Augustine's Restless Longing

Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine

I read once that there are only two people from the ancient world about whom one can write a real biography: Cicero and St. Augustine. This was my motive in finally taking on Peter Brown's famous biography, Augustine of Hippo (1967): given that there are only two people from that whole era one can truly get to know, I thought I might as well get to know both of them. But while Augustine's life is a fascinating window into his time, I found myself captivated by something else: the way Brown portrays Augustine's intellectual journey. In this telling he evolved from a questioning young philosopher who thought he could personally solve the problems of human existence to an old man convinced that humans, by themselves, can achieve nothing. We are, the mature Augustine believed, completely dependent on God, and any attempts we make to save ourselves are doomed to failure. Indeed God has already decreed whether we will be saved or damned before we are even born. Because he wrote so openly about his struggles, and made no effort to hide the many changes in his thinking over his long life, we can trace this evolution. Because the old Augustine became the Catholic Church's most famous and powerful apologist for the violent suppression of heresy – one of his sobriquets is "the father of the Inquisition" – the story of his life may help us come to grips with other people who end up defending authoritarian violence.

The reason one can write a biography of St. Augustine (354-430) is that so many sources about his life survive. His philosophical and theological works fill seven fat quarto volumes, and his writings make frequent reference to events of his life: works he has read, famous men he has met, troubles he has encountered, contemporary issues to which he is responding. We have a substantial biography from a contemporary who knew him and could include snippets from letters Augustine wrote to him in the text. We have more than a hundred sermons he his is supposed to have preached to his congregation in Hippo, 269 private letters, and his own spiritual autobiography, the famous Confessions. It is more than we have for all but a few people of modern times, and it allows for an amazingly detailed portrait of both his thinking and his material circumstances.

Augustine was born into the kind of family one meets so often in the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontës, the people clinging to the bottom of the genteel class. He received a good education but then had to scramble to earn some kind of living from it; several of his friends became teachers of rhetoric. What he loved above all things was to hang out with his friends and talk. They were a bunch of aesthetes who loved music, sunsets, literature, and philosophy. They kept hatching schemes to withdraw from the world together, perhaps to some country estate, where they would cultivate perfect friendship with each other and seek perfect understanding of the universe and the human soul. They disagreed on many things. Some were Catholics, some Manicheans, some pagans. This did not matter; what mattered was free, open-hearted discussion, all sharing equally in their quest to know.

In this period Augustine became for a while a follower of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. I personally find Plotinus' writing to be an impenetrable mishmash of mysticism and jargon, but Augustine was one of thousands who have found this particular mishmash irresistible. Plotinus believed that we could come to understand the universe through logic and introspection. Our interior worlds are vast and enormously complex, and if we come to understand them fully we will come to know what our souls are, where they come from, and where they are going. When God made us, he left enough of himself in our makeup for us to be able to understand his whole creation and our place in it.

That entranced Augustine for a while, but it did not last. He eventually decided that he could not really reason his way to perfect understanding; obstacles kept arising, and he could not honestly say he had overcome them. Brown:

The mold into which Augustine had poured his life as a convert was capable of holding educated Christians of different temperaments, in different parts of the Roman world, for the whole of their lives. Yet Augustine broke this mold in a decade — one suspects, partly because it could not withstand the terrific weight of his own expectations of it. . . . Augustine followed Plotinus in believing that the inner world was vast and complex, but while Plotinus was confident that the wise man could become master of this universe, Augustine had doubts: "There is, indeed, some light in man; but let them walk fast, lest shadows come." (178)

 Augustine once described the place he sought as "a place of rest . . . the full enjoyment of the absolute and true good; breathing the clear air of serenity and eternity." (150) Unable to reach this Eden via philosophy, Augustine tried faith. He threw himself into the study of Scripture, had himself baptized into the Catholic fold, became a priest and then a bishop. Christianity gave him a physical place, and a community, but it did not still his restless soul. He kept worrying over certain problems, especially that of evil: "Above all, there was the burning problem of the apparent permanence of evil in human actions." (148) He realized that he did not really understand human will or human freedom, could not figure out why we can know the right thing to do but still fail to do it, over and over.

He is a man who has realized that he was doomed to remain incomplete in his present existence, that what he wished for most ardently would never be more than a hope, postponed to a final resolution of all tensions, far beyond this life. (156)

He grew obsessed with death. In one of his sermons,

He reminds his listeners that while they are listening to him, their hair is growing, and they are getting older: "while you stand around, while you are here, while you do something, while you talk — you are passing away." (246)

Eventually he ended up with the theological position he argued for in The City of God and Of Grace and Free Will: we are entirely helpless and can only be saved by God's grace, which we can do nothing to merit. We can do nothing but what God wills, which was all fixed at the dawn of time.

Ruins of Hippo, with the Basilica of St. Augustine behind

When Augustine became the bishop of the North African town of Hippo, it was divided between two kinds of Christians: Catholics and a local sect called Donatists. As the Catholic bishop, Augustine preached against the Donatists, and he wrote a tract refuting their arguments, but he did not really do anything about the situation. Then, for reasons of imperial politics, the reigning western Emperor declared the Donatists to be heretics and ordered their suppression. This put Augustine in a tough spot. He was on record arguing that it was wrong to use force in matters of faith, because God only wanted love and devotion that was freely given. But he decided, given his new theological position, that all talk of freely given devotion was meaningless. It would be better for everyone, he thought, if there were only one Christian church to which the whole community belonged. So he lent his weight to the persecution of Donatists, which he justified in two substantial tracts.

People have been arguing ever since about whether Augustine's theology of predestination and his enthusiasm for persecution were related. So far as I can tell, Peter Brown did not take a firm position. But I think they are absolutely linked. Both rely on a dismissal of freedom as an important value. Augustine's personal journey had taught him that his own freedom was meaningless; by himself he could not will himself to happiness or a sense of salvation. Only surrender could save him. Thus it was pointless to care about the freedom of Donatists, since they could not save themselves, either.

I also see in Augustine a contempt for ordinary human life. From his youth he sought to withdraw from human concerns into some rarefied realm of perfection; as a Christian he longed for heaven. This hostility toward life as we generally know it drives many human ambitions, among which is the longing for apocalyptic political change. 

The piece of Augustine's puzzle that most interests me is the way his best characteristics dovetailed with his worst. Intellectually he was the most honest of philosophers, ruthless with his own ideas, always ready to discard his own past work; in the end this drove him to positions that I and many others have found dismaying. He sought, not power or riches, but truth; he struggled all his life toward a blissful vision of human happiness. But in the end he was unable to solve his problems except via surrender, which feels to me like an expression of despair. He accepted cruelty toward Donatists, I think, partly because he was so sensitive to human pain, and so aware that he could not think his way to a better kind of world.

As I see it, what drove Augustine to embrace violence was, ultimately, his inability to reach his "place of rest" by his own free efforts. 

This strikes me deeply because I see in Augustine a perfect paradigm of much that I consider illiberal and antidemocratic: an insistence on finding final answers to question that I think will always remain open, a need for completion in a world where we will always be incomplete, a desire for perfect community in a world of difference. Yes, life is hard, and people do evil; yes, distant political powers hem us in with their decrees. It is true that we cannot will ourselves into heaven. But that is no reason to give up on making the world better and kinder when we can, one small act at a time.

I think Augustine longed too much for heaven. Perhaps that made him a saint, but it made him a very dangerous philosopher.