DOCTORS OF THE CHURCH

“I desire to have knowledge of God and the soul. Of nothing else? No, of nothing else whatever.” Augustine wrote these words shortly after becoming a Christian in A.D. 387. To our ears they may sound close-minded, unsophisticated, or just plain stupid. Yet his words signal the emergence of a new conceptual framework in Western civilization. It is a framework (of religion based upon faith) that replaced the one fashioned by the Greeks and Romans (of philosophy based upon reason); a framework that dominated Western Civilization for a thousand years—a framework that led the West into the Dark Ages.

Born in 354 in the northern African town of Tagaste, Augustine had a Christian mother and a pagan father. His studies in Latin literature and grammar led to his becoming a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage. The unruly students there forced him to quit and go to Rome, where he opened a school of his own. Here the students behaved better, but they reneged on the payment of his fees. As a result, Augustine applied for, and got, a position as municipal professor of rhetoric in Milan. At this point his life changed dramatically.

Until this time, Augustine, in spite of his mother’s pleads and prayers, was not a Christian. Moreover, he had lived a self-indulgent life: he had a mistress, and an illegitimate son, and was, he wrote in his Confessions, “thoroughly licentious.” But in Milan Augustine came under the influence of the bishop, Saint Ambrose, who converted him to Christianity. The intellectual conversion came first, the moral conversion he found more difficult, because Augustine had trouble resisting the temptations of the flesh. “Give me chastity and continence,” he prayed, “only not yet.”

Ultimately, Augustine became the devoted Christian that he had longed to become. He gave up his professorship—and his mistress—returning with his son, Adeodatus, his mother, and some friends to Cassiciacum, a town near Milan, where he conducted seminars, attempting to work out Christian answers to philosophical questions about happiness, truth, and good and evil. Later, Augustine published the record of his seminars: The Happy Life, Against Skepticism, and Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil.

In 388 Augustine went back to Africa to his home town of Tagaste, where he established a monastery. In 392 he was ordained a priest and set up a second monastery in Hippo, a seaport town about 150 miles west of Carthage. Augustine became bishop of Hippo in 396, serving there for over thirty years. He died in 430 while the Vandals were robbing and destroying the city.

As bishop, Augustine spent much of his time combating heresies (beliefs that were not approved by Church officials). Some of these heretics (dissenters from established religious doctrine) were:


• Pelagians, who taught that human beings could attain salvation through their own efforts;


• Manicheans, who taught that two equal gods (one good and one evil) ruled the world;


• Arians, who taught that God had created a son (Jesus) who was neither eternal nor equal with the Father;


• Donatists, who taught that only the pure and holy could be members of the church.


In his battle to against these doctrines (that differed with the Christian doctrine as it had been officially accepted) Augustine composed numerous disputatious sermons, tracts, letters, and books. (The one against the Manicheans comprised thirty-three books or chapters.)

In addition to his polemics, Augustine wrote books and monographs on matters of Christian doctrine, on free will, and on the Trinity. Of his writings, 113 books, 218 letters, and over 500 sermons have survived. His most famous book, The City of God, he composed to explain why Rome fell to the Goths in 410.

Augustine, his contemporaries, Ambrose and Jerome, and Pope Gregory the Great (who came later) are called Doctors of the Church in recognition of their great influence on Christianity.

• The influence of Ambrose and Gregory came from their skill as statesmen; they established the independence of the church and its domination over secular rulers.

• Jerome’s contribution was to translate the Bible into Latin.


• But it was Augustine who had the greatest intellectual influence on Christianity. It was he who fashioned the Christian framework.