An Augustinian Solution

Monastic reformers of Cluny and elsewhere were therefore predisposed to look no further than the West for answers to the problem of the proprietary system.

AND HERE, INEVITABLY, THEY SEIZED on Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). Like the reformers, this greatest of the Latin fathers had lived in a time of social and political disorder: Rome had fallen to the barbarians, and North Africa, where he was bishop, was being overrun as well. His greatest work, The City of God, was composed in response to this catastrophe. It was an effort to make sense of a world that may have been nominally Christian but showed little evidence of the kingdom of heaven within it.

The City of God was not the first reflection on Christian society. A century earlier, an Eastern bishop named Eusebius had written works celebrating the results of Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The Church, having long suffered political persecution, now included in her membership the very ruler of Rome. This development amplified an optimism already exhibited in the Christian subculture that had coexisted with pagandom. For Eusebius, the time had come for the emperor to contribute to the Church’s sacramental ministry and bring the eschatological kingdom of heaven into this world. Christian statecraft, in his view, enabled men “to anticipate even here the commencement of [that] future existence.” 17

In contrast, The City of God asserted that there exists a fundamental incompatibility of heaven with earth. Paradise, understood as the experience of eschatological peace “even here” in the world (to paraphrase Eusebius), is therefore largely unattainable. “The Supreme Good of the City of God,” Augustine wrote,

is everlasting and perfect peace, which is not the peace through which men pass in their mortality, in their journey from birth to death, but that peace

17 Eusebius, Oration in Praise of Constantine, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1887), 581–610.

in which they remain in their immortal state, experiencing no adversity at all. In view of this, can anyone deny that this is the supremely blessed life, or that the present life on earth, however full it may be of the greatest possible blessings of soul and body and of external circumstances, is, in comparison, most miserable?

There is an inherent pessimism about the world in this. For Augustine, misery is the inevitable and even normative condition of life for the Christian in this age. Even if occasional peace is experienced, it manifests itself “rather by future

hope than in present reality.” 18 Conceived in a state of unfamiliarity with Christendom’s Eastern fathers, addressing the apocalyptic invasion of the barbarians, Augustine’s vision of the world was strikingly different from that of Euse

Augustine of Hippo bius and other Eastern Christian writers. 19

If the East produced a unitary vision of the world, Augustine’s cosmology was decidedly dualistic. It divided Christendom into two opposing “cities.” One was the community of the elect, the “city of God” (civitas Dei), defined by a love of God that detached it from any investment in the affairs of the world. The other was the community of the reprobate, the “city of the world” (civitas terrena), which was consumed by corrupted desires that the author collectively defined as “concupiscence.”

18

19 Augustine, City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972), 881. A detailed comparison of these two visions of Christendom can be found in Age of Paradise, 119–127.

But as stark as its division of society was, Augustine’s dualism did not set an unbridgeable chasm between the two cities. In fact, it was the city of God, with its heavenly orientation, that had the vocation and power to confront the world’s unremitting tendency toward concupiscence. And it was the community of the elect that was called to redirect the world toward heaven. And to elaborate this dynamic, Augustine made use of a concept called “reformation.”

As we have seen, traditional Christianity contained a transformational imperative that contrasted a sinfully disoriented life with one oriented toward the kingdom of heaven. One of its earliest expressions is found in Paul’s admonition not to be “conformed to this world” but rather to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). The root of the original Greek verb used here for “transformed” is metamorphoo. Its noun form is metamorphosis, which is easily recognizable to an English speaker. It happens to be this very word that Matthew and Mark use for Jesus’ paradisiacal Transfiguration.

The Latin rendering of metamorphoo in Romans 12:2, however, is not as direct as the English. In the Vulgate, an edition of the Bible used almost exclusively in the West until the Protestant Reformation, the verb used for it is reformare. The noun form of this verb is reformatio. This is interesting in part because Latin has a word that means “transformation,” and reformatio is not it. The verbal form of that word is transformare. But instead of this, reformare was used in the Vulgate. As in the case of the English word “reformation,” the Latin reformatio lacked the sense of a complete transformation; instead, it suggested a “re-formation” of something that already had an established identity. It was in short not really a change in identity. It is possible to associate the more limited sense of change implicit in reformatio with the fact that Augustine did not seem to think it possible that a transformation of life in this world could bring one into a complete experience of the kingdom of heaven. His cosmology, in other words, did not quite reach the borderlands of paradise.

In a celebrated study of early Christianity, a Roman Catholic theologian named Gerhart Ladner argued a half-century ago that a fundamental

difference existed between the way the Greek East and Latin West conceived of the transformational imperative. His characterization of Eastern fathers, unfortunately, was strangely one-sided. 20 His analysis of the Western fathers, on the contrary, was full of insight. When discussing Augustine, for instance, Ladner brought particular attention to the concept of individual spiritual progress indicated by Romans 12:2. Augustine called this progress “reform for the better” (reformatio in melius). Ladner went on to claim that whereas in the East “the progress of the new over the old dispensation . . . is conceived as ceaseless mystical progress” beginning in this age, in the case of Augustine it came to mean only “a greater grace toward perseverance in earthly sufferings and temptations and toward rest in God after terrestrial life.” Accordingly, the transformational imperative led in the East to an immediate (though mystical) experience of paradise, whereas in the West it led to the moral capacity merely to endure suffering until, after death, one could hope to enjoy such an experience. In Augustine’s concept of reform, then, the kingdom of heaven and the world were comparatively isolated realms of human experience.

It is not difficult to understand how centuries later monastic reformers at Cluny and elsewhere in the West would find Augustine’s cosmology convincing as they shrank back in horror from the proprietary system that engulfed them. The eminent twentieth-century historian of Christendom Christopher Dawson once noted as much. “The Augustinian theology and philosophy of history,” he stated,

20 “Strangely” because he was so very erudite. While his effort to characterize the Eastern fathers was commendable (they had yet to enter into the mainstream of modern Western theological reflection), he mistakenly claimed that they understood reform exclusively as a “return to paradise” in the sense of that enjoyed by Adam and Eve at the beginning of time. This primordial condition, however, is surely not the limit of Greek Christian thought. On the contrary, Eastern Christendom maintained a long fascination with an eschatological paradise that exceeded the state of Adam. To take just one ubiquitous example of this, the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom, served virtually every Sunday by clergy in front of the total population of the East, buoyantly thanked God for having “brought us up to heaven and . . . endowed us with thy kingdom which is to come.”