness as a result of that. And because the central focal point of Roman religion became the worship of the genus of the emperor or the emperor cult in the third and fourth centuries that came emerging out of the East and the Orient in particular. Then the Christians resisted worship of



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the emperor or his genus or spirits which endowed and inspired the different rulers over the course of time.

The Romans saw this then closely connected to insurrection, and so to resist participation in a civic way at this level meant to hope for a breakdown of the state at its most fundamental element. And that would be the focus on the emperor himself. Wat would happen when these things fell apart? to the Roman this would be a great crisis because how then does this relate to their religious system? Where is the sin? What has been shattered? And on the other side of that coin, the Romans looking at the prosperity around them and saying look at all that’s happened. Look at all that’s here that’s good. It must be a result of my proper devotion in religion. I caution Christians fall into that trap as well and can be deceived by those things that are around them in a kind of health, wealth, prosperity kind of thinking. Augustine in book 2 analyzes the relationship then between Roman religion and Roman prosperity. And then books 3 to 5 look at Roman history, and he includes some interesting details from the classics. It shows as you read these things—think about Augustine’s breadth of reading. Think about his literary background, the things that he remembers, his childhood stories and how he weaves these things together and kind of gives a universal history of Rome itself.

Then there’s this transition that takes place from 6 to 10. And we’ll look at Roman religion itself. Books 6 and 7 include a number of curious facts about Roman religion and about philosophy. Now there is a very close correlation between religion and philosophy. And the philosophical schools were in some way represented kind of sectarian ways of thinking. And so for Augustine, he includes them together in with the religious sects. He analyzes these, and he includes a lot of curious details. This would be a whole genre of literature that would develop from slightly earlier this time in the fourth and fifth centuries where Christians will be for apologetic purposes analyzing Roman religion or pagan religion and sometimes include detail lost to us from any other place. And as these are converts from paganism, he includes some interesting facts and details. So read these things, and don’t get bogged down in all the curiosities but understand that he’s talking about issues and raising issues of relevance and importance to him and those who live around him.

Books 8 to 10 then move away and look more closely at philosophy and, in particular, at neo-Platonism. We’ve talked a little bit about the positive relationship between Augustine and neo-Platonism.



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And we’ve seen how the Latin translation of Plotinus’s Enneads was instrumental in Augustine’s life in helping him as he broke away from the moorings of Manichaeism on his pilgrimage to eventually hear the gospel in a saving way from Ambrose. Augustine will, surprisingly here, take on neo-Platonism, and he rejects its syncretism most importantly here, and he argues for the unique relationship of Christianity over against neo-Platonism. One might think there are a lot of similarities between the neo-Platonic system and the Christian system at some points. Augustine here will say the two systems are different and separate, that Christianity rises and falls on the unique person of Jesus Christ and the revelation found in Scripture and the exposition of that revelation. And it is a non-syncretistic religion. So you see, as we go down through the first ten books, he covers all of Roman history and Roman religion. He criticizes the kind of magical relationship between Roman religion and the Roman state. He defends Christianity saying that it in no way is the cause for the fall of the Roman Empire. In fact, he even challenges that mentality while at the same time snubbing his nose, as it were, at the idea that a rejection of syncretism would cause breakdown in the central core of society. This is important. The emphasis on syncretism is important.

Let me take a step back in summary of the first part of this work and say that these ideas of syncretism are still alive and well in our world today. With the influence in particular of Eastern mysticism on the American scene, for instance, these are important driving forces. And when it’s masked by ideas in American democracy that permit and celebrate a kind of openness in their religious sphere, one has to be critical and careful as they interact with these things. For Augustine, he cuts to the very heart of the matter and takes on this whole issue of syncretism and the magical relationship between religion and state and insists on the exclusiveness, exclusivity of Christianity. So that’s the first part of the work.

The second part of the work, as we said, then gives us the story of two cities. He’s going to go back, and we’ve talked about this a little bit before as we went back to Genesis and looked at the cities that emerge in Genesis—the descendants of Cain as opposed to those who follow Seth but more importantly Abraham and the notion of the land dweller and the one who occupies the land and the corruption that develops in and round that as opposed to those who pilgrimage and who live in a tent and sojourn because they are looking for a faith city whose building and foundations belong to God Himself. This second half then begins with talking about



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the rise of these two cities. And he begins in books 11 through 17 talking about creation and the fall. And he follows through with biblical history all the way down to the last days. We’ve said that this is in particular not unique bringing it down to contemporaneous times, that is. And this is something that Josephus and other Jewish historians will do. If you’re interested in following up on others, one might consult James H. Charlesworth’s volumes on The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and see the Jewish historians who are in there and see how, outside of the more popular Philo and Josephus, others will follow this theme through as well.

Augustine is different, because he will push it beyond. He’ll push it all the way to Revelation. Augustine consequently becomes an important thinker as it relates to a very popular system of viewing the end of the world and end times. And we’ll contemplate that more in a lecture to come. But he goes from Genesis to Revelation as he’s thinking about the relationship between the city of the world and the city of God. In book 18, he then gets into contemporaneous times. And he deals with his own age, his present age. He deals with society and criticizes it and looks at its relationship between religion and the world. He tries to look moving into book 19 at what people are looking for in life. What do they want? What is it that people want? A popular motif in classical literature—Cicero wrote a work On the Good Life. And it was this idea of a quest for happiness. This as well was something that was important to the Pythagoreans. I think of Hellenistic philosophers. I think of the Stoics and others, each trying to help people to find happiness in life.

Augustine will criticize that as he looks at it, and he will analyze, What does it mean to have a good life? What does it mean to live happily? What does it mean to live in social harmony? How do people get along with each other? Why, if this is so important to people on an individual level, how come there’s so much heartache, corruption, distress, and pain in the world? That’s an interesting problem, isn’t it? And it’s not one that can be separated from the theological realm. And so if you think about it, you think of newspaper stories and cover stories and the news and all can sometimes be so depressing, because it puts a mirror in front of our face of the misery of humankind. While all have this desire for harmony and happiness and a good life, selfishness and sin destroy that, ours and others. And so he concludes that life is unhappy and miserable. He begins then to look at things, both local affairs, and then also international affairs. He looks at distress of war. He looks at hostilities in the world. And he develops a Christian kind



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of social sphere here where he’s interested in pursuing a kind of harmony but a harmony that is found based on sharing certain spiritual principles.

In the context of this, Augustine will think about issues that relate to war. Is there a time when war is just or not? And there’s a whole theory, the just war theory, that develops out of Augustine’s speculations in these areas. Listen to some things, some general statements that Augustine makes along this regard as it relates to social harmony and so forth.

So the peace of the body is an ordered harmony of its parts. The peace of the irrational soul is an ordered satisfaction of its desires. The peace of the rational soul is an ordered agreement of thought and action. The peace of body and soul is the ordered life and health of the living body. The peace of mortal man and God is an ordered obedience in faith under the eternal law. The peace of men is ordered harmony. The peace of a household is an ordered harmony of those who dwell together. In commanding and obeying the peace of a commonwealth is a similar ordered harmony of its citizens. The peace of the heavenly city is a most ordered and most harmonious fellowship in enjoying God and one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.

And so this kind of gets at how Augustine sees these things pulled together that really the very thing that people long for will only be satisfied, can only be satisfied in the realm of faith and in the heavenly city itself.

And so in effect, in this second part of the work, what’s in juxtaposition is this city of God, which is the only solution to bring satisfaction, and the city of this realm which is filled with misery and heartache and pain.

Now let me conclude by saying that we’ve emphasized the importance of this work as a charter in the Middle Ages for the divine rule of the Christian prince who saw this, kind of like Charlemagne, as a kind of a Christian charter for living and ruling, of seeking to find harmony in social justice at the same time having a kingdom which was both earthly but had an eye to the eternal city in the realm of faith. So politically, this work was of extraordinary importance and would have a major impact from the Middle Ages on. The ideas that are at play here, I would say



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concluding it in terms of its impact and value to us, would be the idea of working out a kind of Christian worldview is of essential importance. Second, the idea of working out a sense of Christian citizenship is important. Third, the infusion of faith into the misery and muddle of our daily life and how one can live in this world and all that goes in in and around it and yet have an eye of faith and to follow in the footsteps, so to speak, of Abraham.

Fourth, he has a comprehensive understanding of time and God. And this he introduces to us to think about. What is the relationship between what we think is reality in this human realm, in this material realm, and what really is the very real thing and substance of eternity? And that’s in a spiritual realm. Another issue is the issue of syncretism and thinking about the critique of syncretism and the things that are related to it. Syncretism is at the heart of paganism, paganism being the religion of magic and superstition and the manipulation of the gods in this earthly realm, and critiquing that as he does in this work. I think finally with that eschatological realm understanding that ultimately both in this life and eternally, true tranquility and harmony can only be found in union with God and His people. A fantastic work, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

I’d like to take a step back now and summarize briefly Augustine’s outstanding contributions in the realm of his literary production and how it relates to the life of the mind of faith. If you think of Augustine, we’ve looked at so many works. You’ve read them and have thought about questions that have caused you to think through various issues. Look at Augustine and the soul-searching work of his autobiography, his story of conversion. If you think of his contribution on that level alone, writing an introspective, psychological analysis rooted in a kind of spiritual analysis and a theological one, Augustine would be the first to write a masterpiece such as this and to do it shortly after his conversion.

And we’ve reflected on the impact that it’s had on other writers and thinkers. Second, Augustine will write a treatise on Christian learning, education, which will include an integration of secular learning and Christian learning. He’ll talk about Christian learning and Scripture and the importance of Scripture and how Scripture should be interpreted. And as he draws together developing theories on the approach to Scripture and systematizes them, his fourfold approach to Scripture would be one that would be embraced throughout the medieval period. Again another cornerstone, two cornerstones now to this building.


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A third area we might say is this kind of development of this worldview that we’ve looked at today and all the things that are related to it is a foundational cornerstone that had impact on kings and emperors and nations. I would say, fourth, one might say in the whole realm of theology to think of his different works that dealt with issues that were not trivial. They were issues that related to the origin of evil. They were issues that related to the reliability of Scripture. They were issues that related to questions of good and evil, of God’s grace and sovereignty in the universe and human responsibility. These are profound issues, and Augustine deals with them. Also the whole nature of the Godhead and the Trinity, these things are worked out in this marvelous collection of works by Augustine. All of these things are a result of controversies in his own life as he works to respond to these controversies, and these great systematic works are developed around them. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them, and I hope that they have influence on your life and ministry. What we’ll do in the classes to come, we’re going to look at direct impact in the Middle Ages and the Reformation that Augustine had as later people look back at him and used, abused, rejected, or accepted his works. Blessings until we meet again, Bye-bye.

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