Brown’s Biography of Augustine (1): Initial Thoughts

A major part of my Augustine project over the past few months has been Peter Brown’s biography, which is generally viewed as the definitive longer, critical biography of Augustine. It was first published in 1967 (when Brown was 32!), but was updated in 1999 with an epilogue exploring new evidence about Augustine’s life and new directions of interpretation in the field of Augustine (so its both stood the test of time and not too out-dated). I had very high expectations of this book, but after a careful read, I have to confess that I do not share the glowing admiration of all the Amazon reviews of this book. The book did have many fine qualities. Brown’s writing is skillful (I learned lots of new words, like “coquettish” [196] and “swingeing” [203]). His presentation is sophisticated and his interpretations are insightful and measured. He demonstrates a thorough knowledge of all things Augustine and engages many issues of scholarly interest pertaining to the field of Augustine. The shining strength of the book, in my opinion, is Brown’s knowledge of Augustine’s historical context. He paints a vivid picture of Roman African culture on the eve of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. This was truly a fascinating world: one in the outer skirts of the more sophisticated regions of southern Europe, but still one with its own intelligentsia and theological trends. Augustine, like Tertullian, was thoroughly African, and its helpful to see a little bit of what this setting was like – the spiritual problems of the people of Hippo, the tensions between African bishops and those in Europe (especially in the East), various events I previously knew nothing about, like the Council of Carthage in 411, and so forth.

All in all, however, I was disappointed. Time after time I would be nearing the end of a chapter, still waiting for the penny to drop, and finish by writing in the margin: “Brown isn’t really saying much.” I kept patiently plodding through, impressed with Brown’s skill and knowledge but wondering when Augustine the theologian would be emerge. It wasn’t until after I read all the way through the epilogue that I realized the problem: Brown is a historian, and his interests are the interests of a historian, not a philosopher or theologian. He himself admits as much in looking back 30 years later: “I prudently skirted Augustine the metaphysican, and limited my consideration of his theology largely to his notions of grace and of the Church” (495). What concerns Brown is to see Augustine in relation to his context, especially how his inner developments dovetail with the external developments of his time. But the book is not anchored in clear, over-arching interpretations that draw out Augustine’s overall significance for today, and it fails to adequately engage Augustine’s theology. There is virtually no treatment of Augustine on the problem of evil, or just war theory, or the nature of pride as the root of sin, and his more speculative works like De Trinitate or De Doctrina Christiana or his commentary of Genesis are neglected. Even his treatment of The City of God and Confessions seems largely driven by a-theological interests, such as Augustine’s internal emotional development and the transition from the classical to the medieval world.

For someone like me who is drawn to Augustine primarily for his theology, this book simply failed to intersect with my interests. Of course, the book is still a very helpful resource for what it does aim to do, but I find it difficult to view it as “the standard account of Augustine’s life and teaching,” as claimed on the back cover, and reiterated through many of the 33 Amazon reviews. How can it be the standard account of Augustine’s life and teaching when its discussion of the latter is so filled with gaps? Instead, I would suggest that this book should be seen as a great resource for the understanding Augustine’s life, and especially the historical context in which he lived. That is my main benefit from this book. I now have a working knowledge of the basic details of Augustine’s life, and a sense of what it would have been like to live in Roman North Africa between the 380′s and 420′s, as the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. But this is not the best book for someone wanting to engage with Augustine’s thought as well as his life.

The other benefit I received from reading this book is that the way Brown looks back on his biography during the epilogue gave me insight into the nature of scholarship. I’ve never read a book where you have something like this – an old, established scholar openly critiquing major aspects of the book that put him on the academic map as a young man. Browns’ self-criticisms are not on minor points – several times he admits he got it completely backwards, and advocates an opposite view to the one he advocated before. Whereas formerly, for example, Brown had portrayed Augustine’s as harsh and authoritarian in the ecclesiastical disputes of his middle and later years, Brown now seems eager to vindicate Augustine – he sees more continuity in his development, and is no longer willing to interpret his doctrines of predestination and grace in terms of an alleged hardening during his bishopric. Whereas formerly Brown could treat Augustine’s view of sexuality dismissively and with some disdain, he now argues, against popular conception, that it was moderate and humane. He compares him favorably to contemporaries like Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose, whose views were even harsher (they had no place for sexuality as a good part of life in the Garden before the fall), and suggests that the very vehemence of Augustine’s later writings against sexuality was to some extent the result of being accused of being too moderate (500ff.).

I admire Brown for his honesty and for his passion for his subject. It was fascinating to see his life’s journey with Augustine, and it made me long to have a similar journey in my studies in Anselm. It also reminded me of how subjective and partial the basis is for so much scholarship: if so much change can happen in one person from the beginning to the end of his scholarly career, how much more can it happen on an entire topic, or in an entire field, over the course of time? And if a life-long Augustine scholar can still be changing his mind and learning new things at the end of his career, how much more – in Augustine and elsewhere – is there room for new discovery and insight? There is so much truth out there still to explore.

Who Will Deliver Us?

I am taking the youth staff through Paul Zahl’s Who Will Deliver Us? (Wipf and Stock, 1983). Its a great book, honest and vivid and courageous in applying the gospel to our deepest emotional struggles. The great strength of the book, as I see it, is that Zahl takes classic atonement theology and translates it into modern psychological categories of experience. He argues in chapter 1 that a deep-seated fear of ultimate judgment stands underneath our feelings of stress, depression, and anger, and that we tend to respond to deep fear with either escape, open resistance, or appeasement. In chapter 2 he explores the universal human need for atonement as a response to this fear, looking at both religious and secular expressions of this need. In chapter 3, which I read today in preparation for our staff meeting tomorrow, he presents Christ’s death on the cross as the answer to this human need for atonement in light of our deep, inner fear of judgment and condemnation. I found this chapter a refreshing reminder of the infinite value of the death of Christ for me, each moment afresh. Here’s a good sample quote:

“What is the present value of the death of Christ? How can something that happened long ago meet the judgment that afflicts us now? We have proposed that the problem of being human is essentially a factor of fear. We live our lives under judgment. Whether it is for wrongdoing in a conscious mode or the pervasive, irrational, multiform fear that we are worthless and no good, we live our lives under judgment…. I believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ because it disarms the law and frees me from the fear of judgment. This judgment would use as evidence against me not only the deliberate sins and conscious moral failures of which I feel most painfully aware, but also the compulsive patterns and imprisoning proclivities the origin of which I scarcely know except they feel like the flesh of my flesh. I have often felt judgment not as the condemnation of things about me I can help, but condemnation of my very self and character…. I believe in the atonement. The law is powerless: Christ’s death has disarmed it. ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’” (38-43).

Ecclesiastical Latin

A PhD in historical theology at Fuller requires reading competence in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, and French. I’m hoping to take my Latin placement exam before I start in August, so I’ve started working through John F. Collins’ A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin (CUA Press, 1985), which is a great text. As I’m working through it, I am finding that I enjoy Latin far more than Greek and Hebrew. Every language has its own distinctive feel, like a geographical region or music genre, and the distinctive feel of Latin just comes more naturally to me than that of Greek of Hebrew. I love the boxiness of Latin words, the almost mathematical logic of Latin syntax, and the overall archaic, dusty, hallowed feel of it. If Latin were a building, I think it would be a great castle or cathedral, massively tall with beautiful stained glass windows. Part of my love for Latin is probably the great experience I had studying Latin in high school, much of which I have remembered – I can’t think of the ablative case, or the word “gerundive,” without going back in my mind to Mr. Nichols’ class.

A lot of people don’t see much value in studying Latin because its a dead language and its not an original language of the Bible. But I think there are lots of good reasons to study Latin. First of all, studying Latin helps me understand English better, and language more generally. I remember Collins saying the other day that cases do for Latin what word order and prepositions do for English. All of a sudden I started thinking about why English is the way it is – why we use word order in the way we do, for example – and all kinds of things about the way English operates that I’d never really thought about before began to make more sense. I think Latin is a great language to study in order to see how how language in general operates.

In addition, studying Ecclesiastical Latin plunges you headlong into church history. No language is more interwoven with the thoughts, words, and writings of the church. As I study Ecclesiastical Latin I find I’m being exposed to a whole tradition of writings, and the context in which they emerged: the Vulgate, canon law, liturgical readings, papal decrees, Gregorian chants, Ambrosian hymns, scholastic philosophy, creedal statements, etc., not to mention the writings of individual theologians like Augustine and Aquinas. In short, Latin is a gateway into a whole world of Christian history. Studying it is like walking into that tall castle, looking at all the pictures and words embroidered on the walls and windows, and being reminded that we are very small, and yet connected to something very ancient and very grand.

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged

Some favorite quotes from this brief piece by Dorothy Sayers:

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine — dull dogma as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man — and the dogma is the drama.

…

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.

…

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.

Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world’s history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and that was upon the eve of the Resurrection.

Warfield on Augustine (3): The Confessions

For Warfield, The Confessions represents the quintessential Augustine. He defends Augustine from criticisms that The Confessions is too morbid and introspective, arguing that Augustine talks about himself only to direct us to the goodness and grace of God. In his words: “Confessions [is] not a biography of himself, but … a book of edification, or, if you will, a theological treatise. His actual subject is not himself, but the goodness of God; and he introduces his own experience only as the most lively of illustrations of the dealings of God with the human soul as He makes it restless until it finds its rest in Him” (337-338). I am listening to The Confessions on my iPhone these days on walks and hikes, and so far loving it. I agree with Warfield that it is not only a work of great psychological, literary, and cultural value, but ultimately a work of great theology. As I listen I encounter, not merely Augustine, but a portrait of what the work of God in a human soul looks like.

Here are two favorite quotes early on:

“Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you…. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (1.1).

“But, as You fill all things, fill them with Your whole self, or, as even all things cannot altogether contain You, do they contain a part, and do all at once contain the same part? Or has each its own proper part— the greater more, the smaller less? Is, then, one part of You greater, another less? Or is it that You are wholly everywhere while nothing altogether contains You?” (1.3).

The Crowning of Charlemagne

One of the books I’ve engaged with a bit to learn more about church history is Mark Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Baker Academic, 1997, 2000 [2^nd ed.]). I’ve started with his chapter on the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 because I’ve always found the first half of the medieval period fascinating because I know so little about it – it seems to me like overall the most neglected large portion of church history. I wonder what it would have been like to have been a Christian in Nothern Europe in 750 AD? What were the hot issues in the church in 900 AD? If Kevin DeYoung were blogging back then, what would be the prevailing currents of thought in the church he would be diagnosing and evaluating? There’s a whole world back there to which we often have no conscious connection.

Noll argues that the crowning of Charlemagne was symbolically important in that it represented a number of other larger developments in the church in this era – the rise of the power of Papacy, the North-West geographical trajectory of the church, and the growing connection between church and state. The expansion of Islam into the Eastern Mediterranean region and the growing divide between the Eastern and Western churches, according to Noll, had both contributed to these developments, pushing the church further into Europe, and compelling the church to form new alliances and new authority structures. The church-state connection and the rise of the papacy were products of earlier developments (especially Constantine’s conversion and the capable leadership of Gregory the Great), but the crowning of Charlemagne represented the cementing of these developments into their medieval expression, Christendom.

I’ll be fascinated to take some time to study the rest of the Noll’s book, as well as other developments in the church during these early medieval centuries. I would especially like to learn more about the Carolingian Renaissance.

Warfield on Augustine (2): Augustine’s Development

In engaging different interpretations of Augustine’s development, Warfield helpfully argues for the legitimacy of his 386 conversion, and essential continuity in his thought from this point through the remainder of his career (pp. 372-383). The different phases of his thought are not rigid “turns,” (as often represented in the revisionist scholarship), but reflect a consistent unfolding of his thought in response to his primary theological opponents - first Manicheism, then Donatism, then Pelagianism.

For me, this raises the whole question of how the various other systems with which Augustine struggled – especially Manicheism and neo-Platonism – related to his conversion to, and development in, catholic Christianity. Its clear that while Augustine ultimately rejected these other philosophies and embraced the orthodox Christian faith, they nevertheless left some kind of permanent stamp upon his thought – in some ways in forming modes of thought and expression as he struggled against them (more Manicheism), and in other ways in joining in with and aiding his own theological construction (more neo-Platonism). And this in turn raises a larger question: how do various non-Christian and sub-Christian philosophies and religions relate to Christianity? Most people would agree with C.S. Lewis’ assertion in Mere Christianity that “all … religions, even the queerest one, contain at least some hint of the truth.” To what extent can a non-Christian philosophy (such as neo-Platonism, or Kantianism) have a preparatory role in someone’s conversion, opening and enlarging their mind to Christian concepts, or (in the case of nihilism or existentialism) demonstrating the need for Christian concepts? To what extent can a non-Christian philosophy co-exist with Christianity, or form categories of thought or language in which a Christian theology is presented? Of course there are dangers here – but most great theologians in church history have been profoundly marked by non-Christian philosophies (consider Augustine by Platonism, Aquinas by Aristotelianism, and Barth by Kantian as three classic examples).

I’ve also been reading Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine, which devotes an entire chapter to Manicheism. As I was reflecting on Augustine’s journey through Manicheism towards Christianity, I was reflecting on how there have always been subtle (or not so subtle) rivals to the gospel that have seduced the church into unhealthiness. Manicheism, which Brown portrays as something of the hip, young, urban intellectual movement of the day in Carthage, struck me as bearing some resemblances to currents fads of thought in the church and in academia. As I was reflecting on this, I wrote in the back of the book: There are always seductions away from the gospel into theological blandness. In our own day, theological liberalism is simply the post-Enlightenment manifestation of a more general tendency towards a watering down of the richness and vitality of the gospel in light with the “spirit of the age” – just as fundamentalism is the post-enlightenment expression of a more general tendency towards a reactionary close-mindedness against the “spirit of the age.”

As I continue to engage with Augustine (and Anselm), I hope to understand better how they sought to relate the uniqueness of Christianity with the reality of general revelation, common grace insights in non-Christian systems of thought – neither accommodating the gospel to the “spirit of the age” nor ignoring whatever legitimate bearing on the truth it may have.