St Augustine: Philosophy in an Hour

During the last years of Augustine’s life the collapse of the Roman Empire continued apace. In 428 A.D. the Vandals invaded the North African provinces, and by May 430 they had reached the gates of Hippo. Four months after the beginning of the year-long siege, Augustine died, on August 28, 430. His saint’s day is now celebrated on the anniversary of this date. Augustine was widely regarded as a saint immediately after his death. (Canonisation as a formal process occurred only at the end of the first millennium.)

The Vandals soon overran the whole of North Africa, and in 497 their king, Thrasamund, expelled the Catholic bishops from Numidia. When the bishops left they took the body of Augustine with them to Sardinia. Here it remained until the Saracen invasions of the eighth century, when King Luitprand of the Lombards ransomed Augustine’s relics and had them brought by his knights to Pavia in Italy, where they remain to this day. As you walk down the Strada Nuovo, you come to the beautifully named San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro (St Peter in the Golden Heavens). Inside this twelfth-century Lombard-Romanesque church, by the high altar, you can see the ornate marble reliquary that contains the mortal remains of St Augustine of Hippo.

In Augustine’s view they did, since chastity was a virtue of the mind. But they did not remain virtuous if they had enjoyed the experience. Augustine adds that God may have permitted these rapes because the women concerned were too proud of their chastity. Where much of Augustine’s theology may now appear meaningless or boring, such passages remain as offensive today as they must have been to any right-thinking person then. This is not to doubt Augustine’s integrity. If he too had been raped by the Goths, this probably would not have changed his thinking on the matter.

This could have taken place as an act of will, without accompanying lust. As Augustine recognised, this would have left Adam’s organ unstimulated by desire, so he provides an argument demonstrating how the necessary mechanical feat could have been achieved by willpower alone. Anyone who believes that philosophy is no laughing matter should read this passage. (See the extract in the Writings section.)

Augustine assured his readers that the gross misdeeds of the Goths would be punished when they went to meet their maker. After all, if every sin were punished on earth, what would be the point of having a Last Judgment?

The City of God had a purely spiritual existence and was not to be identified with anywhere on earth, even the holy city of Rome. These ideas were to have a profound effect on the medieval church and later even played their part in the Reformation.

In 410 A.D. Alaric and the victorious Visigoths enthusiastically set about the Sack of Rome. These were the first foreign invaders to have penetrated the city walls for nearly eight hundred years. The fall of Rome was quickly blamed on the loss of faith in the ancient gods, whose worship had recently been banned by the Emperor Theodosius in favour of Christianity. As long as Jupiter had been worshiped, Rome had ruled, and now look what had happened. It was all the Christians’ fault.

Yet this was not just some individual psychological quirk; it was symptomatic of a collective mania that was to grip the church for many centuries to come. From the perspective of history we can only marvel at the perversity of Augustine and the other great European minds of the period who spent their time in similar fashion.

According to Augustine, even unbaptised infants were condemned to everlasting damnation

Morgan opposed this view with a doctrine of his own. This stated that there was no such thing as original sin, and that people were capable of earning a place in heaven without intervention from God’s grace

Pelagians. This heretical sect had been started by a Welsh monk named Morgan (this name comes from the Gaelic for sailor, which translated into Latin as Pelagius). When Brother Morgan arrived in Rome, his upright Welsh spirit was appalled by the moral laxity of the priesthood, which tended to take a rather more easy-going, Mediterranean view of its vows. But Morgan soon detected the cause of the trouble. One day he heard a sermon in which a bishop referred to a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (whose dwelling on unspecific salaciousness had soon stimulated sales and imaginations throughout Christendom). The passage quoted by the bishop explained Augustine’s view that goodness is not possible without the intervention of divine grace, a doctrine verging on predestination. Morgan realised that many were using this doctrine as an excuse for moral lassitude. There was no point in making an effort to be good if this depended upon the intervention of divine grace.