Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (51 page)

More extraordinary still was the fact that Ambrose consistently won. In 385 he refused to surrender a major church in the city to the anti-Nicene Homoeans, still a powerful force at Court under the young Western emperor, Valentinian II, despite the decisions of the Councils of Constantinople and Aquileia in 381 (see pp. 218-20). As the power struggle in the city continued, the following year Ambrose was inspired to an extraordinary act of self-assertion. He had commissioned another large new church and now let it be known that he himself would eventually be buried there at its heart, under the altar. There was no precedent for a living bishop to do this and not even Constantine had dared to provide such a place for his burial. What Ambrose was telling the imperial Court was that he expected to be a martyr and had made provision for a suitable commemoration of his martyrdom. Piling audacity on audacity, he then put workmen to dig up the floor in his newly built church, where they unearthed the bodies of two martyrs from the time of Nero's persecution, complete with names, Gervasius and Protasius, 'long unknown', and indeed the first martyrs ever known in the Church of Milan. Around the chief churches of the city, the bishop triumphantly paraded their impressively large blood-covered bones - perhaps, if this was indeed a genuine discovery, ochre-painted bones from prehistoric burials. Miraculous cures followed. The Homoeans could not compete, and their power in any case ended with the death of Valentinian.
²⁵

After these years of struggle, Ambrose was well prepared for self-assertion, or the assertion of the Church's power, against the pious Nicene Emperor Theodosius I. To our eyes, the results seem ambiguous. In two famously contrasting instances, Ambrose both forced the Emperor to cancel an order for compensation to a Jewish community in Mesopotamia whose synagogue had been burned down by militant Christians and, on the other hand, successfully ordered the Emperor to do penance for his vindictiveness in massacring the riotous inhabitants of Thessalonica (the modern Thessaloniki).
²⁶
Both atrocities had taken place hundreds of miles from Milan, but this made it clear that a bishop of the Church universal could indeed be an international statesman. When Ambrose came to preach funeral sermons first for the young and rather ineffective Emperor Valentinian II and then for Theodosius, he had no compunction in ignoring all the conventions for praising such world leaders, presenting them as fallible, suffering human beings, and particularly emphasizing the humility of the great Theodosius.
²⁷

So it appeared in the 390s that the future lay with a Christian empire under strong rulers like Theodosius and strong bishops like Ambrose: a culmination of God's plan for the world and the beginning of a golden age, the vision of Constantine's historian Eusebius of Caesarea finally realized. This turned out to be a mirage. The Western Empire was overwhelmed by a series of invasions of 'barbarian' tribes from beyond the northern frontier; the most humiliating blow of all was the capture and sack of the city of Rome itself by a Visigoth army led by Alaric in 410. Sixty-six years later, mercenary troops of the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus deposed him and came to a conveniently vague arrangement with the emperor in Constantinople, recognizing him as sole emperor. By that time, most of what had been the Western Roman Empire was under the control of barbarian kings, and although the Byzantines did go on to recapture much of the western Mediterranean, they did not hold on to those conquests for long. All this was the background to a long process of disengagement and separation within the imperial Church between East and West. The Western Latin Church now added to Damasus's assertion of its tradition and Ambrose's demonstration of how it could outface worldly power by finding a theologian who would give it its own voice and shape its thinking down to modern times: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.

AUGUSTINE: SHAPER OF THE WESTERN CHURCH

Augustine was a Latin-speaking theologian who had little interest in Greek literature, only came to the Greek language late in life, read virtually nothing of Plato or Aristotle, and had very little influence on the Greek Church, which in fact came to look with profound disapproval on one aspect of his theological legacy, a modification of the Nicene Creed (see pp. 310-11).
²⁸
By contrast, his impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example, Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine's eyes. He is one of the few writers from the early Church era some of whose work can still be read for pleasure, particularly his remarkable and perhaps too revealing self-analysis in his
Confessions
, a gigantic prayer-narrative which is a direct conversation - I-Thou - with God. His life was played out against the background of the rise, final splendour and fall of the Christian Western Empire, but apart from these great political traumas, his life's work can be seen as a series of responses to conflicts both internal and external.

The first struggle was with himself. Who did he want to be and how would he find a truth which would satisfy him? He was brought up in the 350s and 360s in small-town North Africa. His father, Patricius (of whom he says little), was a non-Christian; his mother, Monica, a deeply pious if not very intellectual member of the Catholic Church. The relationship of mother and son was intense and often conflicted. Augustine reacted against her unsophisticated religion, and after his parents had scrimped and saved to send him to the School of Carthage, he was increasingly drawn by the excitements of university life to the philosophy and literature of Rome. The world was at his feet; he settled down with a mistress and she bore him a son whose name, Adeodatus ('Given by God'), may have been a reflection of the fact that the baby's arrival was evidently unplanned.
²⁹
But even as Augustine began an exceptionally promising career as a teacher of rhetoric (the language study which lay at the heart of Latin culture, a ticket to success and perhaps a political career), he was becoming tormented by anxieties which remained his theological preoccupations all his life.

What was the source of evil and suffering in this world? This was the ancient religious question which the gnostics had tried to answer by picturing existence as an eternally dualistic struggle, and it was the gnostic religion of Augustine's day, Manichaeism, which first won his allegiance and held it for nine years. Yet increasingly he was dissatisfied by Manichaean belief, and as he pursued academic success in Rome and Milan he was haunted by doubts and anxieties about the nature of truth, reality and wisdom. As he ceased to find Manichaeism of use, he turned to Neoplatonist belief, but in Milan he also became fascinated by Bishop Ambrose. Here, for the first time, he met a Christian whose self-confident culture he could respect and whose sermons, sonorous and rich in their language, made up for the crudity and vulgarity of the Bible which had distressed the young Augustine. Even though he remained embarrassed by his mother's demonstrative piety (she had followed him to Milan), he now contemplated a faith which united the imperious nobleman in the pulpit with the elderly woman from a provincial backwater. The contradictory influences of career and Christian renunciation came to tear him apart and made him disgusted with his ambitions. To add to his pain, on his mother's urging, in 385 he broke with his mistress in order to make a good marriage. The woman went back to Africa, swearing to remain faithful to him - in the middle of his narrative of worldly renunciation in the
Confessions
, Augustine at least had the grace to record her resolution, even though he could not bring himself to name her. We may wonder what she felt as she slipped out of the life of the man who had been her companion for fifteen years, leaving behind her charming and talented teenage son to her lover's care.
³⁰

In a state bordering on nervous breakdown, and physically unwell, Augustine arrived in 386 at a crisis which was to bring him a new serenity and a new certainty. In his own account, the crucial prompting was the voice of a child overheard in a garden - children seem to have had a good sense of timing in Milan. The repetitive chant sounded to Augustine like '
tolle lege
' - 'take it and read'. The book Augustine had to hand was the Epistles of Paul, which he opened at random at the words of Romans 13, from what is now verses 13-14: 'put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires . . .'
³¹
It was enough to bring him back fully to his mother's faith and it meant that his plans for marriage were abandoned for a life of celibacy. Another woman spurned: the fiancee has received no more consideration than the mistress from historians until modern times. On Augustine's announcement of the resolution of his torment, Monica 'was jubilant with triumph and glorified you . . . And you turned her sadness into rejoicing . . . far sweeter and more chaste than any she had hoped to find in children begotten of my flesh.' There is more than one way of interpreting this maternal triumph.
³²
When, in later years, Augustine came to discuss the concept of original sin, that fatal flaw which in his theology all humans have inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve, he saw it as inseparable from the sexual act, which transmits sin from one generation to another. It was a view momentous in its consequences for the Western Church's attitude to sexuality.

Augustine found his conversion a liberation from torment. One element in his crisis had been the impact of meeting a fellow North African who had been thrown into a state of deep self-doubt and worry about his own successful administrative career by an encounter with Athanasius's
Life of Antony
.
³³
Now Augustine determined on his own abandonment of ambition, leaving his teaching career to follow Antony's example - after a fashion, for his was to be the life of the desert minus the desert and plus a good library. His plan was to create a celibate religious community with cultivated friends back in his home town: a monastery which would bring the best of the culture of old Rome into a Christian context. This congenial scheme was soon ended by the turbulent Church politics of North Africa. Augustine's Catholic Christian Church was connected with the rest of the Mediterranean Church and with the imperial administration, but it was a minority in Africa, faced with the deep-rooted localism of the Donatists, cherishing grievances now a century old from the Great Persecution of Diocletian (see p. 211) and including some of the ablest theologians of the African Church.

From 387 the Donatists suddenly gained the advantage of political support from a local rebel ruler, Gildo, who established a regime semi-independent of the emperor. In 391 Augustine happened to visit the struggling Catholic congregation in the city of Hippo Regius (now Annaba in Algeria), the most important port of the province after Carthage. The bishop, an idiosyncratic but shrewd old Greek named Valerius, encouraged his flock to bully this brilliant stranger into being ordained priest and soon Augustine was coadjutor (assistant) bishop in the town. From Valerius's death until his own in 430, he remained Bishop of Hippo. All his theological writing was now done against a background of busy pastoral work and preaching for a Church in a world in collapse; much of it was in the form of sermons.
³⁴
The next period in his life was dominated by the problem posed by the Donatists, in terms not just of politics but also of the challenges that their theology posed to the Catholics. Proud of their unblemished record in time of persecution, they proclaimed that the Church was a gathered pure community. Augustine thought that this was not what 'One, Holy and Catholic' meant. The Catholic Church was a Church not so much of the pure as those who tried or longed to be pure. Unlike the Donatists, it was in communion with a great mass of Christian communities throughout the known world. The Catholic Church was in fact what Augustine was not afraid to call 'the communion of the emperor'.
³⁵

In 398 the Donatists' run of luck ended when imperial troops destroyed Gildo's regime; now the Catholics found themselves in a position to dictate terms again. Over the previous decade, Augustine had done much to prepare for this moment, in cooperation with Aurelius, the statesmanlike Bishop of Carthage; now he tried to bring the Donatists back into the Catholic fold by negotiation. A series of conferences failed; the old bitterness lay too deep. Faced with government hostility and orders to conform, the Donatists remained defiant, and the behaviour of both sides began deteriorating in a miserable cycle of violence.
³⁶
By 412 Augustine had lost patience and he backed harsh new government measures against the Donatists. He even provided theological reasons for the repression: he pointed out to one of his Donatist friends that Jesus had told a parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, 'Compel them to come in'.
³⁷
That meant that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism, and the unwilling adherence which this produced might be the start of a living faith. This was a side of Augustine's teaching which had much appeal to Christian regimes for centuries to come.

At the same time, Augustine was faced with the problem of explaining the Roman world's catastrophe. How could God's providence allow the collapse of the manifestly Christian Roman Empire, especially the sack of Rome by barbarian armies in 410? Naturally, traditionalists in religion were inclined to say that Rome's flirtation with the Christian Church was at the root of the problem, but even Christians could not understand how a heretical Arian like the Goth Alaric had been allowed to plunder Catholic Rome. Part of the Christian response was to argue from history. Paulus Orosius, a Spanish protege of Augustine, wrote a
History against the Pagans
, designed to show from a brief survey of all world history that there had been worse disasters in pre-Christian times and that the coming of Christ had made all the difference to the peace of the world. However, Orosius's work seems thin stuff indeed compared with the response which Augustine was making at the same time:
The City of God
(
De Civitate Dei
). It was his most monumental work and it took him thirteen years from 413 to write.