TLS on Augustin

on Augustin

The question of what you love

by LUCY BECKETT

a review of

Henry Chadwick AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO A Life 177pp. Oxford University Press. £12.99 (US $19.95).978 0 19 956830 7
Paula Fredriksen AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS A Christian defense of Jews and Judaism 488pp. Doubleday. £35 (US $35).978 0 385 50270 2

Fifty years ago, the Christian world of late antiquity was still in a curricular black hole between ancient and medieval history. Now much light shines on a landscape of great intrinsic interest, and also of striking relevance to our own time: the inquiry into and defence of seriously undertaken Christian belief in an intellectual atmosphere of ignorance and contempt was the challenge for Augustine - "Me! Become a Christian, be what my doorkeeper is and not what Plato or Pythagoras was!" - and for intelligent Christians is the challenge now.
Henry Chadwick, a renowned scholar of late antiquity for five decades, died in 2008. The posthumous publication of his short book about Augustine, a draft set aside for the even shorter, and less biographical, Augustine (1980) in the Oxford Past Masters series, is warmly to be welcomed. At the end of his graceful and grateful Foreword, Peter Brown, who has been shedding his own light on the same landscape for almost as long as Chadwick, puts his finger on a characteristic of Augustine's which has caused endless theological dispute and is at the same time one of the most attractive and endearing things about him. He changed his mind. More precisely, in a long and massively productive writing life he was not always consistent. He knew this. "Cicero, the prince of Roman orators, says of someone that 'He never uttered a word which he would wish to recall'. High praise indeed! - but more applicable to a complete ass than to a genuinely wise man." In Brown's quotation from a sermon discovered after Chadwick had written this book, Augustine said, "We who preach and write books ... write while we make progress. We learn something new every day. We dictate at the same time as we explore. We speak as we are still knocking for understanding".
read more Augustine never thought his understanding of God complete or capable of completion in this life, and it is the reader's sense of him thinking as he writes, thinking on his feet, that makes him the least boring of all theologians.
On the other hand, if what he wrote is taken as gospel truth, which he firmly warns against in the same sermon, and which was done throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, then inconsistencies, occasional lapses in concentration, strong remarks provoked by particular circumstances, and ideas pushed to logical conclusions for polemical purposes, could and did harden into fiercely contradictory positions taken much later by theological enemies.
Drawing on wide knowledge of Augustine, Chadwick's biography is full of deftly placed detail and a sharpness that matches its subject's.
"In the ancient Church, as in modern secular democracies, one must on no account bribe the electors with one's own money, but it is acceptable to bribe them with their own." Because Augustine was so clear-sighted about what was going on within himself, the personal reality of his life can be followed in a way that is not possible for anyone else in the ancient world. Chadwick does this superlatively well. On Augustine frantically studying the Bible because he has just been ordained priest and feels as incompetent as a pilot who doesn't know how to row, Chadwick says, "Augustine was still in process of discovering that ordinary churches are not places where half-educated fools imagine they worship God while the wise men are in a country villa studying oriental mysticism and Plotinus". Chadwick was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and then Cambridge, and also a priest. There is experience in this sentence as well as history, as there is in Chadwick's praise for Augustine's direct and unliterary sermons.
On Augustine's struggle with the Donatists, Chadwick shows how their puritanical exclusiveness drew from him his double vision of the divinely instituted Church which is to be believed in, and the actual, imperfect Church, full of all kinds of people to be sorted only in the inscrutable judgement of God. The Catholic view of the sacraments, channels for God's grace irrespective of their minister's personal holiness, has depended ever since on Augustine's teaching. "Scandals never offer sufficient reason for leaving the Church": that sentence is Chadwick's; this is Augustine's: "A convert will find many good Christians in the Church if he sets out to become one himself". As for "compel them to come in", Chadwick is careful to distinguish Augustine's use of Jesus' phrase to justify the use of moderate force against Donatists from that of later churchmen who regarded it as a precedent sanctioning cruelty that would have appalled him.
Chadwick writes a little disappointingly on the City of God, but his chapter on Augustine's decades of thoughtful exploration of the Trinity is luminously clear, tracking his search for an "analogical ladder" towards the being of God through the image of God that is the human soul. As part of this search, Augustine found things to say on being, knowing and willing, on love, on memory and the subconscious, that for sheer interest have never been surpassed and that no one has superseded. The whole enterprise was tentative, but, in the words of Augustine with which Chadwick concludes this discussion, "There are many things for which no reason can be given; but that does not mean that there is none".
This caveat applies most particularly to the knot of paradox likely to baffle thinking Christians contemplating the freedom of the will, their belief in their dependence on the grace of God, and God's knowledge in eternity of all that has occurred and will occur in time. Strands from this knot pulled to singular clarity led to the notorious extremes of the controversy between the old Augustine and the brilliant Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum. Chadwick's account of this is fair and balanced.
He thinks Augustine went too far, but he is with him in identifying the real danger in Pelagian morality: Christ does not need to be more than an exceptionally wise and good man to offer the supreme model of grace and inspiration which is all that Julian speaks of. This is the kind of deeply un-Christian Christianity for which the Russian Church condemned Tolstoy as a heretic. Meanwhile, Augustine's pessimistic refutations of the classical assumption that the rational person will become virtuous by understanding virtue and repressing emotion mark, in Chadwick's words, an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness. The key moral question becomes not, What do you think? but What do you love? The difference is immense.
Chadwick's book would ignite or revive interest in Augustine in almost any intelligent reader. So would Paula Fredriksen's very different Augustine and the Jews, an ambitious and formidably learned work, though one that could have been edited into more coherent and less repetitive shape. After many years of work on Jewish and early Christian texts, she here tells what she calls one sweeping story of the Jewish and classical worlds from Alexander the Great to the late Roman Empire, of Augustine's life and thought, and finally of "the stunning achievement of his teaching on Jews and Judaism". The book would have been more reader-friendly if she had managed her material as one story, rather than dividing it into these three parts, but each part is of considerable weight and much interest.
In the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Hellenistic and then Roman Mediterranean, the Jews alone believed that only their one God deserved awe and worship. This exceptionalism, which the Romans respected enough to exempt Jews from emperor-worship, made Jews unpopular when pagans deserted their gods to join them, as some did, and made Christians much more unpopular when they sought converts, as Jews did not. In a world of tribal, civic and local gods and rituals, the Christian conviction that redemption in Christ, and therefore news of it, were for everyone, was something altogether new. It was a consequence of this universal aspiration that orthodoxy became such a critical issue in the early Church: the truth had to be correctly understood and taught as one and catholic, as the Bible had to be agreed as a universally accepted collection of texts. Fredriksen explains lucidly the development of the scriptural canon, but is unkeen on the very idea of orthodoxy, which she regards as imperially imposed rather than arrived at over centuries of argument as to how most accurately to describe the mysteries of revelation.
She describes in vivid detail how the relations between Christianity and Judaism, though not usually between Christians and Jews, became, during this long theologicial turmoil, set in adversarial positions of distrust, ignorance and contempt that lasted for centuries. Arguments developed by Christians against Judaism (themselves developed from arguments between Jews, in one of which, after all, Christianity originated) were soon turned on rival versions of Christianity. Already in the late second century, the pagan Celsus observed that though Jews and Christians quarrelled, they did not quarrel as loudly and viciously as different groups of Christians quarrelled with each other. Throughout all this, alongside the deeply depressing story of the assembly of the stock Christian prejudices adversus Judaeos, a merciful gap between anti-Jewish rhetoric and untidy, generally peaceful, social interaction between Christians and Jews persisted. In a property dispute between a bishop and a Jew that Augustine dealt with in his episcopal court, the fact that one litigant was a Jew was of no weight or concern. That all citizens in the empire, of any race, language or religion, were also citizens of Rome is something for which the Romans deserve much credit.
The principal point of this book is to demonstrate how and when Augustine moved from standard Christian negativity to a new, more open and more profound understanding of Jews and Judaism. To make sense of the change, Fredriksen, in the second section of her book, maps Augustine's career onto the picture of the late Roman world given in her first. She analyses well the critical period in which, through work on St Paul and the Donatist Tyconius, his classical rationalism turned towards pessimistic Christian realism, as sketched by Chadwick. Some of the surrounding material on Manichaeism, described at length, and on the Confessions, is familiar to anyone with any knowledge of Augustine and somewhat unbalances the book, more than half of which has to be read before we reach its real subject, Augustine's "all but unprecedented... Christian affirmation of Jews and Judaism", the result (so like him) of the first serious thought he had given the topic.
He wrote contra Faustum Manicheum when he had been Bishop of Hippo for three years and had learnt a great deal about reading and preaching from the whole Bible. Faustus, now dead, had written a long, scripturally based defence of Manichaeism as the only pure form of Christianity: the Manichees, like the Nazis, wished to purge their guru-led faith of everything Jewish, the whole of the Old Testament with its cruel God, immoral patriarchs and abolished Law, and everything detectably Jewish in the New. Augustine, for years a Manichee in his youth, wrote to refute Faustus's argument which, though it was more ruthless and more consistent, had much in common with the anti-Jewish attitudes and superficial readings of the Old Testament current among Christians of the time.
Central to Augustine's case is his insistence that the revelation of God in Christ does not cancel but fulfils the revelation of God in the Law, which, like the entire Jewish nation, is prophetic of him. Further, Jewish observance of the Law and of the ritual practices enjoined in the Old Testament are seen as good because commanded by God (whereas pagan idolatry is the work of Satan). They were good; they remain good. Jewish and Christian rites may differ, but they point to the same timeless truth: here Augustine's reflections on time and eternity in the Confessions lead him into new depth. This whole argument blows apart the denigrating prejudice and the accusations of pagan superstition levelled at the Jews by Christians then and since. Even the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament - performed nowhere in the Jewish world since the destruction of the Temple in ad 70 - he viewed as necessary typological precedents for the one consummate blood sacrifice of Christ.
When Augustine has to address the difficult question of how God can allow his people Israel not to recognize the unveiling in Christ of the Law they themselves carry, his reply is that for the Jews to survive as God's chosen witnesses to his truth they must sustain their loyalty, guaranteed by God, to their holy books and practices. This, he thinks, is their "mark of Cain", their sign, though they must wander through the world, of God's protection; as a people, they will "continue to exist until the end of time". "Slay them not, lest my people forget" is a line from Psalm 59 which Augustine, perhaps prompted by Paulinus of Nola, later applied to the Jews in sermons and in the City of God.
In her final chapter, Fredriksen shows how Augustine's positive perception of Judaism fits into the complicated pattern of his eventual theology along with what he understood of freedom and grace, memory and time, language and meaning, and, especially in the City of God, what is relative in value and what it is relative to. In this, his last masterpiece, exile in an alien land is the fate of all pilgrims through the earthly city towards the eschatological city of God: here Christians and Jews share much, and Augustine no longer writes of "the mark of Cain". And his reaction to one well-documented case of forced conversion of Jews, in Minorca late in his life, proves that Augustine, tough on pagans and tough on heretics, refused to countenance the idea that Jews should be deprived of their faith and their practice. He knew that to do this was to "slay" the Jew, as Shylock is "slain" by the punishment of conversion.
Fredriksen's book, exemplary in its thoroughness (there are fifty pages of notes that deserve to be read), will enthral anyone who enjoys watching Augustine's mind working in the cause of truth on history, on texts, on the situations in which people find themselves.
It will also enlighten anyone who has been led to believe that anti-Semitism is intrinsic to Christianity .