Justified True Belief

(●) The African bishop whose own life story taught the Western church how to talk about sin, grace, and the restless human heart. + Most of the great teachers of the early church come to us as voices without faces. We know what Athanasius argued and what Basil organized, but we do not know what it felt like to be either of them at twenty. Augustine is the exception, and he is the exception on purpose. Somewhere around his forty-third year, a bishop in a dusty North African port sat down and wrote out the story of his own life as a long prayer addressed to God, complete with the stolen pears, the mistress he sent away, the years he spent in a religion he later thought absurd, and the afternoon in a garden when he finally stopped resisting. Nothing quite like it had been written before. He matters here for two reasons. The first is that he is the hinge of Western Christian thought: for a thousand years after his death, a Latin theologian who wanted to settle a question reached first for Scripture and second for Augustine, and when the Reformation broke out in the sixteenth century both sides fought partly over which of them had understood him. The second is that he arrived at Christianity the hard way, through skepticism, through a rival religion, through Greek philosophy, and through his own considerable resistance, so the questions a modern doubter asks are questions he asked first and answered in writing. One fact gives the scale of the man. In old age he went back through his own books, ninety-three of them, and published a volume noting where he now thought he had been wrong. His friend Possidius, who was with him when he died, catalogued more than a thousand separate items from his pen. A scholarly joke has it that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine is lying.

(●) 354 AD: Born in a small African town to a pagan father and a Christian mother who never let go of him. + Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, an inland town of Roman North Africa in what is now Souk Ahras, Algeria. It was a modest place: olive presses, grain, a forum, a town council. His father Patricius sat on that council and had more ambition for his clever son than money to pay for it; a wealthy neighbour named Romanianus made up the difference. Patricius was a pagan for most of Augustine’s childhood and was baptized only near the end of his life. His mother Monica was a Christian, and she is one of the most vivid people in ancient literature because her son wrote her down. She had him signed with the cross and given the taste of salt as an infant, the old rite that enrolled a child as a catechumen (someone formally enrolled for Christian instruction, but not yet baptized), and then, following a common custom of the age, she let his baptism wait. Baptism washed away past sins, so many families delayed it until the wild years were safely over. In Augustine’s case the wild years lasted rather longer than anyone planned. He grew up speaking Latin, in a countryside where many people still spoke Punic, the old language of Carthage. He was beaten at school and hated it. He loved Virgil, Rome’s great poet, and he could not stand his Greek lessons, with the result that the most influential theologian of the Latin world could never read Greek comfortably. That last detail matters more than it looks. Much of what the West came to believe was worked out by a man reading his Bible in Latin.

(●) 371 AD: Carthage gave him a mistress, a son, a book that turned him toward wisdom, and a sect that held him for nine years. + At sixteen or seventeen, in 371 or the autumn before, he went to Carthage, the great city of the province, to finish his training in rhetoric, the art of public speaking that was the standard road to a career in law or administration. He arrived hungry for everything a city offers a clever provincial boy, and he says so in a famous line: he came to Carthage, and all around him sang a cauldron of unholy loves. He took a woman into his house and lived with her, faithfully by his own account, for something like fifteen years. He never gives her name. Their son was born around 372, and the name they chose says something neither of them could have explained at the time: Adeodatus, "given by God." Then, at about eighteen, a set text in the standard curriculum caught him off guard. It was Cicero’s Hortensius, an exhortation to the philosophical life, now lost except for the pieces later writers quote. It did not argue him into anything. It simply made him want wisdom itself rather than the applause his teachers were training him to win. So he picked up the Christian Scriptures his mother believed, and put them down again: next to Cicero’s polished periods the Latin Bible of that day seemed to him crude and unworthy. What he found instead was Manichaeism, the religion founded in third-century Persia by a teacher named Mani, which then had congregations across the empire. It taught that two eternal powers, light and darkness, are locked in conflict, and that evil is a real substance, an invading force of darkness lodged in matter and in the body. Augustine was a "hearer," one of the outer circle of adherents who supported the elect, the ascetic inner circle who lived under the sect’s full rule of self-denial. The appeal was double. Mani’s system explained evil without leaving Augustine responsible for his own, since what sinned in him was the foreign darkness rather than himself, and it let him laugh at the parts of the Old Testament that embarrassed an educated reader. He stayed nine years. What ended it was not an argument but a disappointment: the movement kept promising that its celebrated bishop Faustus of Milevis would answer his questions about astronomy and the rest, and when Faustus finally came to Carthage in 383 Augustine found him charming, honest, and empty.

(●) 383 AD: He sailed for Italy by night, leaving his mother praying on the shore, and rose to the imperial capital. + Carthaginian students were rowdy, and Augustine had heard the ones in Rome were better behaved. Monica followed him to the harbour and refused to go home without him, so he told her he was seeing a friend off, and sailed while she was praying in a chapel by the shore. He is unsparing about it when he tells the story. The Roman students turned out to be quieter and better at cheating their teacher out of his fees. In 384, on the recommendation of the Manichaean contacts he still had in the city, Symmachus, prefect of Rome and one of the senior magistrates of the empire, appointed him public professor of rhetoric at Milan, then the working capital of the Western empire. It was the best academic post in the Latin world and it put a young African in front of the imperial court. It also put him in the same city as Ambrose, the aristocratic governor who had been swept into the bishop’s chair by acclamation a decade earlier and was now the most formidable churchman in Italy. Augustine went to hear him the way a professional listens to a rival, for the technique. He stayed for the content. Two things came apart in Milan, and both of them had been holding him for years. The first was his contempt for the Old Testament. Ambrose read the difficult passages figuratively, looking for a meaning underneath the letter, and the objections Augustine had learned from the Manichees suddenly had answers. The second was his materialism, by which he meant the conviction that nothing is real unless it is a body occupying space. That is a tighter cage than it sounds, because it left him nowhere to put God: whatever God was, on those terms, he had to be some enormous shining stuff spread out through the world, or else nothing at all. Then he read what he calls "certain books of the Platonists," Latin translations of Plotinus and probably Porphyry, the Greek philosophers who had carried Plato’s thought forward in the generations before him, and learned to conceive of a reality that is immaterial, unchanging, and more real than matter. The intellectual roadblocks were down. The moral one was not, and clearing it cost somebody else more than it cost him. His mother, now with him in Milan, arranged a respectable marriage, and the woman he had lived with for fifteen years was sent back to Africa without her son. She had been faithful to him the whole time, by his own account, and she went home alone. Augustine, meanwhile, had two years to wait before his young fiancée reached marriageable age, and he took another mistress to fill them. He later described the whole business as the behaviour of a man who wanted to be chaste but not yet.

(●) 386 AD: A child’s voice in a Milan garden ended a fight he had been losing for years, and within eighteen months he was baptized and his mother was dead. + In the late summer of 386 a visitor named Ponticianus, a fellow African in the imperial service, noticed a copy of Paul’s letters on the table and began talking about Antony of Egypt, the hermit whose Life was then circulating in Latin. He mentioned two officials at Trier who had picked up that book one afternoon and abandoned their careers before evening. Augustine listened and could not bear it: men with no training in philosophy were doing what he, with all his learning, could not make himself do. He went out into the garden of the house he was sharing, with his friend Alypius following in alarm, threw himself down under a fig tree, and wept. From a neighbouring house he heard a voice, a boy’s or a girl’s, chanting over and over, "Take up and read." He could not remember any children’s game with those words. So he went back to where he had left the letters of Paul, opened the book, and read the first passage his eyes fell on, Romans 13:13–14: "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires." He read no further. Alypius looked over his shoulder at the next line and applied it to himself. Augustine finished the term, resigned his professorship on the grounds of failing health and lungs, and retired with a small household to a borrowed country estate at Cassiciacum, where he wrote his first Christian books as philosophical dialogues. At Easter of 387 Ambrose baptized him in Milan, along with Alypius and his teenage son Adeodatus. They set out for Africa that autumn, and at the port of Ostia, waiting for a ship, Augustine and Monica stood at a window talking about what the life of the saints in heaven would be, and rose in their conversation past all created things, and fell back into ordinary speech. A few days later she told him she no longer had any reason to want to stay in this world. She died there of a fever, in the fifty-sixth year of her life, and he found he could not weep at the funeral, went to the baths hoping it would help, and then wept helplessly when he was at last alone. Adeodatus, the sharp-witted boy who is the second voice in the dialogue On the Teacher, died two or three years later, still in his teens.

(●) 391 AD: A congregation in Hippo seized him, pushed him forward, and made him a priest against his will. + Back in Africa he sold the small property he had inherited, gave away the proceeds, and settled at Thagaste with a few friends to live a shared life of prayer and study. He was already a marked man. In that period a town that wanted a clergyman simply took one, and Augustine had made a practice of avoiding any church that lacked a bishop. Hippo Regius, a port on the coast at what is now Annaba in Algeria, already had a bishop, an elderly Greek named Valerius whose Latin was poor, so Augustine thought it safe to visit. Valerius happened to be telling the congregation that he needed a presbyter, an elder to share the preaching and the pastoral work, the office the Latin church came to call priest. The crowd looked round, recognized the famous convert, laid hold of him and pushed him to the front. He burst into tears. Some of them assumed he was crying because a mere priesthood was beneath him. He was thirty-six, and he never got his quiet life back. He was ordained priest in 391, made assistant bishop of Hippo around 395, and sole bishop when Valerius died a year later, and the rest of his life, close to forty years of it, went the way a working pastor’s life goes. He preached constantly, often several times a week and sometimes daily, to a congregation that clapped and shouted back at him while he was still speaking. Most mornings he sat as a judge, because a bishop’s court was a recognized civil arbitration in the late empire, which meant that inheritance quarrels, property lines and unpaid debts reached him before his books did. The most influential theology of the Latin West was written in the hours left over from parish work.

(●) 410 AD: Rome fell to the Goths, and the answer he began writing, The City of God, took him thirteen years. + In August 410 Alaric’s Goths entered Rome and sacked it for three days. The city had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, and the shock ran through the empire. Refugees crossed to Africa carrying an accusation with them: Rome had abandoned her old gods for Christ, and this was the result. Augustine began his reply in 413 and finished it in 426 or 427. The City of God runs to twenty-two books, and it grew far past its occasion. The first half takes the pagan case apart, patiently and with a good deal of dry humour; the second half sets out an entire theology of history, in which two communities, distinguished by what they love, run intertwined through time until they are separated at the end. Two other fights filled the same years. The Donatists were a rival African church, dominant in parts of the countryside, who held that the sacraments, the rites the church performs in Christ’s name with baptism first among them, were worthless when the clergy performing them had handed over the Scriptures during persecution, and that theirs was the only pure church left. Everything turns on a question any churchgoer can feel the force of: if the man who baptized you turns out to have been a coward or a fraud, were you baptized? Augustine argued that the validity of baptism rests on Christ rather than on the holiness of the minister, which is why the Western church still does not rebaptize. Then, from about 411, came Pelagius, a serious and admired British ascetic teaching in Rome, who held that God would not command what a person could not perform, and that grace is chiefly the good example of Christ and the gift of a free will. Augustine spent the last twenty years of his life on that question, and the answer he gave changed the vocabulary of Western Christianity.

(●) 430 AD: He died with the psalms of repentance pinned to the wall while the Vandals besieged his city. + In 429 the Vandals crossed from Spain into Africa and moved along the coast, and by the summer of 430 they were camped outside the walls of Hippo. Augustine was in his seventies and had watched his province come apart. Possidius, his friend and fellow bishop, who was inside the city with him and later wrote his life, says that he had told his clergy not to abandon their people while any were left to serve. Possidius records the last scene. Augustine asked for the few psalms of David that speak of repentance to be copied out on sheets and hung on the wall facing his bed, and he read them and wept over them through his final illness. He died on 28 August 430, in the third month of the siege, aged seventy-five. He left no will, Possidius says, because he had nothing to leave. The city was taken and burned the following year, but the library of the church at Hippo survived, and with it the books. Over the next two centuries the copies spread across a collapsing Latin world into monasteries in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Ireland and Britain. It is not too much to say that the intellectual furniture the West carried out of the ruins of the Roman empire was largely his.

What He Taught

(T1) Every human being is aimed at God, and nothing smaller will ever settle the aim. + Think of the last thing you badly wanted and then got. A house, a job, a person, a result. There is the moment of having it, which is real, and then there is the strange quiet afterwards in which the wanting starts up again somewhere else. Most people notice this and file it under human nature. Augustine built a theology on it. His claim is not that desire is bad. It is that desire has a target, the way a compass needle has north, and that the target is God. Everything else we chase is genuinely good, because God made it, and genuinely too small, because it is not God. So the pattern of getting and still wanting is not a design flaw in us; it is the design working, an ache that keeps pointing past whatever we just acquired. Out of this he drew a distinction later theologians kept. Some things are to be enjoyed, which for him meant loved for their own sake, as the place where the loving finally comes to rest. Other things are to be used, meaning loved along the way, the way you love a road for where it takes you. Sin, on this account, is very often not the love of something evil at all. It is the love of something good in the wrong order, treating a road as if it were a home. This is why the Confessions is not a memoir. It is an argument conducted on the body of one witness, and the witness is himself: here is a man with intelligence, friendship, sex, money, reputation and a professorship, reporting under oath that none of it held.

(Q) "Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." + Source: Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Pusey translation). The third sentence of the book, and the sentence that sets the terms for everything after it. Thirteen books of autobiography and reflection follow as the working out of a claim made before the story has even begun (T1).

(T2) Evil is not a thing God made; it is a good thing spoiled. + Here is the question that kept him with the Manichees for nine years. If God is good and made everything, where did evil come from? Mani’s answer was tidy: evil is its own substance, an eternal power of darkness, and it is not God’s fault because God did not make it and cannot at present defeat it. That answer costs more than it looks. It buys God’s innocence by making him one of two, a besieged commander rather than the Lord of all. Augustine’s alternative starts with an observation about rot. Consider a healthy apple and a rotten one. The rot is not an ingredient that has been added; it is soundness that has gone. Blindness is not a thing in the eye, it is sight missing from an eye built to see. Philosophers call this a privation: not a substance, but a good that is absent where it ought to be. Everything that exists, Augustine argues, is good simply because God made it and holds it in being. What we call evil is always something good in the process of being corrupted, and the more corrupt a thing becomes the less of it there is, until, if the corruption were total, there would be nothing left to be corrupt. Two consequences follow that Christians have leaned on ever since. Nothing in creation is evil in itself, so the body, matter, sex, food and the created world are not the enemy, which is precisely the point where Scripture parts company with every religion that treats matter as the problem (Genesis 1:31). And moral evil is located exactly where Augustine looked for it after his conversion, in the will: not a foreign substance invading a person, but a will bending away from the highest good toward lesser ones. That answer does not make suffering hurt less. It does keep God from being the author of it.

(Q) "So long therefore as they are, they are good: therefore whatsoever is, is good. That evil then which I sought, whence it is, is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good." + Source: Augustine, Confessions VII.12 (Pusey translation). The moment the nine Manichaean years came undone. A few chapters later he adds the other half, that when he asked what wickedness itself was, he found it to be no substance either, but "the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God, the Supreme, towards these lower things" (Confessions VII.16, Pusey) (T2).

(T3) No one turns to God unless God turns him first. + You might think this sounds like an excuse, and Pelagius thought so too. He was a British moral reformer working in Rome, appalled at the softness of nominal Christians, and his teaching was bracing and simple: God does not command the impossible, so if Scripture tells us to be holy we must be able to be holy. Grace, on his account, is the help God gives from outside, the law, the example of Christ, the forgiveness of past sins, and above all the free will he built into us. What set him off, by Augustine’s own report, was hearing a bishop read out one sentence from the Confessions: give what you command, and command what you will. Pelagius could not bear it. If we have to be given the power to obey, what is the command for? Augustine’s reply rests on a distinction it is worth getting right, because the argument is usually lost by blurring it. Free will, the ability to choose according to what you actually want, he never denied; he wrote a whole book defending it against the Manichees. What he denied is that the will is healthy. A man with a broken leg is still free to walk in the sense that nobody is holding him down, and he still cannot walk. Our wants themselves are bent, and a will can only choose in line with what it wants, so a bent will freely chooses badly and calls the choosing freedom. What grace does, therefore, is not overrule the will from outside but heal it from inside, so that a person comes to want God and then freely, gladly, chooses him. His Latin for it is grace that goes before, praeveniens, and later theology kept the word: prevenient grace, the grace by which God moves first. He got there from Scripture rather than from his biography, though the biography clearly helped. The verse he says settled it for him was Paul’s question, "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7), with Philippians 2:13 and John 15:5 behind it. Christians have argued ever since about how far to press this, and the argument runs straight through the Reformation and out the other side. But the base claim, that salvation is a gift and not a wage, is one the whole church took from him in his words (Ephesians 2:8–9).

(Q) "And all my hope is no where but in Thy exceeding great mercy. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt." + Source: Augustine, Confessions X.29 (Pusey translation). Nine words of prayer that started a controversy. Augustine reports in On the Gift of Perseverance that when a bishop at Rome quoted this line in Pelagius’ hearing, Pelagius reacted so violently that he nearly quarrelled with the man who read it. The sentence concedes everything Pelagius wanted to defend: if God must supply the obedience he demands, the demand is no longer a measure of what we can manage (T3).

(T4) Two loves have built two cities, and all of history is the story of those two. + Ask what makes a crowd into a people, and the usual answers are territory, language, or law. Augustine’s answer is that a people is a group bound together by what it agrees to love, and that this is the only division of humanity that finally matters. Sort the human race by the deepest thing each person loves and you get two communities, which he calls cities. One is founded on love of self carried to the point of contempt for God; the other on love of God carried to the point of contempt for self. Everything else, empire, tribe, class, is temporary. The word "city" is doing ordinary work here, not mystical work. He means something like a commonwealth, a body of people with a shared allegiance. The two cities are not the state and the church: plenty of citizens of the heavenly city are outside the visible church for now, and plenty inside it belong to the other. They are mixed together in every institution until the end, which is why a Christian is not to spend life sorting the wheat from the weeds. The political consequence was enormous, and it arrived at exactly the right moment. Rome had just fallen, and the assumption that a Christian empire was the kingdom of God on earth had fallen with it. Augustine cut the cord. No earthly order, however Christian its rulers claim to be, is the city of God; every earthly peace is real, worth having, and provisional. Christians are resident aliens who pay taxes, serve, obey the law, pray for the emperor, and refuse to believe that any regime is the last word. That is where the West got its habit of holding the state to a standard above the state.

(Q) "Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord." + Source: Augustine, The City of God XIV.28 (Dods translation). The sentence the whole twenty-two-book work turns on, placed at the point where the story of the fall has just been told and the two lines of descent begin to separate. The phrase "glories in the Lord" is Paul’s, and the psalm Augustine quotes a line later is Psalm 3:3 (T4).

(T5) Believe in order to understand, because trust is how understanding starts, not how it ends. + This sounds, at first hearing, like a request to switch off your brain, and it is worth slowing down, because it is nearly the opposite. Augustine’s point is an observation about how anyone learns anything. A child learns to read by trusting a teacher about what the letters say, long before the child can verify a single claim; a medical student takes the anatomy on authority in year one and comes to see why it is true in year four. Nobody starts from nothing. Trust in a reliable source is the ordinary doorway into knowledge, and the alternative, believing only what you have already personally verified, would leave you knowing almost nothing, including your own date of birth. So he is not saying that faith replaces understanding. He is saying faith comes first in the order of time and understanding follows as its reward, and he is equally willing to run the sentence the other way: understand, so that you may believe. Reason gets you to the point of recognizing where trust is warranted, trust lets you inside, and from inside things become intelligible that were not intelligible from the doorway. He took the principle from the Latin Bible of his day, which rendered Isaiah 7:9 as "unless you believe, you shall not understand," following the Greek Old Testament used by the early church. The Hebrew reads differently, and the ESV gives it as "If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all." The principle Augustine built on it survived the translation question, because he defends it on its own merits everywhere he uses it. Six and a half centuries later Anselm of Canterbury turned the same conviction into a motto, "faith seeking understanding," and it has been the working assumption of Christian thought ever since: not belief instead of thinking, but belief that makes hard thinking possible.

(Q) "Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand; since, ‘except ye believe, ye shall not understand.’" + Source: Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Tractate 29.6 (Gibb translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). He is preaching on John 7:17, where Jesus says that anyone willing to do God’s will shall know whether the teaching is from God. Augustine reads that as the order of operations for the whole Christian life: the willingness comes first, and the knowing follows (T5).

(Q) "Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee." + Source: Augustine, Confessions X.27 (Pusey translation). Probably the most quoted sentence any Latin Christian ever wrote. It has been copied into sermons, letters, hymns and diaries for sixteen centuries, which is the plainest measure of what happened next: his own words became the church’s words.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The Latin West learned to talk about grace in his words, and kept them for a thousand years. + The Pelagian question was settled in his lifetime and largely on his terms. A council at Carthage in 418 laid down that grace is needed not only to know what is right but to do it, and the Council of Ephesus in 431, the year after his death, condemned the Pelagian teaching along with other errors. A century later the Council of Orange in 529 took up the argument again and settled the Western position: the first movement of the will toward God is itself God’s gift, and no one is predestined to evil, that is, nobody is marked out beforehand by God for ruin. That is Augustine on grace, with a limit set on how far his followers had pressed him. After that he is simply in the water supply. Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville and Bede passed him on to the early medieval schools. Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the standard theology textbook for four hundred years, is threaded through with him, so that every student trained on it met Augustine whether he set out to or not. Anselm and Bonaventure think in his categories. Thomas Aquinas, who is usually filed under Aristotle, quotes Augustine more often than any other Christian writer, and when a medieval argument reached a stalemate the customary move was to open with the words "Augustine says." He is also, in Western usage, one of the four great Doctors of the Latin church, the title the West reserved for the teachers it regarded as foundational, alongside Ambrose who baptized him, Jerome with whom he corresponded and sometimes quarrelled, and Gregory the Great. The Eastern churches received him differently, and it is worth saying plainly. They honour him as a saint and a father, and they have always read him with more reserve than the West did, partly because he wrote in Latin in a Greek-speaking theological world, and partly because Eastern theology never adopted his account of inherited guilt, the claim that what passes down from Adam to his descendants is guilt itself and not only the damage. The split in the reception is not a modern invention; it goes back to the fact that his books had to be translated before most Greek theologians could read them at all.

(†) The Reformation and its opponents both went to him, and both could quote him honestly. + Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar, formed in an order that carried the man’s name and read his books, and he leaned on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings for years against the theology he was taught. By his own account in 1545, the doctrine he came to preach, that a sinner is justified, counted righteous in God’s sight, by grace received in faith rather than by anything he can produce, came to him out of Paul, and he then picked up On the Spirit and the Letter and found to his surprise that Augustine had read the righteousness of God the same way. John Calvin quotes Augustine far more than any other church father, and wrote that Augustine was so wholly on his side that he could put together a confession of his own faith out of Augustine’s books. The Catholic response quoted him just as confidently. The Council of Trent, answering the Reformers in the 1540s, affirmed original sin and the absolute necessity of grace in language drawn straight from him while rejecting the conclusions the Reformers drew. A century later a movement in France and the Low Countries, the Jansenists, made a rigorous Augustinian account of grace the centre of a long and bitter dispute inside the Catholic church; Blaise Pascal wrote in their defence. There is no dodging what this means. Christians who disagree sharply with each other have each been able to read Augustine honestly and find themselves in him, which tells you something about the size of the corpus and something about the man. He wrote across forty-four years, changed his mind in public, pressed different points against Manichees, Donatists and Pelagians, and left more material than any tradition can hold in one hand. The disagreement about how far to take his teaching on predestination is a genuine disagreement among Christians who all take Scripture as authoritative, and it is best described that way rather than as a fault in him or in the people arguing.

(†) Beyond theology he handed the West its habit of looking inward. + The Confessions is generally reckoned the first autobiography in the Western sense: not a record of a career but an examination of a self, with the motives dug out and held up to the light. Nothing quite in that shape survives from before him, and the form has not stopped since. Petrarch carried a pocket copy up Mont Ventoux in 1336 and opened it at the summit; Rousseau borrowed the title for a book Augustine would have found appalling. Two of his arguments took on lives of their own outside theology. In Book XI of the Confessions he asks what time actually is, notes that the past no longer exists and the future does not yet, and concludes that measuring time is something the mind does by holding memory and expectation together, an analysis philosophers still work through. And in The City of God he answers the ancient skeptics with a move Descartes would make famous twelve hundred years later: if I am deceived, then I exist, since what does not exist cannot be deceived. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was no orthodox believer, opened his Philosophical Investigations by quoting Augustine on how a child learns words. The practical inheritance is quieter and larger. The short rule he wrote for his community at Hippo is the oldest monastic rule in the West still in use, and from the twelfth century onward whole families of orders took it up: Augustinian canons and friars, Dominicans, Norbertines, Servites. When Luther entered religious life, the rule he took up was Augustine’s.

(†) He came to bless the use of imperial force against fellow Christians, after arguing at first that no one should be coerced. + The Donatist quarrel is the place Augustine himself has to answer for, and the evidence is in his own letters rather than in anything later readers made of him. - He changed his mind, and said so. Writing to the Donatist Vincentius, he records his earlier view: "originally my opinion was, that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we must act only by words, fight only by arguments, and prevail by force of reason." What overcame it was not an argument but results: imperial pressure had brought whole towns, including his own, into the Catholic church, and the converts seemed glad afterwards (Letter 93.17). - He read a parable as a warrant. He pressed the master’s line in the parable of the banquet, "compel people to come in" (Luke 14:23), as scriptural authority for the state penalizing schismatics, Christians who had broken away from the unity of the church, and defended imperial fines and confiscations at length (Letter 93.5; Letter 185). Read in its setting the line is about a servant scouring the roads to fill a feast, and the compulsion in view is urgent invitation, not police power. Later Christians of every branch have judged that he was wrong here, and the judgment does not need hindsight to make it: he had held the better view himself, in his own words, and argued his way out of it. - He drew a line he expected others to hold. The same letters oppose the death penalty and torture for the Donatists, and when Donatist partisans murdered one of his clergy and maimed another he wrote to the imperial officer begging that the guilty not be executed, arguing that the church did not want blood for blood (Letter 133). The mercy is as much a part of his record as the coercion, and a fair ledger carries both. Two further teachings of his own have troubled Christians ever since. He concluded that infants dying unbaptized share the condemnation of the race, softening it only to the mildest of penalties, a conclusion most of the church has declined to follow. And he tied the transmission of original sin so tightly to sexual desire that his account of marriage carries a permanent shadow, one his friends thought he had read out of his own history as much as out of Paul. The honest last word is his own habit. In his early seventies he went back over ninety-three of his books and published the Retractations, listing where he now judged himself mistaken. Few teachers of that stature have ever done it, and it is the fairest light to read his mistakes by.