ology the val augustine and medie augustine and medieval theology ch511 lesson … ·...

Augustine and Medieval Theology

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

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LESSON 03 of 24CH511

Augustine: The Wayward Genius

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Hello again. It’s my pleasure to be meeting with you again to talk about Augustine, and as our habit has been the past two lectures together, let’s begin with a contemplation prayer from Augustine and then a prayer that comes out of the Confessions. But first some sentences by Augustine on prayer.

He said, “Prayer’s a protection of holy souls. A consolation for the guardian angel. An insupportable torment to the devil. A most acceptable homage to God. The best and most perfect praise for penitents. And religious, the greatest honor and glory, the preserver of spiritual health.

What I’d like to do is pray a prayer that comes out of the Confessions. Much of the Confessions, as you’ve seen, ranges from prayer into monologue, back and forth, as Augustine opens his soul up before God. In book 1 in chapter 15, there’s a prayer that Augustine writes where he asks the Lord to consecrate both the bad things from his youth and the good things, his education and his past, that it might be incorporated together and embroidered in such a way to be of honor, glory, and service to the Lord. And you know, that was my prayer for myself, for my children, and would be my prayer for you and would ask that you might embrace it as your prayer as well.

So allow me to read this, and we’ll offer it up as our prayer, and I’ll close then.

Hear my prayer, O Lord. Let not my soul faint under Your discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto You Your mercies. Whereby You save me from all my most mischievous ways, that You might become sweet to me beyond all the seductions which I used to follow, and that I may love You entirely and grasp Your hand with my whole heart, and that You may deliver me from every temptation, even unto the end, for O Lord, my King and my God, for Your service, be whatever useful thing I learned as a boy, for

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

Cornerstone University



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Your service, what I speak and what I write and count, for when I learned vain things, You granted me Your discipline in my sin and taking delight in those vanities, You’ve forgiven me.

I learned indeed in them many useful words, for these may be learned in things not vain, and that is the safe way for youths to walk in.

And Father, we ask that this might be our prayer as we contemplate the early life of Saint Augustine, and we think about the education of our friend here who’s taking this course and the career of ministry that’s set out before him or her and pray Your richest blessings on them, on myself as we seek to try to please You. And we ask these things in name of both Augustine and our own intercessor, our risen Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s good to be with you again today, and what I’d like to do is briefly summarize where we’ve gone so far and where we’re going to head. In terms of summary, you’ll recall that in our first lecture we talked a little bit about what the world was like in Augustine’s days and tried to show you that he bridged a chasm that separated the ancient world from the medieval world. He lived at a time of upheaval, a time where the church hoped to provide stability and yet was increasingly found to be the scapegoat for pagans living in a horrid economic and political time.

Augustine was bombarded, as we’ll see beginning today, by many temptations and plagued by various philosophies, and these things he experienced and tasted and drank deep of. And out of the wellspring of his own resources in Scripture and his relationship with the Lord he was able to provide an articulate, a Christian response to the world of his time and formed around it a theological understanding rooted in Scripture that would last for over a millennium as it was studied and incorporated into the church and rediscovered again in the time of the Reformation.

Now, we also looked briefly at some of the sources that are useful for the study of Saint Augustine and his time and tried not be overwhelmed by that. I hope that it gives you insight, if you’re not aware of these things, and in some ways it will open up to you the world of the early church and the magnificent resources that we have available to us to study early Christianity and the church fathers and their writings and exegesis and impact into the world that they lived in. So that’s where we’ve been thus far, and today we’d like to begin with looking at the life of Augustine. We’ve



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divided up his life into segments, and the title of today’s lecture is “Augustine: The Wayward Genius,” and we’ll look at thirty years of his life and some of the influences in his life.

My objectives will be to familiarize you with the major chronological events through age thirty, and I would hope that in that process you’d become aware of the variety of sources that are used to help us understand more about the life and development of Augustine. I would hope, as well, that you would see how God in His marvelous providence transformed a very unlikely candidate and made him into a vibrant servant, and that will be one of the major themes of my discussion with you today.

Furthermore, to look at some of the circumstances of his youth, of his education, and so forth, and how these things impacted his life and development. And finally, we can’t neglect nor overlook in any way the prayerful pursuit of his mother, the impact of family and friends on the development of this young, would be, Christian genius.

So with that set before us, what we should begin with then is some introductory material on Roman Africa, and my thesis will be this today: with Augustine probably one could not find a more unlikely candidate to be one of the great saints of all time than Augustine. I don’t think that I would think of looking in the mid-fourth century. I certainly wouldn’t be looking in Numidia. I wouldn’t be looking on the African coast, and furthermore, on the African coast two hundred miles from the coastline, in the hinterland in some offbeat place like Tagaste, but in 354, this is where Augustine is born.

Let me tell you a little bit about Africa at this time. Africa and Rome had an enchanting past, and it was one that was probably best articulated in the masterful work by Virgil, his Aeneid, where he talks about how all the classical societies looking back to the tragedy of the fall of Troy and looking to find their origins in the eastern Mediterranean, and as a narrative, Virgil is writing a historical, political piece to give historicity and rootedness and antiquity and a sense of fame and glory to the new imperial government of Rome. Africa plays a small role in that, and one will learn if you remember having read the Aeneid, you may recall the story of Aeneas’s journeys and his shipwreck and his love affair with Dido in Carthage. The Carthaginians were Phoenician offspring. In fact, much of what we know about the biblical Phoenicians is based on archaeological discoveries in early



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Carthage in terms of their child sacrifice and things of this nature, which there’s a tremendous amount of archaeological evidence that supports.

In Hellenistic times and Roman times, they had begun to be absorbed into the Roman sphere. This classical story of this love affair and how Dido is jilted by Aeneas and he speeds away off to courses north to what will be Italy, is well-known, and her anguish for her departed love, and in some ways this reflects the place that Africa had in Roman eyes. It was a jilted lover of sorts, and Africa was the breadbasket for the Roman population. Increasingly Rome had become in the imperial period a social state, and there are a lot of people on the dole, and they were supported by the stable agricultural produce across North Africa in the Nile basin and in particular in these areas around Carthage.

And so these people were part of a colonized service state to Rome. Their frontier had been stabilized. They had tremendous problems with the Berber population and kingdoms in the second century BC, but these things had been stabilized and for the most part that Berber and nomadic population and kingdoms had been either held at bay by Roman frontier fortresses or they had been gradually assimilated and absorbed into Roman colonial society. Cities were founded, land was given to retired soldiers, and it was a way of extending Roman society in North Africa. It was a very fertile area, and they saw themselves in many ways the chattel state to Rome and want to be Romans always. These people were of a mixed blood, Carthaginian and Berber factions with Roman provincial kinds of blood, and while certainly Augustine himself was of a hardy Latin stock and Latin-speaking stock and probably didn’t speak the indigenous Punic dialects, yet these words were the words of the village, of the hinterland.

This is where Augustine grew up, and he didn’t grow up in the great city of Carthage, which was the second most prominent city in the Roman Empire at this time. Instead, he grew up several hundred miles inland on a plateau in small village, and you have this young boy, not coming from wealth, coming from a family, there was not middle class, so to speak, but he was not part of the landed patrician kind of Roman society with landed wealth, but instead found themselves in a client service family that was always strapped, it seemed.

We get these recollections both from his Confessions and as you read in Peter Brown’s masterful biography, you’ll notice that in his



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footnotes, he’s drawing on sermons, recollections from sermons. He’s drawing on inscriptions and mosaics and other kinds of sources, as he’s embroidering this story about a young Augustine. One has to be careful with dealing with autobiographical sources because they are subject to the most dangerous biases, but when they’re tempered with other available sources that have survived to us, one can get a fuller three-dimensional picture of what life was like. And here for Augustine, his father we know very little about, but we do know that he was in this kind of this, not a landed wealthy class, but one that always seemed to be struggling, and here let’s choose as one of our great saints of all times, some boy living in a village, two hundred miles in, in a colony of Rome, from a nondescript family, apart from a very pious mother, and we’ll take this person and make him one of the great geniuses of the Christian church. It’s quite a remarkable scene that we have here set before us.

So this gives you a little background then about Roman Africa at the time. In the fourth century, these places AD, these colonies were in some ways suffering more under the increased economic strains of the teetering empire, and the people felt the pressures of increased taxation and the anxieties, despite the fact that they were removed by hundreds of miles and many days’ journeys from the centers of power, they felt in some ways more oppressing strains of the empire as it was weakening and collapsing.

And so out of this we find our young man, Augustine. Augustine’s born in AD 354. His father a Roman patrician. Very little is known of him, and he dies when Augustine is a teenager. His mother, Monica, has, while the father has a good Latin name, the mother has a name that is probably tied into the Punic language and may be tied into their Punic worship. And so, if that’s the case, that’s interesting because it reflects perhaps that she may have indigenous stock in her rather than Latin stock. But nonetheless, she’s a pious Christian, and we’ll talk more about her in a minute.

The recollections that we have of his childhood for the most part are based on his Confessions, and today we’ll be contemplating the first six books of the Confessions, and they’ll take us up through age thirty. His home, his early recollections as a child, these things are written at age forty-three and he’s a pious bishop, and he’s thinking about children in his congregation, and he’s thinking about his experiences having observed children. But he is able to transpose these observations to his own childhood, and he personalizes them in a dramatic way. There’s no innocent



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child with Augustine. He’s screaming at the breast and in many way shows that he’s a child of Adam, screaming out of the womb and insisting on his own ways, which is an interesting theological factor later as we think about original sin and Augustine’s recollections and thoughts about that.

His early childhood would have been no different than any other Roman boy in Africa. This hoping a want-to-be; hoping to one day make it to Rome or in this case, now the power moved away from Rome to Milan. Their only hope of escape would be education. Otherwise, they’d be destined to work the land. There are very few references in Augustine’s works to gardening and working of the land and all. He had been separated by that because of the fortunate circumstances of his education. What kind of education could one expect to have in North Africa at this time? It would be rudimentary at best. They would study a handful of classics—Virgil, Cicero [a renowned orator, writer, and lawyer], and Terence would be the most important works. They would read fragments of them. Of course, they were in manuscript form, in scrolls. They would do much by memory. There’s some interesting recollections in Augustine’s works of some of his friends who had committed to memory complete classical works. This is of interest because in the ancient world, memory played a much more important role in education than it would today, and so people would commit an enormous amount of material to memory.

The reason this is of importance is it relates to the early church fathers’ use of Scripture, because that is one source of evidence that’s used in critical study of the ancient texts of Scripture. As we look at the text that survives in the church fathers, we then use that to kind of see what kind of texts, family of texts, and trying to date those quotations the texts are coming from to understand the biblical tradition and scriptural tradition in various reasons, and this is an important line of evidence that much work needs to be done in. But one of the great difficulties with it is not only trying to sort through the variant manuscript evidences that survived for that whole tradition, but then to work through whether a church father is quoting from a source or quoting from memory. You’ll learn that Peter Brown will tell you that Augustine quotes Scripture over forty-two thousand times, and he supposes that it’s often from memory, but does that mean that it’s flawed? And if the Scripture quotation varies in a small way from the Latin text that’s well known at this time, does that mean it reflects a different textual tradition or not? One has to work through that in order to come to some solid conclusions that are meaningful.



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My major point here is that memory played an important role in ancient education and it would be important in Augustine’s own personal development.

Also discipline, and that’s something he shied away from and in his Confessions will think sorely on, about being beaten by his teachers, and that’s in almost every ancient culture, that’s a common theme in education. In fact, the determinative for the Egyptian hieroglyphic word to learn shows a man holding a stick up in the air ready to beat a student who is not respectful. So pay attention there on the end of this tape and beware. No, continue on before the Lord.

The memorization cannot be underestimated and the important function of memorization in learning, and it’s something that’s underestimated today and not enough emphasis is placed on it perhaps.

Now Tagaste, he had his early years of education there, and as a teenager was able to go off into one of the more prominent cities, a university town in his region called Madaurus. Madaurus was a city that had a university, as I said, but as well known as the hometown of a very famous Latin author, apart from Augustine, in this region, one of the more famous authors to have come out of this region, and his name was Apuleius. He wrote a work called The Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass or Golden Legend, which was an interesting story that tells us a lot about religion in Rome, the mystery cults, magic, and sorcery, as an individual is transformed by a witch into an ass and his exploits as he’s bought, traded, owned by different people and eventually is changed back into himself at a festival of Isis. And so a well-known story, and it was written by a person that lived several centuries earlier in Madaurus.

Augustine had little respect for the work or for the author, but he went to school for a short time in Madaurus and then because of financial crisis had to return home, and so from his fifteenth to sixteenth year was at home and while at home was an unbridled youth. For the first time we see him thinking consciously about his sin. And he’s an adolescent who wished to be in school that was frustrated by the financial circumstances of his plight, and found himself involved with friends and tasting deep of the rivalries of teenage life. And some of the things that he halts to think deeply on are things that perhaps we may pass over. There’s the story of the theft that is an important story in these early parts of



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Confessions, and they mark a critical turning point for Augustine, a self-conscious reflection on longtime rebellion. It’s something that you may give thought to, about the role of the theft in the orchard and how it relates to, you’ll remember this is written as a pious bishop, his Confessions, and how does this relate to an identic scene of the forbidden fruit, and what about the tinges of consciousness that are taking place in this young man, and what should this tell us.

He will go headlong into greater sins, but we’ll have to wait for advancement into his further university career. What will happen is that there will be great sacrifices that are made, and he’ll have opportunity to go to the great city of Carthage to finish out his education. And the aim of the education for the ancient was either to proceed into law or to be, in his case, a school teacher. And he was pursuing a degree in rhetoric. He would be a schoolmaster and teach young children how to speak and would give speeches for hire, for statesmen, as they came into town or would represent them in court, perhaps. He would make public speeches for people at festival times, and he was spokesman for hire.

It’s interesting in the educational system that one of the techniques that was popular was to take a classical work and to go through it word by word, kind of like some so-called Protestant exegetes that will strain at the gnat as they go through Scripture in a very systematic and mechanical way, taking each word and dividing it up, oftentimes missing the larger picture of what might be going on, which is a potential criticism of this inordinate emphasis on textual studies that misses the context and flow of the passage, whether it’s a classical work or a scriptural work. But this technique of learning was important for Augustine because as he then, after his conversion, begins to study Scripture, he’ll study Scripture as he had learned to study Virgil, a piece at a time, and know it carefully and scrutinize it. There’s great value in studying the text at that level, and I’d never underestimate or undermine that in any way, but to see it in balance of seeing the whole as well.

But this was an important component as well in education, along with their memory, and this was the basis then for rhetoric. One learned to speak well by reading good things and by tearing apart and by memorizing, and you learned to speak as the ancients did, and so this was the course of the young man’s study. Alas, Augustine never had an appetite for Greek. This would be, as Peter Brown points out, one of the great failures of the ancient



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educational system. Can you imagine the great theologian Augustine not knowing Greek and not even having an appetite for it, and it probably had to do with this method of learning, the minutia and going through word by word as Homer was explained and to be a very difficult inductive process to learn Greek. But Augustine never did learn Greek and never had an appetite for it, and consequently it hindered him as opposed to his near contemporary Jerome, whose world was opened up to him in the world of biblical studies because he had learned Greek and, in fact, Hebrew.

But Augustine’s access to Scripture and his access to learning would be Latin and Latin only, an unlikely candidate to be one of the great thinkers of human history, one of the great philosophers of all times, one who had never read or learned Greek, who had no appetite for it, and whose only access to these things was through Latin and Latin only. Yet God used it all. And that’s the amazing, the subtext here, that is so amazing, that God providentially took this great mind and used these little pieces of circumstances and embroidered them together to take a marvelous intellect, let it blossom, and to use it in a mighty way because of the circumstances that he was brought through and learned to respond to.

Augustine will in Carthage, if stealing a pear tinged his conscience, in Carthage he goes headlong into lust, sensual lust, and one that his mother no doubt had strictly warned him against, and he would in some ways be a little bit bitter against his mother and his father because of their restrictions in these areas. But he went headlong into sexual lust, he went headlong into sensual lust, he loved the theater, and loved to have his heartstrings tugged and his heart broken and his emotions tossed with lovers parted, and he was in need of acceptance and friendship always and sensual experiences of life,

which as a young man he found ready at hand in the busy, bustling city of Carthage.

Students were disruptive. They came from wealthy families, and when Augustine is there, his father will die, and he’s there because of the patronage of a friend of the family or perhaps a distant relative who saw the potential in this young man and funded his education while in Carthage.

The gladiatorial games are there, and Augustine would go with his friends and watch state criminals put to death in animal bites



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and see the cruelty of the jeering crowd as he’s watching this, and he’s surrounded by the excesses of the Roman Empire at this time and he’s swallowed up in them. And he will take a handmaid, a woman, to be his friend and his sexual partner. He will have a son by her who he deeply loves and calls the gift of God, and his son, Adeodatus, will have an intellect like unto his father’s. The mother’s name we’ll never learn, and she’s sent away later. The next time we talk together, she’ll be sent on her way as he seeks a more appropriate marriage through the help of his mother and political contacts, but it certainly was a matter of heartbreak and distress to Augustine.

He drinks deep of loss in Carthage, and at the same time he’s looking for a balance to his excesses and he hooks up with a Persian Gnostic cult called the Manichees [Manicheans]. When we talk about Augustine’s anti-Manichean works, we’ll go into great detail on the beliefs of the Manichees and their historical development and so forth, but I want to give in a quick way give a bird’s-eye view of this group. It’s a Persian Gnostic sect. Mani was a third-century individual. We have a source that tells us about his early life, his involvements in a Jewish Christian sect, and his development out of that sect of Gnostic ideas, which, again, we’ll go into much great detail when we consider his works, but are a radical dualism, not only a dualism of material and immaterial, a separation of these two things, but also a dualism in the universe between a good god, who is the god of spiritual things, and an evil god, who is the god of material things.

Now these two will be at opposition with each other, and the salvation message to a Gnostic was the wisdom and knowledge that’s revealed from this good god or from emanations from this good god and to realize the wickedness of the material order and to realize that our real problem in life is our flesh and body. This will come to Augustine at a time when he’s in great need, and the Persian Gnostics were outlawed, they were outlawed at the end of the third century by a decree by Diocletian. They were seen as a seditious sect.

In fact, the very language that’s used to outlaw the Persian Gnostics will be the exact same language later that will be incorporated against the Christians in persecution of the church under Diocletian. So the basis for that final persecution will be their persecution of the Gnostic sect, the Manichees.



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The Manicheans thrived in Carthage, and he will in some ways be enamored by their teachings. He’ll be caught up in probably the friendships and the web of friendships that existed in and around the Manichean schools. In the end, he will be dissatisfied with them. In the end his ideas and thoughts, the questions that he’ll be preparing as his mind is racing about these things, he’ll wait until a great champion will come to answer his questions, and you see this anxious young man poring over their writings and thinking about their teachings. And with his biblical background that he had as a young child because of the influence of his mother, and he’s always waiting to have these things answered, and when the great champion will come in, he will find the person wanting in the balance and found wanting and unable to answer his questions. He leaves empty and dissatisfied and still filled with lust.

We’ll talk more about the Manichees when we discuss his works specifically against the Manicheans, but back to the narrative about Augustine in Carthage. Augustine, when he finishes his education, will begin to teach, and he’s teaching aristocratic youths there who are rowdy and unruly. Augustine himself will begin to get notoriety as a writer and a rhetorician, and he will through connections leave and go to Rome. He’ll begin teaching in Rome, hoping to find perhaps political connections, fame that he longed for, intellectual setting, and as well maybe students that were more cooperative and interested in him as a teacher and what he was teaching. But, in fact, they were no more respectful there, and they ganged up and refused to pay Augustine. These kinds of instances are pretty well-known in the ancient world. There was one Christian, near contemporary Christian teacher, who the students ganged up on and stabbed to death with their styluses, so you can have some real problems with unruly students. These in Rome refused to pay Augustine. Through political connections and all though, he was able to go to Milan.

Milan was the center of Roman power, but let me say one further thing about his time in Rome. Certainly in Rome, he was in contact with the Manichees and stayed with them, and these people would provide housing and social setting for you to make transition in the ancient world. It was not as easy as just picking up and moving somewhere. One had to have connections so you could know where to live and to have the social structures around you so that you could get your feet established, and it was through the Manichees that he did that.



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But he also was in contact with the neo-Platonic schools of Plotinus and his followers.

Plotinus was the founder of neo-Platonism, and these ideas will be reflected in Augustine’s works, and certainly he came into increased contact with them while in Rome. They had their own schools, and what is interesting is that these schools would be like large lecture halls, and very dynamic professors that would attract large crowds of people interested in philosophy and speculative topics. We know from the founder of neo-Platonism, from this Plotinus, his writings that are attributed to him are nine lectures called the Enneads and lectures that were edited by his students. They’re a dialogue with his attendees as he’s lecturing away, and the people who are there are interacting, and at one moment Plotinus will be lecturing on a topic and the next moment there will be a comment coming from the crowd, and you’ll see him zig and zag as he’s responding to questions and interaction.

The reason I point this out is that we know as early as Plotinus that Plotinus and his school attracted Gnostics, and so they would come in because the Gnostics felt that they found some common ground with the neo-Platonic school and their view of matter and their view of eternal things. And, in fact, Plotinus will be very deliberate and systematic to show the Gnostics who are part of his entourage that there’s a stark difference between Gnosticism and Platonism. It had to do with their view of nature and had to do with one having a sinister view of nature; the other having a very high and positive view of nature and the material work and its creation and ordering. And so this school shared some language in common but was in many ways diametrically opposed to one another. We find that Augustine in one way or another has found access to these neo-Platonic schools and is beginning to learn about them, and he has a quest for wisdom and he’s looking for answers, and they’re answers as much as anything for his own instabilities of life.

Augustine will go to Milan, and in Milan the greatest rhetorician in Milan was a bishop who was formerly a statesman. Now Augustine had finally arrived. He had made his way from two hundred miles from the coastland of the Mediterranean. He had made his ways through the little country bumpkin schools to the universities, through the tragedies of loss of father and yet had patronage, and made his way eventually to the seat of power. There he found himself attending the Catholic Church and listening to the great rhetorician Bishop Ambrose, who we’ll talk about in the next class,


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and found that his heart was moved and that he was inspired by this person as he was expounding Scripture and teaching in a way that seemed to make sense to him. And lo and behold, in pursuit of Augustine will be his mother,

who will find her way to Milan and will be praying for now her thirty-year-old son and for his conversion, and she sees the great potential in him. Other siblings he had, we don’t know anything about them, but his mother, Monica, is in pursuit of this young man, hoping all the time that he has a legitimate marriage and that he finds himself converted and in service to God.

This is the story of Augustine in his early years. One important theme at this time is the theme of friends. Augustine will contemplate friends and friendship more than any other church father of his era, and they played an important role in his life and would play an important role in his life.

Think then with me for a moment of the unlikely story of this young boy from North Africa and how God used the particulars of his education, of his background, to mold, to prepare him for conversion, which will take place at the feet of Ambrose soon here in this next lecture.

Best to you as you continue your reading and your study and your other studies, and I look forward to telling you more about Augustine and his conversion in our next time together. Blessings.

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