The Authority of Augustine

The Authority of Augustine1

Augustine speaks: 'The thirteenth of November was my birthday. After a lunch (light enough to keep from putting a burden on our mental faculties), I called the whole group that dined together that way every day, to go and sit in the baths, for that seemed a suitably private spot.'2 Some of those present had probably spent the morning reading a bit of Vergil and were now ready for higher and nobler things. What followed was the conversation recorded in the first book of Augustine's de beata vita.

And so we are here, 1505 years after that afternoon in the baths, 1537 years after Augustine's birth, speaking of this man long deceased as though we know him. This lecture is about him, it belongs to a series named after him, and it has the sponsorship of a venerable and international order of religious men dedicated to his name and example. I have spent my entire adult life reading him, and writing books about him. We live in a time, moreover, in which his words have reached their largest audience (if we count rather than weigh readers), but it is a time that imagines itself more free of his influence than any other since his lifetime, and that views some of his most characteristic ideas as rebarbative. But even hostility is a token of esteem: if you despise Augustine and write or speak about him in that vein, you judge him worth despising somehow; and so even there he hovers over us.

The power of this man's name is much with us. My topic is precisely that power. How did he come to have it? And what are we to make of it? Why have we made of Augustine a saint of this sort? Did he wish to be treated so? What right have we to acclaim him? And what decorum should govern our applause?

For holy men often attract a veneration that they would deprecate. To take an example Augustine could have known, the first paragraph of the ostensibly quite pious Life of Plotinus by his chief disciple Porphyry records an act of rebellion against the philosopher and offers a measure of the distance between master and disciples. Porphyry recounts a subterfuge by which the students managed to have an artist create a portrait of the philosopher, despite Plotinus' reluctance.3 The subterfuge was comical: the painter Carterius attending Plotinus' lectures as if to listen though actually to look, and look hard, at the speaker, then go out to create just the sort of image of an image that Plotinus abhorred. Though the reluctance to face the painter is soundly based in Plotinus' philosophical ideas,4 and though his disciples could cite nothing in his doctrines in support of their act, they nonetheless overrode his judgment in order to ensure that he was made a plaster (or pigment) sage according to their preconceptions of the role that was his to play.

We leave our holy men no choice: we insist they be saints. One could as easily cite the veneration accorded Socrates or Francis of Assisi. But they did not write, and Plotinus resisted writing, and wrote with difficulty: is it different when we deal with a figure like Augustine, who wrote as though his life depended on it? Does not he at least deserve to become a Great Book? We will return to the difference that his being a writer makes.

To speak circumspectly of the authority of Augustine, it is worth first asking what Augustine's own attitude in the face of authority was, both in theory and in practice; and then how Augustine came to achieve what authority he did; and finally what we can make of that authority today.

Augustine's epistemology is, like so much of his thought, difficult to characterize in a way that avoids misinterpretation. He has the knack, as so often elsewhere, of holding views that seem irreconcilable with each other. The paradox of Augustine's epistemology is that it sometimes sounds completely a prioristic and intellectualist, and at other times it sounds completely ecclesiastical and authoritarian. It is both, and in the combination is the genius of it. What I set forth here is a tentative interpretation. It draws on works of the early period, and chiefly on the de vera religione: not because that period is to be privileged as authoritatively Augustinian, but because it was at that period that issues of this sort moved him most often to theoretical statement.

In principle, Augustine held that human powers suffice to know, love, and serve God. A purely natural theology approach is possible: Romans 1.20, 'for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made: his eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable,' offers the scriptural warrant. It ought in principle to be possible for a person to look upon a