St. Augustine

Before, however, entering upon the discussion of the development of my opinions, it is desirable to draw attention to one major addition to our primary source-material. In 1981 a young Austrian scholar, Johannes Divjak , published in the Vienna Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vol. 88) a collection of Augustine's letters, preserved in two manuscripts [ 12th cent.] and Marseille 209 [ 15th cent.]) and hitherto unknown to scholarship. These letters, which were the subject of an international colloquium held at Paris in 1982, cover a wide range of Augustine's interests, but especially his activities as a bishop involved in the social life of the Roman Africa of his day. Such a discovery was utterly unexpected and must be reckoned among the boons which are occasionally vouchsafed to scholarship. Much work remains to be done before the information provided by the Divjak letters is fully exploited, but no future biographer of Augustine will be able to neglect them, for they throw a remarkable illumination on more than one episode in his career.

To turn now to the way in which my own views have developed since 1963. In 1967, four years after the appearance of my book, Peter Brown published his Augustine of Hippo. A Biography, and established himself as the outstanding Augustinian biographer of his generation. The merits of Brown's work, which has been translated into several languages and become a standard textbook, have been widely acclaimed, and need no endorsement from me. It is, however, important to remember Brown's self-imposed limitation: 'Inevitably, [my] perspective has led me to concentrate on some aspects of Augustine's life more than others. Seeking to trace the changes I have traced, I am acutely aware that I have been led along the side of a mountain-face: I found myself, for instance, above the plains of Augustine's routine duties as a bishop, and far below the heights of his speculations on the Trinity.' It is the combination of parochial concern and theological speculation, of action and contemplation, which make the saint; for whatever Augustine was, he was never average.

Let us consider the matter more closely. It could fairly be maintained that whatever in Augustine's character may be called sanctity was the result of his enforced ordination. The personality described in the Confessions, even allowing for the convert's desire to present his past life in a poor light, is not an attractive one: brilliant, charming and fascinating, he was also egoistic, ambitious and very selfish. The very appeal which asceticism held for him, even in his early years when he admired, without imitating, the self-denial of the Manichaean Elect, throws into harsh relief his own determination to seek advancement, even when this involved jettisoning the mother of Adeodatus, the companion of some fourteen years, in order to make an advantageous marriage.

The decision on his conversion to Catholic Christianity in 386 to abandon his hopes for worldly success and to return to Africa certainly represented a major sacrifice and was a good omen for the future; but it was his enforced ordination in 391, which has conferred immortality on the otherwise undistinguished port of Hippo, which brought Augustine into contact with ordinary African Christians, the uneducated and illiterate, upon whom he was to lavish so much care in later years- it is difficult not to be moved by the reference, at the end of Book IX of the Confessions, to his fellow-Christians, 'Thy servants, my brothers, Thy sons, my masters, whom with voice and heart and writings I serve' and whose prayers he asks for the souls of his parents, Monica and Patricius. It was these rank-and-file believers who afforded Augustine the opportunity to devote himself to the service of others in a way that would have been inconceivable in the days when he was still a layman. Furthermore, it was concern for the faith of these same humble Christians which provided the basic inspiration for some of Augustine's major theological writings.