Gentle
Augustine
Fr.
Tony’s Midweek Message
August
28, 2019
Today
is the Feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo (died Aug. 28, A.D. 430). Often seen as a dour bigot obsessed with
sexual immorality because of his doctrine of Original Sin and his argument
against British Monk Pelagius’s teaching on Free Will and good at the heart of creation,
I think this Saint has gotten a bad rap. I think that at heart, he was a gentle soul,
acutely aware of his own failings and willing to suffer those of others. He
first came to theological prominence by his argument against the Donatists, the
North African sect that broke away from the main body of the Church over how to
deal with the failings of Christians.
One of the last pagan Emperors had ordered the persecution of Christians
who refused to renounce their faith: clergy
were forced to turn in their Christian Scriptures to authorities or suffer
death and torture. When the persecution ended
and a new Emperor became Christian, rigorists insisted that there be no
forgiveness to these “tradditores” (“those who had handed over” sacred things),
a word from which we get the word “traitor.”
Moral failings in clergy for Donatists meant that the ministry and
sacraments of such priests were invalid, and not Christian. Augustine, who had himself come to Christian
faith only after a decades-long process of struggling with sexual sin and his
own raging libido, argued that the Church was called “holy” not because its
members and clergy were already holy, but because holiness was their aim. The Church was for sinners, not only for saints. All such tradditores,
after a penance sufficient to soothe the hearts of those scandalized by previous
betrayals and misdoings, were to be received once again into full fellowship
and ministry.
Even
Augustine’s condemnation of Pelagius was based on his empathy for those
struggling with sin: Pelagius’s argument
for absolute free will meant that the Church was unable to give any ministry to
people afflicted with obsessive or compulsive, recidivist sin except “pick
yourselves up by your bootstraps, or get out!”
Most of us know the story of Augustine’s own
conversion: convicted by the unending pleas
of his mother Monika and by the reasoning and sermons of Bishop Ambrose of
Milan, he overheard a child’s game from over the garden wall, a voice chanting “pick
it up and read it” (tolle lege). Augustine
picked up a Bible, opened it at random, and the first verse to appear to his
view was Romans 13:13-14: “ Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering
and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but
put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill
the lusts thereof.” He applied this to
himself, who by his own account had for decades prayed, “Lord, give me
chastity, but not yet!” His deep
awareness of his own troubled past gave him empathy for sinners, and this is
what lies behind both his argument against the rigor of Donatists and his
rejection of Pelagius’ austerity toward those who did not use their “free will”
rightly.
Augustine
taught that Evil did not exist as a separate power in opposition to Good: rather, Evil was the privation or absence of
Good, just as darkness is the absence of light.
For him, the challenge was not to fight and defeat evil so much as to
bring good out of it. He wrote, “Anyone who does not love Him Who made man has not learned to love
man aright. ... No. All things proclaim Him, all things speak. Their
beauty is the voice by which ... ‘God judged it better to bring good out of
evil than to suffer no evil to exist.’”
This,
again, is a mark of Augustine’s empathy.
A
controversialist and polemic writer, as bishop, Augustine kept a scroll of
calligraphy posted in his office that said, “Here, no evil will be spoken of anyone.” He had
argued that the Church try to root out Donatism; but when the Empire began to
persecute them with violence, he defended the very heretics he had previously
accused: gentle and fair treatment coupled with good teaching and example might
in this case work to bring good out of evil.
Grace
and Peace.
--Fr.
Tony+
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