Lars Erik Bryld <lars-erik@dadlnet.dk> wrote:
> Det leder lige til prædestinationslæren, ifølge hvilken Guds nåde
> endegyldigt afgør hvem som skal frelses og hvem som ikke skal (og til
> nogle menneskers yndlingshobby med at forudsige hvem som skal hvorhen).
Så ved du vist ikke hvad præsestinationslæren er for en fisk.
Da Gud er alvidende, kender han naturligvis også fremtiden i alle
detailler. Også hvordan folk vil opføre, jeg tænke, før det er sket.
Men det er skam rigtigt at alle mennesker er syndere, og at kun Guds
nåde kan frelse dem.
Augustine
Introduction
Saint Augustine (in Latin, Augustinus), bishop of Hippo
in Roman Africa from 396 to 430, and the dominant
personality of the Western Church of his time, is
generally recognized as having been the greatest thinker
of Christian antiquity. His mind was the crucible in
which the religion of the New Testament was most
completely fused with the Platonic tradition of Greek
philosophy; and it was also the means by which the
product of this fusion was transmitted to the
Christendoms of medieval Roman Catholicism and
Renaissance Protestantism.
This unique significance would have belonged to
Augustine had he never written the famous Confessions,
in which at the age of about 45 he told the story of his
own restless youth and of the stormy voyage that had
ended, as he believed, 12 years before he put it in
writing, in the haven of the Catholic Church. It is easy
to forget that the real work of Augustine's life did not
begin until the last scene of the Confessions was
already receding for him into a remembered past.
Moreover, the Confessions themselves are not so much
autobiography as they are devotional outpourings of
penitence and thanksgiving. Augustine's conscientious
memory generally can be trusted for the facts: his
reflections upon them are those of the bishop on his
knees. This is not to say that, in any attempt to
understand or appreciate the mind of the bishop, the
Confessions can be neglected. The picture must, however,
be drawn in proper proportion; it is essential to avoid
giving undue prominence to what should be no more than
its background.
Youth and conversion.
Hippo Regius is the modern Annaba on the Algerian coast,
in what was then the Roman province of Numidia.
Augustine, named Aurelius Augustinus, was born on
November 13, 354, of middle-class parents at Tagaste
(modern Souk-Ahras), a small town about 45 miles (72
kilometres) to the south. His father, Patricius, was and
remained until late in life a pagan; his mother, Monica,
was a Christian of intense but simple piety, from whose
early teaching Augustine retained a reverence for the
"name of Christ" that never left him. But he was not
baptized in infancy. He went through primary and
secondary schooling and soon displayed such intellectual
promise that the modest family funds were banked upon
securing him an academic career that would qualify him
for government service. As a 19-year-old student at
Carthage he was stirred by the reading of a treatise of
Cicero--the now lost Hortensius--and was filled with an
enthusiasm for "philosophy," which meant not only a
devotion to the pursuit of truth but a conviction of the
superiority of a life devoted to that pursuit (the vita
contemplative) over any aims of secular ambition. The
faith of the Catholic Church seemed to him too
hopelessly unphilosophical for any man of culture to
entertain; and he was easily carried away by the
discovery in Manichaeism of a religion that professed to
appeal to reason rather than authority.
Influence of Manichaeism.
The Manichaean system as propagated in the Western Roman
Empire was a materialistic dualism that accounted for
the creation of the world as the product of a conflict
between light and dark substances and for the soul of
man as an element of the light entangled in the dark.
Manichaeism claimed to be the true Christianity,
preaching Christ as the Redeemer who enables the
imprisoned particles of light to escape and return to
their own region. In the Manichaean Church the higher
order of "elect" adhered to a strict regimen of
asceticism and celibacy, all physical generation being
held to serve the realm of darkness. After an
adolescence that probably was no more licentious than
was common in his time and country, Augustine had formed
a liaison with a woman of low birth by whom he had a son
and to whom he remained loyally attached throughout the
nine years of his association with the Manichaeans, and
he was therefore allowed to join that sect's lower order
as one of the "hearers," to whom marriage was permitted
as a concession to human weakness.
His first zeal for this "religion of enlightenment" did
not last long, however, for the Manichaean experts were
intellectually second rate and proved incapable of
dealing with the questions he put to them. He became
increasingly disillusioned and was already falling into
a general agnosticism when, at the age of about 28, he
left Carthage, where he had worked as a free-lance
teacher of rhetoric, and went to Rome in search of more
satisfactory pupils. There he made connections that led
to an official professorship at Milan, where the Western
emperor then resided.The bishop of Milan was Ambrose,
the most eminent Christian churchman of the day.
Augustine was introduced to Ambrose but never came to
know him well. He went to hear him preach, however, and
this, his first contact with the mind of a Christian
intellectual, was enough to shake Augustine's prejudice
against Catholic teaching. Although he had abandoned the
doctrines of Manichaeism, he retained its materialistic
presuppositions, which left him still a skeptic with no
satisfying alternative to Manichaean notions of ultimate
reality. The being of God and the nature and origin of
evil remained for him problems as insoluble as they had
ever been. (see also Index: good and evil)
Influence of Neoplatonism.
The solution of both problems was given to him by a
chance introduction to Neoplatonic writings, for which
he may well have been prepared by Ambrose's use of them
in some of his sermons. Neoplatonism, in the work of the
3rd-century philosopher and mystic Plotinus, its
greatest exponent, is a spiritual monism--a
philosophical doctrine holding that there is only one
reality--according to which the universe exists as a
series of emanations or degenerations from absolute
unity. From the transcendent One arises self-conscious
mind or spirit; from mind comes soul or life; and soul
is the intermediary between the spheres of spirit and of
sense. Matter is the lowest and last product of the
supreme unity; and since the One is also the real and
the good, the potentiality of evil is identified with
unformed matter as the point of maximum departure from
the One. Evil itself is thus the least real of all
things, being simply the privation or absence of good.
Neoplatonic mysticism relies on the principle that the
inward is superior to the outward: to reach the good,
which is the real, one must "return into" oneself; for
it is the spirit at the heart of man's inmost self that
links him to the ultimate unity. (see also Index:
Christianity)
In the seventh book of the Confessions, Augustine tells
how in such an act of introspection he found God--the
"changeless light," at once immanent and transcendent,
which is the source of every intuitive recognition of
truth and goodness. This discovery of God was more than
the conclusion of a process of reasoning: it was a
mystical experience, a vision or touch that came and
went. But it left behind it the answer to Augustine's
unsatisfied questionings. God is light, and evil is
darkness, as the Manichaeans said. But neither is a
material substance: the changeless light of God is pure
spiritual being, and the evil is nonentity, as darkness
is but the absence of light.
Conversion to Christianity.
Augustine's mystical experience, his awareness of God,
had been momentary and fleeting. He believed that this
could be only because he had not made for himself the
necessary total identification of supreme value with
spirit; he was still himself entangled with the flesh.
In fact, Neoplatonism had reinforced the Manichaean
principle that the way of return to God must be through
escape from the body; and for Augustine this meant
primarily and immediately escape from the ties of
sexuality. The immortal story of his conversion in the
eighth book of the Confessions tells of his coming to
learn of the heroic achievements of Christian asceticism
in East and West, of the self-contempt induced in him by
the contrast of his own weakness, and of the final
breakdown of resistance in a Milan garden, when, at the
sound of a child's voice calling "tolle, lege: tolle,
lege" ("take up and read"), he opened the New Testament
Letters and read in Letter of Paul to the Romans the
words, ". . . put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no
provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Rom.
13:14).
This was in the late summer of the year 386. Vacation
was near, and Augustine resigned his teaching chair and
went with some young pupils, his son Adeodatus, and his
mother Monica to a reading party at a country house lent
by a friend. Out of their literary study and
philosophical discussions there came the earliest of
Augustine's surviving works--the dialogues, which
display so little of the storm and stress of a religious
conversion and so little concern with specifically
Christian themes that critics have been led to question
the accuracy of the Confessions story written many years
later. It is true that Augustine's struggle against the
domination of his sexual nature can be regarded as the
final phase in that fluctuating pursuit of the
"philosophic life" first presented to him by Cicero's
Hortensius. But there is no sufficient reason for
doubting that he was a Catholic Christian in intention
when he received Baptism at the hands of Ambrose in the
spring of 387. It is certain that three or four years
later, when he wrote his treatise De vera religione ( Of
True Religion), he was still thinking of Christianity in
Neoplatonic terms. In this treatise, the divine Word (
Logos) in Christ is the mind or spirit of Plotinus,
illuminating the reason, through whom the human soul has
access to the transcendent Godhead. Christ's human life
is man's example of the ascetic victory over the pains
and pleasures of the flesh; Christian morals serve only
to purify the soul for the life of contemplation; and
Christian faith is the necessary acceptance of the
church's authority in this preliminary stage of
training.
Bishop and Christian philosopher.
Shortly after his Baptism, Augustine left Milan, with
his mother and a small party of friends, to return to
Africa. At Rome's port city of Ostia, his mother died;
and Augustine recorded his last talk with her, in which
son led mother, through a discourse formed on the
pattern of the Neoplatonic "ascent" from this world to
the other, to share with him a momentary experience of
the life eternal. Home again at Tagaste, the friends
formed a little community devoted to the religious life
of contemplation and study. But its peace was soon
broken when, on a visit to Hippo in 391, Augustine was
forced to accept ordination as assistant priest to its
old bishop, Valerius. Five years later Valerius died,
and Augustine entered the episcopate in which he was to
labour until his death. The bishop in Roman Africa was
not only the pastor of a parish, the busy teacher and
preacher, but the presiding judge in a much-frequented
court of summary jurisdiction in civil cases. Augustine
never enjoyed robust health, and the vast extent of his
literary output was made possible only by the constant
services of stenographers and by an extraordinary
capacity for the extempore formulation of ordered
thought, of which at least 400 sermons remain as proof.
He was not a systematic theologian. Much of his writing
was in response to the appeals that his growing
reputation in the Christian world brought to him for the
solution of the most diverse problems. Over 200 of his
letters have been preserved, many of them having the
scale of minor treatises. He was tireless in controversy
with heretics--Manichaeans, Donatists, and Pelagians.
But his deepest thought, the real Augustinianism, is to
be found in his scripture commentaries and homilies,
especially his expositions of the Psalms and his
writings on the Gospel and First Letter of John. The
characteristic pattern he imposed upon Christian
theology was not the outcome of controversy.
The decisive turn was given to his thinking by his
ordination to the priesthood, which dragged him against
his will from the vita contemplative into the world and
at the same time diverted his studies from philosophy to
Scripture. The realities of pastoral experience among
the very imperfectly Christianized people of an African
seaport, together with the rapid impregnation of his
mind with the categories of biblical religion, made it
impossible for him to overlook the differences between
Neoplatonism and Pauline Christianity. The knowledge of
God and of the soul always remained from the time of his
Baptism the one and only knowledge that he desired; and
Plotinus had not been mistaken in bidding him look
within himself if he would find God, for the Bible also
tells of a likeness to God imprinted on the soul. But
although for the Neoplatonist the soul's likeness to God
is that of a, so to speak, reduced divinity, for the
Christian it is that of a temporal and mutable image of
the "eternal and changeless." Augustine was assured that
it is the task of a Christian philosophy, guided by the
scriptural revelation, to seek to know God through his
image in the soul; and this was the path he followed in
his great treatise De Trinitate ( On the Trinity). He
insisted that a true knowledge of the soul's nature can
be based only on the immediate awareness of
self-consciousness; and the soul's awareness of itself
is of a trinity in unity that reflects "as in a glass
darkly" the being of its Maker. He claimed that
knowledge of one's own being, of one's own thinking, of
one's own willing is not open to doubt; there is an ego
that exists, knows, and wills. But in none of these
aspects is the ego self-sufficient or independent: it
cannot maintain its own being, produce its own
knowledge, or satisfy its own desires. Augustine
believed that he had learned from the Platonists to find
in God "the author of all existences, the illuminator of
all truth, the bestower of all beatitude" (De civitate
Dei viii, 4). But his theories of the universe, of
knowledge, and of ethics were his own. The following
three paragraphs summarize these theories.
Theory of the universe.
Creation in Plotinus is motiveless and purposeless, the
automatic by-product of the divine self-contemplation;
in Augustine its source is "the will of a good God that
good things should be" (De civitate Dei xi, 21). The
outgoing energy of creative love forms the basic
principle of his entire theology. Since nothing can come
into being or continue in it but by this divine will to
create, all that exists is good "in so far as it has
being"; and because there are evidently degrees of
goodness, there must also be degrees of being. But even
the formless matter that is nearest to "not being" is
essentially good because God made it; the origin of evil
is not to be sought in material existence. Augustine
persistently refused to unload upon the material
conditions of human life the responsibility for human
wickedness. (see also Index: Christianity)
Theory of knowledge.
Following Plato, Augustine argued that the ability to
make true judgments never can be inserted into the mind
from outside. The human teacher never can do more than
help his pupil to see for himself what he already knew
without being aware of it. Augustine's favourite
examples of these intuitive judgments are the
propositions of mathematics and the appreciation of
moral values; they are not the construction of the
individual mind, because when properly formulated they
are accepted by all minds alike. The individual thinker
does not make the truth, he finds it; and he is able to
do so because Christ, the revealing Word of God, is the
magister interior, the "inward teacher," who enables him
to see the truth for himself when he listens to him.
Ethics.
Augustine accepts the basic assumption of ancient
ethical theory that conduct is properly directed to the
achievement of eudaimonia--the happiness or well-being
that is taken to be the one universal desire of
humanity. Augustine's cosmos is an ordered structure in
which the degrees of being are at the same time degrees
of value. This universal order requires the
subordination of what is lower in the scale of being to
what is higher: body is to be subject to spirit, and
spirit to God. Man must know his place in the order of
the universe and, knowing it, must voluntarily accept
it; that is, he must set upon himself and upon
everything else the relative value that is properly due.
Augustine's word for the ethical valuation that
influences conduct is amor ("love"). Amor is the moral
dynamic that impels man to action. If it is rightly
directed man will never set a higher value on what is
lower in the scale. All lesser goods are to be "used" as
means or aids toward the higher; only the highest is to
be "enjoyed" as the ultimate end on which the heart is
set. The supreme good in whose fruition alone man
reaches his perfection is for Augustine the God whose
nature is agape, love in the New Testament sense of the
word. If, then, man's love, his amor, can rise to the
enjoyment of God, it will become a participation in the
divine agape, love itself. God will have given himself
to men, and by sharing in his love men will love one
another as he loves them, drawing from him the power to
give themselves to others.
Struggle with the Donatist schism.
The energies of Augustine, both pastoral and literary,
were for the first 15 years of his episcopate distracted
by the wearisome struggle to end the schism in the
African Church that had persisted for nearly a century.
The Donatists, a Christian sect (named after Donatus,
one of its leaders) the members of which outnumbered the
Catholics in the country districts and in many towns,
claimed to be the only true church on the ground that
their ministry was the only one the succession of which
had not been stained by apostasy in the great
persecution of the years 303-313, which had begun under
the emperor Diocletian. Imperial attempts to suppress
the schism had stimulated the martyr spirit that had
always marked African Christianity and gained Donatism
the support of strong elements in the native population
whose grievances were social and economic rather than
ecclesiastical. The schism maintained itself by
fanatical violence, and Augustine's persevering attempts
to settle the questions at issue by peaceful discussion
were fruitless. In the end, the imperial government
became convinced that the Donatists were a danger to the
security of Africa. The Donatist bishops were compelled
to meet their Catholic rivals at a formal conference
held under an official arbitrator at Carthage in 411,
the foregone conclusion of which was a Catholic victory.
Donatists and Catholics agreed that the power of the
Holy Spirit is conveyed to the believer through the
sacraments, which are administered by the church through
the clergy. The Donatists alleged, however, that the
sacraments require for their validity a ministry
undefiled by serious sin; for the Spirit departs from
the sinner, who cannot therefore "confer what he does
not possess." Augustine replied that the sacraments
convey the Spirit in virtue of Christ's ordinance alone
and that this validity is unaffected by the worthiness
or unworthiness of the human minister. The church's
unity depends on the Spirit's supreme gift of charity,
of which schism is the denial. Unfortunately, Augustine,
who had for long opposed the use of any means but
persuasion to end the schism, eventually was induced to
approve the enforcement of legal penalties upon the
schismatics, in the interest, as he believed, of the
many whose fear of Donatist violence had kept them from
returning to the church. His famous saying, "Love, and
do what thou wilt," was in fact a defense of compulsion
in the service of charity.
Struggle with the Pelagian heresy.
As the Donatist controversy was ending, the Pelagians
were already beginning to threaten the traditional
doctrines of sin and redemption in the Western Church.
Pelagius had set himself to resist the slackening of
Christian moral standards. Against those who pleaded
human frailty in excuse for their failings, he insisted
that God has made every man alike free to choose and to
perform the good; that it is the essence of sin to be a
voluntary act that God's law forbids and that the sinner
was free to avoid; and that, were not this freedom real,
there could be no justice in God's punishments and
rewards. This reduction of Christianity to a bleak
moralism could not avoid conflict with the plain
implications of the church's sacramental and liturgical
practice. Baptism had always been "for the remission of
sins," and infants were held to need it because they
inherit the guilt of Adam's transgression, which, as St.
Paul taught, brought death upon the whole race of men.
The doctrine of original sin was firmly established in
the Western Church before Augustine's time; and when it
was openly rejected by Pelagius' disciple Celestius,
there was no escape for Pelagianism from being branded
as a heresy. The prevarications of Pelagius were able to
persuade Pope Zosimus (417-418) to reverse the
condemnation pronounced by his predecessor, Innocent I.
But in the spring of 418 the African bishops obtained
from the emperor Honorius an edict banishing the
heretics; and Zosimus was obliged to come into line.
Augustine was the soul of the Church's resistance. He
had seen Pelagianism at once as not merely a denial of
the virtue of Christian Baptism but also as a fatal
misconception of the relationship between God and man.
For to assert that man can achieve righteousness by his
own effort is to contradict the fundamental truth that
God is the giver of all good.
Before the controversy began, Augustine had worked out
his own rationalizations of the doctrines of original
sin and divine grace--rationalizations that the church
was to prove unwilling to accept fully. He accepted the
traditional belief in the fact and in the penal
consequences of Adam's transgression, defining the fact
as man's refusal to accept his place in the created
order, and the consequences as a dislocation of the
order of man's own nature--the revolt of flesh against
spirit. He argued that not only are all men involved in
Adam's guilt and punishment but also that this
involvement takes effect through the dependence of human
procreation on the sexual passion, in which the spirit's
inability to control flesh is evident. It was this
linking of original sin with human sexuality that
exposed Augustine in his old age to the most damaging
criticisms of the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum, who
boldly asserted the moral neutrality of the instincts
that belong to man's created nature and charged
Augustine with relapsing into Manichaeism in his
argument that an impulse that a man is bound to fight
and conquer must therefore be evil.
For Augustine the fall of man means that in all men the
true order of love has been violated. Departing from the
love of God above him, man has followed the love of self
and become subject to what is below him. Man has fallen
by the act of his own will. He cannot by a similar
exercise of will reverse the consequences of that fall.
The subjection of spirit to flesh is a slavery from
which the perverted will has no power to deliver itself,
just because it cannot will the deliverance. What is
needed is a kind of reversal of gravity--the
substitution of an uplifting for a down-dragging love.
And Augustine believed that this could happen only by
that gracious descent of the divine love to dwell within
the sinner: the gospel of the incarnation and of
Pentecost.
Pelagius, on the other hand, argued that all men have
been created free to do what is right when they see it,
and that Christians have received the needed moral
enlightenment in Christ's teaching and example.
Augustine knew the unreality of the Pelagian conception
of freedom as an innate and absolute power of choice,
unaffected by circumstances. He pointed to the
inescapable conditioning of all moral activity by the
situation of the agent--outside whose control are in
general not only the presentation of an object but also
the kind of feeling that the presentation excites.
Moreover, the act of will is dependent on feeling as
well as on cognition. In Augustine's words:
Men will not do what is right, either because the
right is hidden from them or because they find no
delight in it. But that what was hidden may become
clear, what delighted not may become sweet--this
belongs to the grace of God" (De peccatorum meritis
et remissione).
Augustine insisted that without this delight in
righteousness there can be no true freedom in
well-doing, but only a servile obedience to law. The
love of God, which is the motive of the Christian life,
must be free. Yet love of God, as St. Paul said, enters
man's heart by the gift of the Holy Spirit; and
Augustine found it increasingly difficult to leave room
in his doctrine of grace for a genuinely free response
on man's part to the Spirit's gift. The unexamined
assumption that everything in human life must be
ascribed either to God's or to man's working compelled
him to hold that God alone is the cause of every human
movement toward good. In the first year of his
episcopate, the study of St. Paul's argument in Rom.
9-11 had convinced him that no event in time can alter
the eternal setting of God's will toward any human soul:
his elect are chosen before the foundations of the
world. God knows--not before, but apart from, the time
process--how each individual in the course of time will
respond to the particular form in which grace is offered
to him; and the elect alone receive the grace that will
win their acceptance.
The rigour of this doctrine did not soften in face of
the Pelagian challenge. In De civitate Dei (The City of
God ), the masterpiece on which Augustine was working
throughout the Pelagian controversy, he drew a picture,
as majestic as it is appalling, of the "beginnings,
course and destined ends" of the two invisible societies
of the elect and the damned. The work seems to have been
in his mind before the capture of Rome by the Visigoths
in 410 had shaken the empire; but it took the form of a
Christian apologetic against the pagan claim that the
disaster was consequence and punishment of Rome's
apostasy from its ancestral religion. Augustine's two
cities are not to be identified with the Christian
Church and the pagan or secular state. They are symbolic
embodiments of the two spiritual powers that have
contended for allegiance in God's creation ever since
the fall of the angels--faith and unbelief, "the love of
self extending to contempt for God, and the love of God
extending to contempt of self." Neither power is
embodied in its purity in any earthly institution; in
this world the heavenly and earthly cities are
inextricably intermingled. If there is a philosophy of
history in the De civitate Dei, it is the religious
philosophy of predestination.
Augustine found it difficult in his old age to reassure
some of his own disciples, to whom his doctrine seemed
to make moral effort futile and praise and blame alike
groundless. But he would retract nothing. His last
completed treatises drew out the logic of predestination
to its most ruthless conclusions. Though his doctrine in
its final form was never accepted by the church, it
reappeared virtually unmodified in the writings of both
St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, the most acute
thinkers, respectively, of Scholasticism and Reform. It
may indeed be regarded as product of the too audacious
attempt of the time-bound human mind to contemplate
existence with the eye of the eternal God. (see also
Index: election)
The influence of Augustine.
The end of Roman civilization in Africa was near and the
Vandal armies were besieging Hippo when Augustine died
there on August 28, 430. Not many years later, Vincent
of L*rins defined Catholic orthodoxy in the famous
phrase, Quod ubique quod semper quod ab omnibus creditum
est ("What is everywhere, what is always, what is by all
people believed"). He dared not call Augustine a heretic
in so many words, but it was against the extravagances
that he rightly detected in Augustinian doctrine that
his definition was aimed. That these extravagances have
been a noxious legacy to theology because of their
author's authority cannot be denied. But that should not
prevent the grateful acknowledgment of the debt that
Christian thinking has owed through the centuries to
Augustine's influence, which has spanned and may one day
reconcile the divisions of Western Christendom. The
secret of that influence is to be found not so much in
the brilliance and profundity of his intellect, the
magic of his style, or the validity of his constructions
as in the unique power of his religious genius. St.
Anselm of Canterbury, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the
makers of The Book of Common Prayer, St. Francis de
Sales, Blaise Pascal, Jacques-B*nigne Bossuet, Joseph
Butler, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul
Tillich--all these have in their different ways drawn
inspiration from one in whom they have been compelled to
recognize "the heart of the matter." Verus philosophus
est amator Dei ("The true philosopher is the lover of
God"). In those words from the De civitate Dei,
Augustine has left at once the best portrait of himself
and the fullest justification of his life's work.
St. Augustine has been revered as a doctor of the church
since the early Middle Ages. His feast is celebrated on
August 28. (Jo.Bu.) Related Internet Links
Augustine
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