History of the Church; Part VI: The Aftermath of the Council of Nicaea: the Heresy of Nestorius.

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1 Mystical Rose: Historical September 12th Volume IV History of the Church; Part VI: The Aftermath of the Council of Nicaea: the Heresy of Nestorius. Long before the final condemnation of Arianism, the clouds had begun to gather for a fresh assault on the great mystery of the Incarnation. About the year 428, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, began to affirm these false doctrines:- 1. That there are two persons in Christ, the divine and the human, the divine dwelling in the human as in a temple; 2. That Mary was the mother of the human temple only and hence should not be given the traditional title of Mother of God. It was the denial of Mary s divine maternity that shocked most of all the Catholic instinct of the Eastern faithful and aroused a storm of angry protest. Our Lady found a champion in the great theologian St. Cyril of Alexandria, and in the Council of Ephesus, convened by Pope Celestine I (418-32). In 431, the divine maternity was defined and Nestorius was condemned. Two bishops, Theodoret of Cyr and Ibas of Edessa, held out against the decision. The supporters of Ibas ultimately immigrated to Persia where one of them, Barsumas, founded a Nestorian Church at Nisibis. Favored by the political enmity of Persia to Constantinople, the schismatic church spread rapidly until the eleventh century. Its influence ranged from Jerusalem to 1

2 China. Despite a slow steady movement towards reunion which began in the 14 th century, the Nestorian Church is still in existence today in the mountains of Khurdistan, Persia, and Irak; it numbers about 100,000 members under a Patriarch of Catholcos. The Heresy of Eutyches The Council of Ephesus was followed by the usual reaction against the Nestorians whom it condemned. About the year 446 Eutyches, an aged monk of Constantinople, in his anxiety to defend against the Nestorians the truth that there is but one Person in Christ, toppled over into the other extreme by professing that in Christ after the Incarnation there was but one nature, a fusion or mixture as it were of the divine and the human. Hence the followers of Eutyches are spoken of as Monophysites (Greek; mono=one; physis=nature). Eutyches confused the two ideas of person and nature, and consequently misinterpreted the teachings of St. Cyril and the Council of Ephesus; if the teachings of Eutyches were true, then Christ would be neither God nor man, and it could no longer be said that God died to save the world. Eutyches was condemned by Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople, but representing himself as merely upholding St. Cyril, he was supported by Dioscorus, Bishop of Alexandria. A synod to discuss the matter met at Ephesus in 449 under the presidency of Dioscorus, and a letter was read from Pope St. Leo (the Dogmatic Epistle), in which the Sovereign Pontiff laid down with all possible clarity and precision the existence of two distinct natures of Our Lord, in no way mixed or confused but united in the one Person of the Incarnate God. Dioscorus, however, was supported by the Emperor and a numerous following of Monophysite monks and his will prevailed. The violent ill-treatment which was given to all who stood for the Pope s teaching earned for this historic gathering the title of Latrocinium or the Robber Council. Flavian, Bishop of Constantinople was deposed and flung into prison where he died. The decrees of the Robber Council were rejected by Pope Leo I and the Churches of Syria, Asia Minor, and Pontus, and the rejection was enforced by the Emperor Theodosius II until his death in 450. In the following year (451) the General Council of Chalcedon was convoked by Pope St. Leo the Great, supported by the Emperor Marcian and the Empress Pulcheria (sister of Theodosius II) in the East, and by the Emperor Valentinian III in the West. Dioscorus was condemned, deposed and exiled and his decrees were revoked. The Dogmatic Epistle of Pope St. Leo to Flavian was re-read and greeted with the enthusiastic acclamation: That is the faith of the Fathers: that is the faith of the Apostles. Peter had spoken through Leo. That was Cyril s faith, and that is the faith of the Fathers. The teaching of the Sovereign Pontiff had triumphed. 2

3 In the West: the Problem of Grace While the Church was busy in the East combating heresies regarding the Divine Person and the divine and human natures in Our Lord, theologians in the Western world were occupying themselves with more concrete and practical problems in the matter of that Divine Grace by which Christ lives His mystical life in the souls of the just. The Heresy of Donatus On the one hand, in North Africa, the Donatists (followers of Donatus, Bishop of Casa Riga in Numidia at the beginning of the 4 th century) affirmed: That without grace, one can no longer be a member of the Church, and that sacraments administered by clergy while in the state of mortal sin are worthless. The first statement is a denial of the loving mercy of Jesus, who wishes that sinners should not be excluded from His Church but that they should be converted and live. The second would make the faithful dependent for the sacraments on the goodness of the Church s ministers, who are, after all, human and liable to fall; this again would be contrary to God s providence in our regard. Combated by St. Augustine, the heresy was condemned at the Synod of Arles in 314 and by the seventh century it had completely disappeared. The only additional importance of Donatism lies in the fact that it established Catholic teaching once and for all on the sacramental character imprinted by Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, on the condition necessary, for validity of these and the other sacraments, and also in its special bearing on the modern question of the Validity of Anglican Orders. The Heresy of Pelagius Diametrically opposed to the Donatist position was that defended at the beginning of the fifth century by Pelagius, a Celtic monk of Britain, and his disciple Celestius. Pelagius maintained that there was no such thing as Original Sin in the proper sense of the term, and that, moreover, mankind could attain to eternal life by free will alone, unaided by grace a flat challenge to Our Lord s words: Without Me you can do nothing. It was vigorously refuted by Orosius, St. Jerome, and above all St. Augustine, and ultimately condemned in 418. Thereafter the Pelagians threw in their lot with the Nestorians, and were again condemned, with them at Ephesus in 431. Divine Providence turned Pelagianism to a two-fold use: 1. It was indirectly the means of having the faith preached in our island, since it was on his return to Rome after a mission against Pelagianism in Britain that St. Germanus of Auxerre reported the existence of scattered groups of Christians in Ireland. It was to these Irish believing in Christ that Palladius was sent in

4 2. It served to clarify and establish upon a firm basis the setting out of Catholic teaching in the supremely difficult problems of free will, grace, and predestination. This was perhaps the greatest part of the life work of St. Augustine. Pelagianism, like Arianism, had its roots on pagan philosophy: it attempted to strip Christianity of all dependence on Christ and make religion a purely natural thing. It was a great heresy in the sense that it attacked great truths and for a short time cause great controversy. But it was not great either in extent of influence or duration. Unsupported by secular power, condemned by Councils and Emperors alike, it quickly disappeared without having seriously menaced the East or gained any great hold in the West. The First General Council of Constantinople: 381 A.D. The Second great general Council of the Church, which met at Constantinople in the year 381, was summoned primarily as a solemn demonstration of the unshaken loyalty of the Eastern Bishops to the faith as set forth at Nicaea, a demonstration that the Church of the East had never gone over to Arianism, that the Arians were no more that a heretical faction-had never anything more despite their power and were now finally discredited. Why was such a declaration necessary, fifty-six years after the bishops of the East, with the enthusiastic support of the all-powerful Emperor, had condemned Arius as a falsifier of the truth and had provided, in the homo-ousion, a such touchstone to test the orthodoxy of future bishops? The answer to this question is one of the strangest and most involved chapters of Church history. The simplest way, perhaps, to set out as much essential to the story of the General Council of Constantinople in 381 will be to list the turning points of the story and then attempt some explanation of the why of it all. The day after the Council of Nicaea three bishops revoked their signatures to the condemnation of Arius the bishops of the neighboring Sees of Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Chalcedon. They were promptly banished by the Emperor, and others elected in their stead (325). In 328 the Bishop of Alexandria died, and the young deacon, Athanasius, who had been his main adviser at the great Council, was chosen to succeed him, and despite the active hostility of the Meletian faction, he was consecrated. That same year Constantine recalled the exiled bishops and reinstated them why, we do not know; it may have been for personal reasons only. From this moment until his death in 341, the ex-lucianist, Eusebius of Nicomedia, becomes the leading figure in the movement to undo the work of the Council of Nicaea. After the Emperor founded his new capital city, Constantinople, Eusebius became its bishop. Eusebius never openly attacked the achievements of 325. His line was to work for the destruction of the leading bishops who had supported the homo-ousion, on a plea that they were heretics, but of a different kind, i.e. men who did not really believe in the Trinity, who by the word homo-ousion meant that the Father and the Logos were one. The first victim of this campaign was 4

5 the second greatest prelate in the empire in the East, the Bishop of Antioch, Eustathius by name. It was possible he who presided at Nicaea. A carefully chosen council of bishops now met at Antioch, condemned and deposed him. And, once again, the Emperor followed up the ecclesiastical judgment by a sentence of exile. Nine other leading bishops were similarly removed in the course of the next year or so (330-32). In 332 the intrigue to remove Athanasius began. The agents of this were the Meletians of Alexandria. The point of attack was not the orthodoxy of his beliefs but his loyalty to the Emperor. Athanasius was summoned to the court, and cleared himself easily, returning home with a letter of high commendation from Constantine. Two further attempts to disgrace him, in the next two years, also failed. Then, in 334, Constantine did the most astonishing thing of all astonishing to us who know, really, so very little of the day-to-day history of these events. He recalled Arius from banishment, and received him at court. And while a council was ordered to investigate what we may call the Athanasius Problem why it was that the greatest city of the Eastern world had never known peace since this young prelate had been bishop Arius persuaded the Emperor that he was as orthodox as the best, and on the strength of a formula drawn up by himself (in which the homoousion did not appear) he was received back into the Church in 335. As to the Council, it was held at Tyre, and it deposed Athanasius; and the Emperor, after a personal hearing, banishing him to Trier, in Germany, almost as far as a man could travel from Alexandria and still be in the Emperor s territory. It was now ten years since the farewell ceremonies at Nicaea. In 336, Arius died, on the eve of a solemn ceremony of rehabilitation prepared in the cathedral of Constantinople, and in 337 Constantine also died. Constantine s death brought the Arian party a still greater freedom of action. He was succeeded by his three young sons as joint emperors, and to none of these could the upholding of Nicaea be the matter of personal prestige it was to him. Certain it is that from this time that the party begins to propose alternatives to, or substitutes for, the Nicaean formula; more or less innocuous substitutes, in the first years had they not been put out by known opponents of the homo-ousion or con-substantial, and by men who were declared foes of the bishop, Athanasius, who had become the very symbol of all that the categorical test word stood for? And here it needs to be said that there were many bishops, as little Arian as Athanasius himself, who, nevertheless, had no love for the famous Nicaean word as there had been many such bishops at Nicaea. These Catholic bishops, supporting the various alternatives of the kind described, played the Arian game, of course, albeit unconsciously. Their dislike of the test word arose from the fact that, in the East, as has been already said, the word homo-ousion had a bad history. Its first use, by Clement of Alexandria and by Origen too (around ), was seemingly in the Nicaean sense; and when a bishop of Alexandria, answering heretics, seemed to critics so to 5

6 defend the distinction of Persons in the Holy Trinity that he obscured the truth that there is only one God, it was made a point against him that he had not explicitly said the Logos was homo-ousion with the Father. And this bishop, Denis, explains to his namesake, the Pope, in his defence, why he had not used the useful word: it was a word which was not found anywhere in Scripture. This was about the year 267, nearly seventy years earlier than Nicaea. But eleven years after the exchange between the two Denises, when the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was condemned (268) for the heresy of teaching that the Father and the Logos (Son) are one Person, he actually used the word homo-ousion to express this oneness, and so his condemnation gave the word an ill sound in the East. Since the pronouncement and use of this term at the Council of Nicaea, and ever since 268, it stank of heresy, even when it had, so to speak, been disinfected by the Council of Nicaea and given an undoubtly orthodox employment. Sabellianism, the denial the truth that there is a Trinity, was the great scar heresy of the East to the generation upon which Arianism came, and homo-ousion had been the heresy s shibboleth, in Eastern ears. It is a wonder, says Newman, that the word homo-ousion, that the bishops of the Eastern Oriental Churches and the Western bishops were able to agree on this word at the Council of Nicaea, seeing how it irritated the Orientals and perplexed the Western bishops. Again, there is latent first-class difficulty in the Nicaean council s formal condemnation, as a conclusion to the creed, of those who say that the Son is of another substance than the Father ; and this was fully exploited in the troubled years after the death of Constantine. The latent difficulty is that to the Greeks these two terms did not necessarily and always mean exactly the same thing, as they did to the Latin Church. Hypostasis to the Greeks came to mean what the Latin Church called person; ousai meant nature rather than person. The sentence, The Son is not of another hypostasis than the Father, a Greek might take to mean, Father and Son are one Person, while the Latin Church understood by it, are of the same nature. All this is set down to convey something of the causes that held quite orthodox minds in doubt about their practical action during these controversies a state of doubt which for years played into the hands of the radically unorthodox. This was an especially dangerous condition of things, seeing that it was these radicals the real Arians who had the ear of the court, and who stood to the world of officials and administrators for the ideal type of Christian believer, the kind that should be officially supported. For in this first generation that followed the personal conversion of Constantine, the official world was very far from being Christianized in belief. Though the Emperor, especially after he had become sole emperor, turned his back very definitely on the pagan rites, these were by no means forbidden. The whole life of paganism went on as before, and the cult of Sol Invictus and Summus Deus still held very many of its adherents. To these enlightened monotheistic foes of polytheism, the Arian version of the Christian idea of God was 6

7 naturally appealing. On the first view it was simpler, more logical terms meaning just what they appeared to mean its language non-mysterious, rational. It is not, of course, suggested that there was a carefully worked out plan, in all this, on the part of high officials. But the two tendencies existed side by side in these years, and it was this accidental coincidence that did much, to make Arianism the highly dangerous threat it proved to be, and to give it a character of toughness out of all proportion to the number of its real adherents. As to its quality as a danger to Catholicism, let Harnack s judgment be recalled, that Arianism, had it been victorious, must have ruined Christianity completely, emptying it of all religious content, leaving it a mere system of cosmology and ethics. It was, in the circumstances, one of the greatest dangers the true religion has ever had to face, and this despite the fact that, in the critical, fourth century, Arianism was never a popular thing; It was an epidemic of the schools and the theologians, and to them it was mainly confined The classes which had furnished martyrs in the persecutions were in no sense the seat of the heresy. (Newman, Tracts, pp ). The only one of Constantine s sons who really favored the anti-nicaean party was Constantius II, and once he became sole master of the empire (359), the Radicals really threw off the mask, and Arianism proper the explicit renunciation of the doctrine that the Logos is truly God--was now propounded in councils and, with great violence and persecution, imposed by the Emperor. And it was in these years (350-51), that the heresy was first thrust upon the bishops of the still largely pagan West, of Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul. In council after council, in the West and in the East, whether perplexed by the confusion of the issues, whether terrified by the threats of the Emperor and the knowledge that bishops had been murdered who oppose him, whether overcome by the specious argument that it was all, in reality, a matter of ridding the Church of Athanasius, whom they were taught to consider a restless, violent, party-spirited man, and of his arbitrary formula in council after council the bishops gave wholesale, at Arles (353), Milan (355), Sirmium (357), and most spectacularly, at the simultaneous councils of Rimini-Selucia (359), (Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, for the bishops in the West; Selucia, is the modern Turkish port of Silifke, on the Mediterranean), about the morrow of which St. Jerome wrote a celebrated phrase, that the whole world woke up one morning, lamenting and marveling to find itself Arian. In 361 Constantius disappeared, baptized (just in time) by an Arian. He was followed by Julian the Apostate, who set about a systematic revival of Paganism. Then came Jovian, a Catholic, and after him Valentinian, a liberal, who appointed Valens s co-emperor of the East. Valens (365-78), a true Arian, of the political type, returned to the policy of Constantius, and a real persecution of Catholics followed. But the cloudiness of the early period had been dissipated. The issue was now clear to the bishops that only by insistence on the consubstantial or homo-ousion could the Church 7

8 rid itself of the crypto-arians whose influence meant death. After Valens was killed in a war with the Goths in 378, a Catholic general from Spain named Theodosius succeeded him. The way was at last open to real restoration of the true traditional belief. Nicaea, for the first time in fifty years, was to come into full operation in all the Sees of the East. The General Council of 381 is an epilogue to a drama just concluded. It does little more than register a fait accompli, and its essential importance is its demonstration to the world that the Christians of the East, after more than fifty years of continuous disturbance and of the oppression on the part of their rulers, remain Catholics, are not Arians; it is a demonstration that the Council of Nicaea was no mere ecclesiastical pageant, but a source of strong and unfailing leadership. No two General Councils follow the same historical pattern not even where a bare fifty years separate them, and when the matter of their discussions is the same. In this Council Rome, the West, was not represented at all was not so much as invited. The same problem had for years now vexed the Churches of the West. The same political revolution the appearance of sovereigns who were wholeheartedly Catholic was to be their salvation also. And they too, demanded a council, and it took place at Aquileia, some weeks after the council we are dealing with. And why the council when met at Constantinople came, in after years, to be regarded as a General Council is something that may puzzle the legists and theologians. (The first stage in the development of its recognition as a general council was the unanimous vote of the First General Council of Chalcedon, fourth session, in 451, taking as the rule of faith, that which was fixed by the Council of Nicaea, and which one hundred fifty bishops of the council assembled at Constantinople by Theodosius the Great confirmed. ) The bishops who sat in the council were one hundred and fifty in all. There were none from Egypt, only half of them from Thrace and Asia. Almost one half of the bishops came from the vast civil diocese called the East, Oriens, whose chief see was Antioch. And it was the Bishop of Antioch, Meletius, who presided at the council. Once again the cross-currents and misunderstandings of these much troubled years had borne strange fruit. At Antioch there was a rival claimant to the See, Paulinus, and it was Paulinus whom Rome (and Alexandria also) recognized as the lawful bishop. But the Catholic East was solidly behind Meletius, and this meant the support of the three great Cappadocian bishops St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the greatest theologian of the day and one of the greatest preachers of all time. Meletius died before the council had been long in session, and it was the last-named Gregory who was elected president in his place. The actual business before the council was slight, and now, with the See of Antioch vacant and the seventy-one bishops of its jurisdiction already assembled. It is not suprising that the question of the successor of Meletius took first place in the minds of all. 8

9 The president of the council had the happy idea that the bishop whom Rome and Alexandria recognized, should be chosen, and so the schism would be ended, but the bishop would not agree. And then there arrived the Bishop of Alexandria himself, the successor of Athanasius, with some of his suffragans, and he made such a bitter attack on the president because he had consented, being already bishop of Sasima, to become Bishop of Constantinople, which would breach the law enacted by Nicaea, that Gregory, already discouraged by the revelation of what ecclesiastical politics could be at a high level, resigned both his Episcopal see and the presidency of the council. The council closed on July 9 th. What it had accomplished was, first, to issue a statement of belief which explicitly renewed the homo-ousion definition of Nicaea, and then, naming the varieties of Arianism, to condemn each and every one of them as heretical. The bishops next published a detailed statement of their faith in the consubstantiality of the Divine Logos with the Father, in the distinctness of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and in the reality of the Incarnation of the Second Person, Jesus Christ. These statements about belief involved the condemnation of two other theories related to Arianism, namely, the denial, by Macedonius, and his followers, that the Holy Ghost is really God, and the theory of Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, that in the Logos Incarnate in the God-Man, Jesus Christ the Divine Logos functions in place of the human soul: Christ, who is truly God, is not truly a man. This last heresy was to have a famous history in the next seventy years, to be the occasion of two later General Councils, and, ultimately, in one form or another, so to divide the Catholics of the East as to paralyze their resistance to Islam. There are four canons enacted by this council. The first is the declaration renewing the work of Nicaea, and condemning these various heresies. The second, between the lines of which can be read much of the history since the council, forbids bishops to cross the frontiers of another (civil) diocese, or to interfere in another bishop s administration. The Bishop of Alexandria, it is explicitly laid down, is to confine himself to Egypt; the bishops of the East (i.e. Oriens) shall confine their joint action to the East, with the reservation that the Bishop of Antioch keeps the rights acknowledged at Nicaea; and statements no less explicit restrict the bishops of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace to those (civil) dioceses respectively. The bishops are reminded of the Nicaean rule that the affairs of the dioceses of any given province are to be regulated by a twice-yearly meeting of the bishops. About the same time when St. Gregory of Nazianzus was invited to become Bishop of Constantinople, the efforts of the Bishop of Alexandria, Peter II, had brought about the election of an Alexandrian philosopher, Maximus, and his unlawful, clandestine consecration. The council (canon 4) now declared that Maximus was not a bishop, and that whatever ordinations he had performed, were worthless, and he candidates in truth are not ordained at all. 9

10 The third canon, the most famous action, in its historical effects, of this council: The Bishop of Constantinople shall have the primacy of honor after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is the new Rome. (Taken from The Church in Crisis by Hughes; Published 1960) St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Doctor of the Church; A.D. 430 So great is the veneration which popes, councils, and the whole Church have paid to the memory of this glorious saint through every succeeding age since his time that Pope Leo X ordered that his feast should be observed with the same honors as that of an Apostle, and he is recognized as a model of true penitents, a triumphant champion of the Faith, the equal of any philosopher, and the first of theologians, supreme Doctor of Grace. He was born on 13 th of November, in the year 354, at Tagaste, a small town of Numidia in North Africa, not far from Hippo, but at some distance from the sea, which he had never seen till he was grown up. His parents were of good position, but not rich; his father, Patricius, was an idolater, and of a violent disposition; but by the example and prudent conduct of St. Monica, his wife, he at length learned the humility and meekness of the Christian religion, and was baptized a little before his death in 371. She bore him several children; St. Augustine speaks of his brother Navigius, who left a family behind him, and of a sister who died an Abbess. At the wish of his mother and with the consent of his father he was entered in his infancy among the catechumens, Baptism itself being deferred, according to a common custom of the time; but in early youth he fell into grave sin and until the age of thirty-two led a life morally defiled by license and intellectually by Manichaeism. Of this time, up to his conversion and the death of St. Monica, he speaks at large in his Confessions, a book written for a people curious to know the lives of others, but careless to amend their own ; written not indeed to satisfy such curiosity, but to show forth to his fellows the mercy of God and His ways as exemplified in the life of one sinner, and to endeavor that no one should think of him above that which he confessed himself to be. He therefore divulged all the sins of his youth in the nine first books and, in the tenth, published the many imperfections to which he was still subject, humbly begging the intercession of all Christians on his behalf. Sending this book to Count Darius, he tells him that, The caresses of this world are more dangerous than its persecutions. See what I am from this book: believe me who bear testimony of myself, and regard not what others say of me. Praise with me the goodness of God for the great mercy He has shown me, and pray for me that He will be pleased to finish what He has begun in me, and that He never suffer me to destroy myself. By the care of his mother he was instructed in the Christian religion, and taught to pray. He was made 10

11 a catechumen, by being marked with the sign of the cross and blessed salt being put into his mouth; and while still a child, falling dangerously ill, he desired Baptism and his mother got everything ready for it; but he suddenly grew better, and it was put off. This custom of deferring Baptism for fear of sinning under the obligations of that sacrament, St. Augustine very properly condemns; but the want of a sense of sanctity and the sacrileges of Christians in defiling it, by relapsing into sin, is an abuse which no less calls for our tears. The Church has long since forbidden the baptism of infants ever to be deferred: but it is one of the principal duties of pastors to instruct the faithful in the obligations which the sacrament lays them under, and to teach them to value and to preserve the grace which they received by it. And so I was put to school to learn those things in which, poor boy, I knew no profit, and yet if I was negligent in learning I was whipped: for this method was approved of by my elders, and many that had trod that life before us had chalked out unto us these wearisome ways Augustine thanks God that, through the persons who pressed him to learn had no other end in view than penurious riches and ignominious glory, yet divine Providence made a good use of their error, and forced him to learn for his great profit and manifold advantage. He accuses himself of often studying only by constraint, disobeying his parents and masters, not writing, reading, or minding his lessons so much as was required of him; and this he did, not for want of wit or memory, but out of love of play. But he prayed to God with great earnestness that he might escape punishment at school, for which dread he was laughed at by his masters and parents. Nevertheless, we were punished for play by them that were doing no better; but the boys play of them that are grown up is named business Who is he that, weighing things well, will justify my being beaten when I was a boy for playing at ball, because by that play I was hindered from learning so quickly those arts with which, when grown up, I should play far worse? No one does well what he does against his will, he says, and takes notice that the masters who corrected him for a small fault if overcome in by a playfellow at ball. He liked Latin very well, having learned that language from his nurses, and others with whom he conversed; but not the Latin which the first masters teach; rather that which is taught by those who are called grammarians. While he was little he hated Greek, and, for want of understanding it sufficiently, Homer was disagreeable to him; but the Latin poets became his early delight. Augustine went to school first in his own town; then at Madaura, a neighboring city, where he studied grammar, poetry, and rhetoric. When he was sixteen years old his father made him return to Tagaste, and kept him a whole year at home. During this time the young man fell into bad company, and gave himself up to games and diversions. His passions grew unruly and were indulged, but his father took no care of his growing up in virtue, provided he was eloquent. His mother indeed implored him to keep himself free from vice; which, he says, seemed to me but 11

12 the admonitions of a woman, which I was ashamed to obey; whereas they were Thy admonitions, O God, and I knew it not. By her Thou didst speak to me, and I despised Thee in her. He went to Carthage towards the end of the year 370, when he was seventeen. There he took the foremost place in the school of rhetoric and applied himself to his studies with eagerness and pleasure; but his motives were vanity and ambition, and to them he joined loose living, though Vincent the Rogatist, his enemy, acknowledges that he always loved decency and good manners even in his irregularities. Soon he entered into relations with a woman, irregular but stable, to whom he remained faithful until he sent her from him at Milan in 385; she bore him a son, Adeodatus, in 372. His father, Patricius, died in 371; but Augustine still continued at Carthage and, by reading the Hortensius of Cicero, his mind was turned from rhetoric to philosophy. He at length grew weary of the books of the heathen philosophers because Christ was not mentioned in them, whose name he had sucked in, as it were, with his mother s milk, and retained in his heart. He undertook therefore to read the Holy Scriptures; but he was offended with the simplicity of the style, and could not relish their humility or penetrate their spirit. Then it was that he fell into the error of the Manichees, that infirmity of noble mind troubled by the problem of evil, which seeks to solve the problem by teaching a metaphysical and religious dualism, according to which there are two eternal first principles, God, the cause of all good, and matter, the cause of all evil. The darkening of the understanding and clumsiness in the use of the faculties which wait on evil-living helped to betray him into this company, which he kept till his twenty-eight year and pride did the rest. I sought with pride, he says, what only humility could make me find. Fool that I was, I left the nest, imagining myself able to fly; and I fell to the ground. His vanity was flattered by the Manichees, who claimed to try everything by the test of bare reason, and scoffed at all those who paid deference to the authority of the Catholic Church, as if they shackled reason and walked in bonds. It was by this familiar trick that he was seduced and caught in the nets of the Manichees, who promised to show him everything by demonstration, and calling faith weakness, credulity, and ignorance. They said that, setting aside imperious authority, they would lead men to God and free them from all error by reason alone. Writing afterwards to a friend, he said, You know, my dear Honoratus, that upon no other ground we adhere to these men. What else made me, rejecting for almost nine years together the religion which was instilled into me in my childhood, a follower and diligent hearer of these men, but their saying that we are overawed by superstition, and that faith is imposed on us without reason being given: whereas they tie none to believe, except upon the truth being first examined and cleared up? Who would not have been led astray by such promises? Especially a young man desirous of truth and, by reputation among learned men in the schools, already proud and talkative. They derided the simplicity of the Catholic Faith, which commanded men to believe before they were taught by evident reason what truth was. St. Augustine frequently 12

13 teaches, in his other works, that this is the general method of false teachers and a usual cause of wrecking the faith. For nine years Augustine had his own schools of rhetoric and grammar at Tagaste and Carthage, while his devoted mother, spurred on by the assurance of a holy bishop that the son of so many tears could not perish, never ceased by prayer and gentle persuasion to try to bring him to conversion and reform. After meeting the leading Manichean teacher, Faustus, he began to be disillusioned about that sect, and in 383 departed for Rome, secretly, lest his mother should prevent him. After a serious illness he opened a school of rhetoric there, but finding that the scholars there were accustomed frequently to change their masters in order to cheat them of their salary for teaching, he grew weary of the place; and it happened that orders were sent from Milan to Symmachus, prefect of Rome, requiring him to send some able master of rhetoric to Milan. Augustine applied for the post; and, having given Symmachus proofs of his capacity, was chosen by him and sent. At Milan he was well received and the bishop, St. Ambrose, gave him marks of respect. Augustine was very desirous of knowing him, not as a teacher of the truth, but as a person of great learning and reputation. He often went to his sermons, not so much with any expectation of profiting by them as to gratify his curiosity and to enjoy the eloquence; but he found the discourses more learned than those of the heretic Faustus and they began to make an impression on his heart and mind; at the same time he read Plato and Plotinus: Plato gave me knowledge of the true God, Jesus Christ showed me the way. St. Monica, having followed him to Milan, wished to see him married, and the mother of Adeodatus returned to Africa, leaving the boy behind; but neither marriage nor single continence followed. And so the struggle, spiritual, moral, intellectual, went on. He found the writings of the Platonic philosophers bred pride in his soul, making him have a mind to seem wise and leaving him full of his punishment, instead of teaching him to bewail his own misery. Finding nothing in them about the mystery of man s redemption or Christ s incarnation, he with great eagerness betook himself to reading the New Testament, especially the writings of St. Paul, in which he then began to take great delight. Here he found the testimonies of the Old Testament illustrated, the glory of heaven displayed, and the way clearly pointed out which leads thither; here he learned that which he had long felt, that he had a law in his members warring against the law in his mind, and that nothing could deliver him from this body of death but the grace of Jesus Christ. He perceived an infinite difference between the doctrine of him who styled himself the last of the Apostles, and that of those proud philosophers who esteemed themselves the greatest of men. Augustine himself was now convinced of the truth and excellence of that virtue which the divine law prescribes in the Catholic Church, but was haunted with an apprehension of insuperable difficulties in its practice that kept him from resolutely entering upon it. And so, by listening to St. Ambrose and reading the Bible he was convinced of the truth of Christianity, but there was still wanting in him, the will to 13

14 accept the will of God. He says of himself: I sighed and longed to be delivered, but was kept fast bound, not with exterior chains but with my own will. The Enemy held my will, and of it he had made a chain with which he fettered me fast; for from a perverse will was created wicked desire or lust, and the serving this lust produced custom, and custom not resisted produced another kind of necessity, with which as with links fastened one to another, I was kept close shackled in this cruel slavery. I had no excuse as I pretended formerly when I delayed to serve Thee, because I had not yet certainly discovered Thy truth: now I knew it, yet I was still fettered I had nothing now to reply to Thee when Thou said to me, Rise, thou that sleepest, and rise up from the dead, and Christ shall enlighten thee I had nothing, I say, at all to reply, being now convinced by Thy faith, except lazy and drowsy words, Presently, by and by, let me alone a little while longer ; but this presently did not presently come; these delays had no bounds, and this little while stretched out to a long time. He had been greatly impressed by hearing the conversion of the Roman neo-platonic professor, Victorinus, related by St. Simplician, and soon after Pontitian, an African who had employment in the Emperor s court, came one day to pay a visit to Augustine and his friend Alipius. Finding a book of St. Paul s epistles lying on the table, he took occasion to speak of the life of St. Anthony, and was surprised to find that his name was unknown to them. They were astonished to hear of the miracles so well attested done so lately in the Catholic Church, and did not know before Pontitian mentioned it that there was a monastery full of fervent religious outside the walls of the very city in which they lived, under the care of St. Ambrose. Pontitian then went on to speak of two gentlemen who had suddenly turned to the service of God by reading the life of St. Anthony. His words had a powerful influence on the mind of Augustine, and he saw, as it were in a glass, his own filthiness and deformity. In his former half desires of conversion he had been accustomed to beg of God the grace of continence, but was at the same time in some measure afraid of being heard too soon. In the first dawn of my youth, he says, I had begged of Thee chastity, but by halves, miserable wretch that I am; and I said, Give me chastity, but not yet a while ; for I was afraid lest Thou should hear me too soon, and heal me of the disease which I rather wished to have satisfied than extinguished. He was ashamed and grieved to find his will had been so weak, and directly Pontitian had gone he turned to Alipius with these words: What are we doing to let the unlearned start up and seize heaven by force, while we with all our knowledge remain behind, cowardly and heartless, wallowing in our sins? Because they have outstripped us and gone on before, are we ashamed to follow them? Is it not more shameful not even to follow them? He got up and went into the garden. Alipius, astonished at his manner and emotion, followed, and they sat down as far as they could from the house, Augustine, undergoing a violent inward conflict. He was torn between the voice of the Holy Ghost calling him 14

15 to chastity and the seductive memory of his former sins, and going alone further into the garden he threw himself to the ground below a fig-tree, crying out, How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou be angry forever? Remember not my past iniquities! And seeing himself still held back, he reproached himself miserably: How long? How long? Tomorrow? Tomorrow? Why not now? Why does not this hour put an end to my filthiness? As he spoke these things and wept with bitter contrition of heart, on a sudden he heard as it were the voice of a child singing from a neighboring house, which frequently repeated these words, Tolle lege! Tolle lege! Take up and read! Take up and read! And he began to consider whether in any game children were wont to sing any such words; and he could not call to mind that he had ever heard them. Whereupon he rose up, suppressing his tears, and interpreted the voice to be a divine admonition, remembering that St. Anthony was converted from the world by hearing a particular passage of the gospel read. He returned to where Alipius was sitting with the book of St. Paul s epistles, opened it, and read in silence the words on which he first cast his eyes: Not in rioting or drunkenness; not in chambering or impurities; not in contention or envy; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. All the darkness of his former hesitation was gone. He shut the book, and with a serene countenance told Alipius what had passed. Alipius asked to see the passage he had read, and found the next words to be: Him that is weak in faith, take unto you ; which he applied to himself, and joined his friend in his resolution. They immediately went in, and told their good news to St. Monica, who rejoiced and praised God, who is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand. This was September 386, and Augustine was thirty-two. He at once gave up his school and retired to a country house at Cassiciacum, near Milan, which his friend Verecundus lent to him; he was accompanied by his mother St. Monica, his brother Navigius, his son Adeodatus, St. Alipius, two cousins, and several other friends, and they lived a community life together under the direction of St. Monica. Augustine wholly employed himself in prayer and study, and his study was a kind of prayer by the devotion of his mind therein. Here he sought by austere penance, by the strictest watchfulness over his heart and his senses, and by humble prayer, to control his passions, and to prepare himself for the grace of leading a new life in Christ and becoming in Him a new creature. Too late, he prayed, have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved Thee! Thou was with me, and I was not with Thee; I was abroad, running after those beauties which Thou hast made; those things which could have no being but in Thee kept me far from Thee. Thou hast called, Thou hast cried out, and hast pierced my deafness. Thou hast enlightened, Thou hast shone forth, and my blindness is dispelled. I have tasted Thee, and am hungry for Thee. Thou hast touched me, and I am afire with the desire 15

16 of Thy embraces. From the conferences and conversations which took place during these seven months St. Augustine drew up his three dialogues, Against the Academicians, Of the Happy Life, and Of Order. Among the bad habits he had contracted was that of swearing. Later, urging others to refrain from it, he set before them how he had overcome that habit. We also were formerly given to that low and vicious custom: we once swore; but from the time that we began to serve God, and understood the evil of that sin, we were seized with great fear, and by fear restrained it. You say you do it by habit; but above all things watch over yourselves that you may never swear. A more inveterate habit requires the greater attention. The tongue is a slippery member, and is easily moved. Be then the more watchful to curb it. If you refrain today, you will find it easier to refrain tomorrow. I speak from experience. If your victory be not complete tomorrow, it will at least be easier by the victory of the day before. The mischief dies in three days. And we shall rejoice in our advantage and in our deliverance from such an evil. In another sermon he says, I know it is difficult to break your habit; it is what I found myself; but by fearing God we broke our custom of swearing. When I read His law I was struck with fear; I strove against my habit, I invoked God my helper, and He helped me. Now nothing is easier to me than not to swear. During the early days of his conversion, God as he tells us, by His grace brought down the pride of his spirit, and laid low the lofty mountains of his vain thoughts, by bringing him daily to a greater sense of that misery and bondage from which he was delivered. He was baptized by St. Ambrose on Easter-eve in 387, together with Alipius and his dearly loved son Adeodatus, who was about fifteen years of age and was to die not long afterwards. He was still at Milan when the relics of SS. Gervase and Protase were discovered, and was witness to certain miracles that were wrought on persons touching them, but in the autumn he resolved to return to Africa. Accordingly he went on to Ostia with his mother and several friends, and there St. Monica died in November 387. To her life and last days Augustine devoted six moving chapters of his Confessions. He returned for a short while to Rome, refuting Manichaeism there, and went on to Africa in September 388, where he hastened with his friends to his house at Tagaste. There he lived almost three years, disengaged from all temporal concerns, serving God in fasting, prayer, good works, meditating upon His law and instructing others by his discourses and books. All things were in common and were distributed according to everyone s needs; St. Augustine himself reserved nothing which he could call his own, having alienated the very house in which he lived. He had no idea of becoming a priest, but had good reason to fear that attempts would be made to make him a bishop. He therefore carefully avoided going to any cities in which the sees were vacant, for fear of being chosen; but in 391, having occasion to go to Hippo, there being then a bishop there, he went thither. Valerius, bishop of the city, had mentioned to his people the necessity of ordaining a priest 16

17 for the service of his church, and so, when St. Augustine came into the church, they presented him to Valerius, desiring with great earnestness that he might be forthwith ordained priest. St. Augustine burst into tears, considering the great dangers that threatened him in that charge, but was obliged in the end to acquiesce, and was ordained. By this time he was a new man, even more conspicuous for his piety than for his great learning, and he now employed his friends to beg of Valerius some respite, in order to prepare himself in solitude for the exercise of his office. He made the same request himself, by a letter which tacitly condemns the presumption of those who without a holy fear and true vocation intrude themselves into the ministry. Valerius seems to have granted him this respite till the following Easter, for his first sermons coincides with that time. Augustine removed to Hippo and in a house adjoining the church established a sort of monastery, modeled on his house at Tagaste, living there with St. Alipius, St. Evodius, St.Possidius, and others according to the rule of the Apostles. Valerius, who was a Greek, and had, moreover, an impediment in speaking, appointed him to preach to the people in his own presence, as was customary for bishops to do in the East, but at that time, that practice was unusual in the West; more unusual still, he was given permission to preach on his own ; knowing that the instruction of the flock was a principal duty of the pastoral charge, he from that time never interrupted the course of his sermons until his death. We have nearly four hundred extant, though many were not written by him but taken down by others as he delivered them. During these early days he vigorously opposed the Manichaeans and the beginnings of Donatism, as well as effected such domestic reforms as the abolition of feasting in the chapels of the martyrs (a debased survival of the primitive love-feast) and of family fights as a public amusement: I used appeal and persuasion to the utmost of my ability to extirpate such a cruel custom from their minds and manners. I thought I had done nothing while I only heard their acclamations and raised their delight and admiration. They were not persuaded so long as they could amuse themselves with giving applause to the discourse which they heard. But their tears gave me some hope, and showed that their minds were changed. When I saw them weep, I believed this horrible custom would be abolished. It is now eight years ago and upwards and, by the grace of God, they have been restrained from attempting any such practice. In the sermons which fill the fifth volume of his works this father inculcates assiduous meditation on the last things; for if the Lord s day (or last judgment) may be at some distance, is your day (or death) far off? He enforces the necessity of doing penance; For sin must be punished either by the penitent sinner or by God, his Judge; and God, who has promised pardon to the penitent sinner, has nowhere promised him who delays his conversion until tomorrow, a tomorrow to do penance in. He frequently speaks of almsdeeds, and claims that the neglect of them is the cause of the loss of the greatest number that perish, seeing Christ mentions only this crime in the sentence both of the 17