The Second Founder of the Faith

By Richard N. Ostling.

The clever young North African was a teacher of rhetoric who, in his 32 years, had explored such fashionable beliefs as Manicheism and skepticism. Lately, living in Milan, he had been drawn intellectually toward Christianity through the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, but resisted full commitment, partly because of personal circumstances. He had fathered a son out of wedlock by one mistress and had recently begun living with another while he was waiting for the woman with whom he had arranged a social-climbing betrothal to reach marriageable age.

Though Aurelius Augustinus had won a bit of renown, he would surely be unknown to history were it not for the celebrated September day in A.D. 386 when he seemed to hear a child's singsong voice chanting "Tolle lege, tolle lege" (Take up and read, take up and read). Snatching the Bible, which he had once disdained, he read the first words his eyes fell upon: St. Paul's admonition in Romans 13 to abandon wanton living and "put on the Lord Jesus Christ." Instantly, he later wrote, "a light of certainty pierced my heart and all the shadow of doubt vanished." From that moment on, he was a zealous Christian.

That sudden conversion was fateful not only for St. Augustine, who forsook his ambitions and his women to undertake an early form of monastic life, but for the subsequent development of the West. Pope John Paul II, in an anniversary pronouncement, terms Augustine the "common father of our Christian civilization." Only a handful of thinkers have had equivalent influence over such a span of years. Yale Historian Jaroslav Pelikan observes in The Mystery of Continuity (University Press of Virginia, $14.95), a new work on the saint, that in each of the 16 centuries since his conversion, Augustine has been a "major intellectual, spiritual and cultural force." Even scholars who find the influence more bane than blessing grant the point.

In this 1,600th anniversary year, few tourists in Milan notice the halfconcealed cathedral doorway leading to the remains of the baptistry where a naked Augustine was immersed by St. Ambrose. In Annaba, Algeria, near the site of ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as priest and bishop, the occasion is being largely ignored. But in other places around the world, numerous conferences on Augustine's thought are marking the anniversary, including last week's assemblage of 500 scholars from 19 nations at the Rome headquarters of the Augustinian order. One notable in attendance, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer, says that through Augustine "I learned to believe, to know faith and to love the church."

Augustine was an "absolute thinking machine," says Father John Quinn of Pennsylvania's Villanova University. During his 35 years as bishop, he not only supervised a turbulent diocese but spent long hours judging disputes, preached daily (500 sermons survive) and managed to write 100 treatises and hundreds of letters on doctrine. Five million of his words are indexed in computers at West Germany's Wurzburg University.

Those words affected almost every aspect of the faith. Long before Calvin, Augustine championed predestination; before Luther, he taught salvation by God's mysterious grace, not by good works. Augustine more than any other writer defined Roman Catholic teaching on the Trinity, conditions for waging a "just war" and the "original sin" of Adam and Eve that corrupts all humanity. With the latter teaching, complains French Philosopher Jean Guitton, "he weighed down Christianity with his pessimism."

Much of Augustine's energy as a bishop was spent resisting heretics and schismatics, which led him to insist on the hierarchical church as the authoritative teacher and sole channel of salvation. Though this view later buttressed papal powers, Augustine defied Pope Zosimus when the Pontiff tolerated Pelagius, whose theology was so optimistic that humanity scarcely seemed to need a Saviour. !

Just before Augustine's time, the Roman Empire had officially embraced Christianity. As a new bishop, Augustine was still hoping to use reason to win over the maverick sects that were disrupting Christendom. But by A.D. 400 he was turning to the state to enforce doctrinal conformity. St. Jerome, the translator of the Latin Bible, wrote approvingly, "Catholics revere you and accept you as the second founder of the ancient faith, and -- which is a mark of greater fame -- all the heretics hate you." Indeed, one band of them almost managed to assassinate the troublesome bishop. Augustine's reliance on the state began a millennium of alliances between cross and crown, officially repudiated by Catholicism only in 1965.

Dismissing arid philosophers as "cold fish," Augustine was a passionate writer. This is especially evident in The Confessions, one of the masterpieces of ancient literature. The book is not only a pioneering autobiography but the forerunner of modern psychology and existentialism. It contains piercing self- examination of the soul ("You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find peace in You") and of the mind ("I cannot totally grasp all that I am"). Indeed, Massachusetts Theologian Brian Daley credits him with being the "discoverer of the person."

Augustine began work on The City of God, said to be the first philosophy of history ever written, in response to the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in A.D. 410. By the time other barbarians, the Vandals, had vanquished Hippo in A.D. 430, its august bishop was already dead at age 75. The hordes destroyed the city but preserved Augustine's library of writings. It was as if they sensed that the West might need to rely on his words for sustenance as the ancient world died away.

With reporting by Daniela Simpson/Rome, with other bureaus