The ancient Church before Augustine only possessed a single great dogmatic scheme, the Christological. Augustine also knew it and made use of it; but in inserting it into a greater and more living group, he deprived it of its original meaning and object. It has been said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven; we may maintain of Augustine that he did the same for dogmatics, by separating it from speculations about the finite and infinite, God the Logos and the creature, mortal and immortal, and connecting it with questions as to moral good, freedom, sin, and blessedness. Goodness became for him the point on which turned the consideration of blessings; moral goodness (virtue) and the possession of salvation were not merely to occupy corresponding positions, but to coincide (ipsa virtus et præmium virtutis). If we may use a figure, we can say that Augustine formed into one the two centres of popular Catholic theology, the renewing power of redemption and the free effort to attain virtue; of the ellipse he made a circle—God, whose grace delivers the will and endows it with power to do what is good. In this is comprehended his significance in the history of the Christian religion. He did not, however, vindicate the new portion consistently, but built the old into it. Indeed, in the new cathedral erected by him, the old building formed, as it were, the holy of holies, which is seldom entered.

When we seek to determine what has been accomplished by an ancient Church theologian as teacher of the Church, we must examine his expositions of the Symbol. We possess several by Augustine. It is extremely instructive to compare the earliest (De fide et symbolo, A.D. 393) with one of the latest (De fide, spe et caritate, A.D. 421, or later). In the former Augustine is still substantially a theologian of the ancient Church. The questions discussed by him are the same as were then dealt with, in both halves of the Church, in the Symbol, and are suggested by its language. Even the manner in which he discusses them is but slightly distinguished from the customary one. Finally, the polemic is the one that was usual: Arians, Manichæans, Apollinarians, Pneumatomachoi occupy the foreground; the last named especially are very thoroughly refuted. On the other hand, Augustine’s characteristics declare themselves even in this early exposition.The foundation of Augustine’s religious characteristics can be best studied in the writings that are read least, namely in the tractates and letters written immediately after his conversion, and forming an extremely necessary supplement to his Confessions (see above, p. 92, note 2). In these writings he is not yet at all interested in Church dogmatics, but is wholly absorbed in the task of making clear to himself, while settling with Neoplatonism, the new stage of religious philosophical reflection and inner experience, in which he finally found rest (see De vita beata, Adv. Academ., Soliloquia, De ordine, and the Epistles to Nebridius). The state of feeling expressed by him in these work, never left him; but it was only in a later period that he gave it its dogmatic sub-structure. In consequence of this, as is proved even by the Confessions and also the Retractations, he himself lost the power of rightly estimating those writings and the inner state in which he had found himself in the first years after his conversion. But he never lost the underlying tone of those first fruits of his authorship: “Rest in the possession of God,” as distinguished from the unrest and unhappiness of a seeking and inquiry that never reach their aim, or the essentially Neoplatonic version of the loftiest problems (see e.g., De ordine II., 11 ff., “mala in ordinem redacta faciunt decorem universi”; the same view of evil is still given in De civit., XI., 18). Those writings cannot be more fully discussed in a history of dogma. Thus we have, above all, his love of truth and frankness in the sections on the Holy Spirit, and his sceptical reserve and obedient submission to Church tradition. Further, in the Christology we find his characteristic scheme “Christ invested in man” (Christus indutus in homine), as well as the strong emphasis laid on the humility of Christ contrasted with pride (superbia). Compare, besides, sentences like the following. Chapter V I.—“Since he is only-begotten he has no brothers; but since he is first-begotten, he has deigned to name all those his brothers who after and through his headship are born again into the grace of God through the adoption of sons.” Or (Chapter XI.): “Our Lord’s humility was lowly in his being born for us; to this it was added that he deigned to die for mortals.” Or (Chapter XIX.): “The writers of the Divine Scriptures declare that the Holy Spirit is God’s gift in order that we may believe that God does not bestow a gift inferior to himself.” Or (ibid.): “No one enjoys that which he knows, unless he also loves it . . . nor does anyone abide in that which he apprehends unless by love.”“Secundum id, quod unigenitus est, non habet fratres; secundum id autem quod primogenitus est, fratres vocare dignatus est omnes qui post ejus et per ejus primatum in dei gratiam renascuntur per adoptionem filiorum.” “Parva erat pro nobis domini nostri humilitas in nascendo; accessit etiam ut mori pro mortalibus dignaretur.” “Divinarum scripturarum tractatores spiritum sanctum donum dei esse prædicant, ut deum credamus non se ipso inferius donum dare.” “Eo quod quisque novit non fruitur, nisi et id diligat . . . neque quisquam in eo quod percipit permanet nisi dilectione.” But if Augustine had died before the Donatist and Pelagian controversies, he would not have been the dogmatist who changed the whole scheme of doctrine; for it was these controversies that first compelled him to reflect on and review what he had long held, to vindicate it with all his power, and to introduce it also into the instruction of the Church. But since it had never entered his mind that the ancient doctrinal tradition, as attached to the Symbol, could be insufficient,He undoubtedly noticed, and with his love of truth frankly said, that the Church writers gave throughout an insufficient statement of the grace of God; but he contented himself with the plea that the Church had always duly emphasised grace in its prayers and institutions. See prædest. sanct., 27: “Quid opus est, ut eorum scrutemur opuscula, qui prius quam ista hæresis (Pelagianorum) oriretur, non habuerunt necessitatem in hac difficili ad solvendum quæstione versari? quod procul dubio facerent, si respondere talibus cogerentur. Unde factum est, ut de gratia dei quid sentirent, breviter quibusdam scriptorum suorum locis et transeunter adtingerent, immorarentur vero in eis, quæ adversus inimicos ecclesiæ disputabant, et in exhortationibus ad quasque virtutes, quibus deo vivo et vero pro adipiscenda vita æterna et vera felicitate servitur. Frequentationibus autem orationum simpliciter apparebat dei gratia quid valeret; non enim poscerentur de deo quæ præcipit fieri, nisi ab illo donaretur ut fierent.” He himself had indeed learned from experience in his struggle with the Manichæans, that the defence of truth has to be regulated by the nature of the attack. When he was twitted by his opponents with what he had formerly written about freewill against the Manichæans, he appealed to the claims of advancing knowledge, as well as to the duty of offering resistance both to right and left. He thus saw in the earlier Church teachers the defenders of the truth of the Church against fatalism, Gnosticisim, and Manichæism, and from this standpoint explained their attitude. since it had still less occurred to him to declare the Symbol itself to be inadequate, it was a matter of course to him that he should make everything which he had to present as religious doctrine hinge on that Confession. In this way arose the characteristic scheme of doctrine, which continued to influence the West in the Middle Ages; nay, on which the Reformed version is based—a combination of ancient Catholic theology and system with the new fundamental thought of the doctrine of grace, forced into the framework of the Symbol. It is evident that by this means a mixture of styles arose which was not conducive to the transparency and intelligibility of doctrine. But we have not only to complain of want of clearness, but also of a complexity of material which, in a still higher degree than was the case in the ancient Catholic Church, necessarily frustrated the demand for a closely reasoned and homogeneous version of religious doctrine. We are perhaps justified in maintaining that the Church never possessed in ancient times another teacher so anxious as Augustine to think out theological problems, and to secure unity for the system of doctrine. But the circumstances in which he was placed led to him above all others necessarily confusing that system of doctrine, and involving it in new inconsistencies.It is self-evident that for this reason dogma, i.e., the old Catholic doctrine of the Trinity and Christology, necessarily became less impressive. Reuter’s objection (l.c. p. 495) rests on an incomprehensible misunderstanding. The following points fall to be considered.

1. As a Western theologian, he felt that he was bound by the Symbol; but no Western theologian before him had lived so much in Scripture, or taken so much from it as he. The old variance between Symbol and Scripture,See on this and on what follows, Vol. III., pp. 203 ff., 207 ff. which at that time indeed was not yet consciously felt, was accordingly intensified by him. The uncertainty as to the relation of Scripture and Symbol was increased by him in spite of the extraordinary services he had rendered in making the Church familiar with the former.The attempts to define their relationship, e.g., in Book I. of the treatise De doctrina Christiana, are wholly vague, and indeed scarcely comprehensible. The “substance” of Scripture is to form the propositions of the Rule of Faith; but yet every sentence of Scripture is an article of faith. The Biblicism of later times, which afterwards took up an aggressive attitude to the Church in the West, is to be traced back to Augustine; and the resolute deletion of Scriptural thoughts by an appeal to the authority of the Church’s doctrine may equally refer to him.After his conversion Augustine was firmly of opinion that nothing stood in Scripture that contradicted the doctrine of the Church; he was not so certain that the interpretation of Scripture must follow the authority of tradition. Yet what a profusion of “dangerous” ideas would have been evolved from the Bible by his rich and acute genius if once he had freed his intellect from the fetters of obedience! The perception that no less than everything would have been doubtful, that a thousand contradictions would have taken the place of a unanimous doctrine, certainly helped in determining him not to shake the bars of his prison. He felt he would never be able to escape, but would be buried by the ruins of the collapsing edifice. Hence the principle declared in De nat. et grat. 22, that we must first submit to what stands in Scripture, and only then ask “quomodo id fieri potuerit.” What a difference from Origen! If we are asked for the historical justification of pre-reformers and reformers in the West, in taking their stand exclusively on Scripture, we must name Augustine; if we are asked by what right such theologians have been silenced, we may refer similarly to Augustine; but we can in this case undoubtedly go back to the authority of Tertullian (De præscr. hær.).

2. On the one hand, Augustine was convinced that everything in Scripture was valuable for faith, and that any thought was at once justified, ecclesiastically and theologically, by being proved to be Biblical—see his doctrine of predestination and other tenets, of which he was certain simply because they were found in the Bible. By this principle any unity of doctrine was nullified.See Vol. II., 331, n. 3. But, on the other hand, Augustine knew very well that religion was a practical matter, that in it faith, hope, and love, or love alone, were all-important, and that only what promoted the latter had any value. Indeed he advanced a considerable step further, and approximated to the Alexandrian theologians: he ultimately regarded Scripture merely as a means, which was dispensed with when love had reached its highest point, and he even approached the conception that the very facts of Christ’s earthly revelation were stages beyond which the believer passed, whose heart was possessed wholly by love.De doctr. Christ. I., 34: an extremely noteworthy exposition, which, so far as I know, has very few clear parallels in Augustine’s works, but forms the background of his development. This latter point—which is connected with his individualistic theology, but slightly influenced by the historical Christ—will be discussed below. It is enough here to formulate sharply the inconsistency of making Scripture, on the one hand, a source, and, on the other, a means.See the details in “De doctr. Christiana” copied in Vol. III., p. 203, n. 2, of this work. —a means indeed which is finally dispensed with like a crutch.De doctr. Christ., 35-40, especially c. 39, “Therefore a man who depends on faith, hope, and love, and holds by them invincibly, only needs Scripture to instruct others.” Scripture even only offers patchwork; but a man may rise to such perfection even in this life as no longer to require the patchwork. The mystics and fanatics of the West have given their adhesion to the last principle, advancing the inner light and inner revelation against the written. Now Augustine, in his excellent preface to his work “De doctrina Christiana,” has undoubtedly, as with a flash of prophetic illumination, rejected all fanatical inspiration, which either fancied it had no need at all of Scripture, or, appealing to the Spirit, declared philological and historical interpretation to be useless. But yet he opened the door to fanaticism with his statement that there was a stage at which men had got beyond Scripture. Above all, however, he created the fatal situation, in which the system of doctrine and theology of the Western Church are still found at the present day, by the vagueness which he failed to dispel as to the importance of the letter of Scripture. The Church knows, on the one hand, that in the Bible, so far as meant for faith, the “matter” is alone of importance. But, on the other hand, it cannot rid itself of the prejudice that every single text contains a Divine and absolute direction, a “revelation.” Protestant Churches have in this respect not gone one step beyond Augustine; Luther himself, if we compare his “prefaces” to the New Testament, e.g., with his position in the controversy about the Lord’s Supper, was involved in the same inconsistency as burdened Augustine’s doctrinal structure.

3. Augustine brought the practical element to the front more than any previous Church Father. Religion was only given to produce faith, love, and hope, and blessedness itself was bound up in these virtues bestowed by God, or in love. But the act of reform, which found expression in the subordination of all materials to the above intention, was not carried out by him unalloyed. In retaining the old Catholic scheme, knowledge and eternal life (ἀφθαρσία) remained the supreme thoughts; in pursuing Neoplatonic mysticism, he did not cast off the acosmic view that regarded all phenomena as transient, and all that was transient as figurative, retaining finally only the majesty of the concealed Deity; in despising the present life, he necessarily also depreciated faith and all that belonged to the present. Thus, his theology was not decided, even in its final aims, by one thought, and he was therefore unable really to carry out his doctrine of grace and sin in a pure form. As the intellectualism of antiquity, of course in a sublimated form, was not wholly superseded by him, his profoundest religious utterances were accompanied by, or entwined with, philosophical considerations. Often one and the same principle has a double root, a Neoplatonic and a Christian (Pauline), and accordingly a double meaning, a cosmological and a religious. Philosophy, saving faith, and Church tradition, disputed the leading place in his system of faith, and since Biblicism was added to these three elements, the unity of his type of thought was everywhere disturbed.

4. But apart from the intention, the execution contains not only inconsistencies in detail, but opposite views. In his conflict with Manichæism and Donatism, Augustine sketched a doctrine of freedom, the Church, and the means of grace, which has little in common with his experience of sin and grace, and simply conflicts with the theological development of that experience—the doctrine of predestinating grace. We can positively sketch two Augustinian theologies, one ecclesiastical, the other a doctrine of grace, and state the whole system in either.

5. But even in his ecclesiastical system and his doctrine of grace, conflicting lines of thought meet; for in the former a hierarchical and sacramental fundamental element conflicts with a liberal, universalist view inherited from the Apologists; and in the doctrine of grace two different conceptions are manifestly combined, namely, the thought of grace through (per, propter) Christ, and that of grace emanating, independently of Christ, from the essential nature of God as the supreme good and supreme being (summum bonum, summum esse). The latter inconsistency was of greatest importance for Augustine’s own theology, and for the attitude of Western theology after him. The West, confessedly, never thoroughly appropriated the uncompromising Eastern scheme of Christology as a statement of saving faith. But by Augustine the relation of the doctrine of the two natures (or the Incarnation) to that of salvation was still further loosened. It will be shown that he really prepared the way much more strongly for the Franciscan feeling towards Christ than for Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and that, in general, as a Christologian—in the strict sense of the term—he bequeathed more gaps than positive material to posterity. But in addition to this antithesis of a grace through Christ and without Christ, we have, finally, in Augustine’s doctrine of sin a strong Manichæan and Gnostic element; for Augustine never wholly surmounted Manichæism.

From our exposition up to this point—and only the most important facts have been mentioned—it follows that we cannot speak of Augustine having a system, nor did he compose any work which can be compared to Origen’s περὶ ἀρχῶν. Since he did not, like the latter, boldly proclaim the right of an esoteric Christianity, but rather as Christian and churchman constantly delayed taking this liberating step,Tendencies in this direction are found everywhere; but they were never more than tendencies. everything with him stands on one level, and therefore is involved in conflict.It is one of Reuter’s chief merits that he has proved the impossibility of constructing a system from Augustine’s thought, and of removing the inconsistencies that occur in it. But it is “not what one knows and says that decides, but what one loves”; he loved God, and his Church, and he was true. This attitude is conspicuous in all his writings, whether it is the Neoplatonist, the earlier Manichæan, the Pauline Christian, the Catholic Bishop, or the Biblicist, that speaks, and it lends to all his expositions a unity, which, though it cannot be demonstrated in the doctrines, can be plainly felt. Therefore, also, the different movements that started or learned from him, were always conscious of the complete man, and drew strength from him. He would not have been the teacher of the future if he had not stood before it as a Christian personality who lent force and weight to every word, no matter in what direction it led. As preacher of faith, love, and the dispensation of grace, he has dominated Catholic piety up to the present day. By his fundamental sentiment: “Mihi adhærere deo bonum est,” as also by his distinction between law and gospel, letter and spirit, and his preaching that God creates faith and a good will in us, he called forth the evangelical Reformation.See the testimonies to Augustine of the Reformers and their confessional writings; yet the difference that still existed was not unknown to them. By his doctrine of the authority and means of grace of the Church, he carried forward the construction of Roman Catholicism; nay, he first created the hierarchical and sacramental institution. By his Biblicism he prepared the way for the so-called pre-reformation movements, and the criticism of all extra-Biblical ecclesiastical traditions. By the force of his speculation, the acuteness of his intellect, the subtlety of his observation and experience, he incited, nay, partly created, scholasticism in all its branches, including the Nominalistic, and therefore also the modern theory of knowledge and psychology. By his Neoplatonism and enthusiasm for predestination he evoked the mysticism as well as the anti-clerical opposition of the Middle Ages.Even the Anti-Gregorian party in the Middle Ages frequently appealed to Augustine. It was possible to find in him welcome statements as to the meaning of the Empire, the possibility of correcting Councils, and, generally, anti-hierarchical passages. By the form of his ideal of the Church and of felicity, he strengthened the popular Catholic, the monachist, state of feeling, domesticating it, moreover, in the Church, and thereby rousing and capacitating it to overcome and dominate the world as contrasted with the Church. Finally, by his unique power of portraying himself, of expressing the wealth of his genius, and giving every word an individual impress, by his gift of individualising and self-observation, he contributed to the rise of the Renaissance and the modern spirit.

These are not capricious combinations, but historical facts:Compare Reuter, Studie VII. the connecting lines that lead back to him, can everywhere be clearly demonstrated. But where, then, in the history of the West is there a man to be compared to him? Without taking much to do with affairs—Augustine was Bishop of a second-rate city, and possessed neither liking nor talent for the rôle of an ecclesiastical leader or practical reformer—by the force of his ideas he influenced men, and made his life permeate the centuries that followed.

It has been attempted to depict Augustine’s significance as Church teacher, by dividing absolutely the various directions in which his thought moved, and by giving separate accounts of the Neoplatonist, the Paulinist, the earlier Manichæan, and the Catholic Bishop.It is unmistakable that there are three planes in Augustine’s theological thoughts, Neoplatonic mysticism (without means of grace, without the Church, nay, in a sense, even without Christ), Christological soteriology, and the plane of the authority and sacraments of the Church. Besides these, rationalistic and Manichæan elements have to be taken into account. But it is to be feared that violence is done him by such an analysis. It is safer and more appropriate, within the limits of a history of dogma, to keep to the external unity which he has himself given to his conceptions. In that case his Enchiridion ad Laurentium, his matured exposition of the Symbol, presents itself as our best guide. This writing we mean to bring forward at the close of the present chapter, after preliminary questions have been discussed which were of supreme importance to Augustine, and the controversies have been reviewed in which his genius was matured. We shall, in this way, obtain the clearest view of what Augustine achieved for the Church of his time, and of the revolution he evoked. It is a very attractive task to centralise Augustinian theology, but it is safer to rest content with the modest result of becoming acquainted with it, in so far as it exerted its influence on the Church. One difficulty meets us at the very outset which can not be removed, and went on increasing in after times. What portion of Augustine’s countless expositions constituted dogma in his own eyes, or became dogma at a later period? While he extended dogma to an extraordinary extent, he at the same time sometimes relaxed, sometimes—as regards ancient tradition—specifically stiffened, the notion to be held of it. The question as to the extent of dogmas was neither answered, nor ever put precisely, in the West, after the Donatist and Pelagian controversies. In other words, no necessity was felt for setting up similarly express positive statements in addition to the express refutations of Pelagians, Donatists, etc. But the necessity was not felt, because Churchmen possessed neither self-confidence nor courage to take ecclesiastical action on a grand scale. They always felt they were Epigones of a past time which had created the professedly adequate tradition. This feeling, which was still further accentuated in the Middle Ages, was gradually overcome by the Popes, though solely by them. Apart from a few exceptions, it was not till the Council of Trent that dogmas were again formed. Till then the only dogmas were the doctrines contained in the Symbols. Next these stood the catalogues of heretics, from which dogmas could be indirectly deduced. This state of matters induces us to present the doctrine of Augustine as fully as possible, consistently with the design of a text-book. Many things must here be brought forward from his works which bore no fruit in his own time, but had a powerful influence on the course of doctrinal development in the following centuries, and came to light in the dogmas of Trent.Reuter also recognises (p. 495 f., note) that Augustine held the contents of the Symbol alone to be dogma. But we have here to remember that the most elaborate doctrine of the Trinity and Christology were evolved from the Symbol, and that its words “sancta ecclesia” and “remissio peccatorum” contained theories from which equally far-reaching dogmas could be formed, or heretics be convicted. Even Cyprian refuted the Novatians from the Symbol, and Augustine used it against the Pelagians. A peculiar difficulty in the way of discussing Augustine in the history of dogma consists further in the fact that he created countless theological schemes, but no dogmatic formulas. He was too copious, too earnest, and too sincere to publish catch-words.

In what follows we shall proceed (1) to describe Augustine’s fundamental view, his doctrines of the first and last things;Augustine was the first dogmatist to feel the need of considering for himself the questions, which we are now accustomed to treat in the “prolegomena to dogmatics.” The Alexandrians undoubtedly attempted this also; but in their case formal and material, original and derived, were too much intertwined. Nor did they advance to the last problems of psychology and the theory of perception. Enchir., 4: “Quid primum, quid ultimum, teneatur, quæ totius definitionis summa sit, quod certum propriumque fidei catholicæ fundamentum.” (Questions by Laurentius.) for they were fixed when he became a Catholic Christian; (2) and (3) we then describe his controversies with Donatists and Pelagians, in which his conception of faith was deepened and unfolded; and (4) we expound his system of doctrine by the help of the Enchiridion ad Laurentium.

1. Augustine’s Doctrines of the First and Last Things.Augustine taught that it was only possible to obtain a firm grasp of the highest questions by earnest and unwearied independent labour. Herein above all did his greatness consist.

It has been said of Fiesole that he prayed his pictures on to the walls. It can be maintained of Augustine that his most profound thoughts regarding the first and the last things arose out of prayers; for all these matters were contained for him in God. If the same can be said of innumerable mystics down to the private communities of Madame de Guyon and Tersteegen, it is true of them because they were Augustine’s disciples. But more than anyone else he possessed the faculty of combining speculation about God with a contemplation of mind and soul which was not content with a few traditional categories, but analysed the states of feeling and the contents of consciousness. Every advance in this analysis became for him at the same time an advance in the knowledge of God, and vice versâ; concentration of his whole being in prayer led him to the most abstract observation, and this, in turn, changed to prayer. No philosopher before or after him has verified in so conspicuous a fashion the profound saying that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Godliness was the very atmosphere of his thought and life. “Piety is the wisdom of man” (Hominis sapientia pietas est, Enchir., 2; De civ. dei XIV., 28). Thus Augustine was the psychological, because he was the theological, genius of the Patristic period.Compare with what follows, Siebeck, in the Ztschr. f. Philos. and philos. Kritik, 1888, p. 170 ff. Not unversed in the domains of objective secular knowledge, he yet discarded them more resolutely than his Neoplatonic teachers, to whom he owed much, but whom he far surpassed. “The contents of the inner life lay clearly before Augustine’s eyes as a realm of distinctive objects of perception, outside and independent of sense experience, and he was convinced by his own rich insight that in this sphere quite as genuine knowledge and information, based on inner experience, were to be gained, as by external observation in surrounding nature.” Augustine brought to an end the development of ancient philosophy by completing the process which led from the naïve objective to the subjective objective.See the Appendix on Neoplatonism, Vol. I., p. 336 ff. He found what had been long sought for: the making of the inner life the starting-point of reflection on the world.The method of the Neoplatonists was still very uncertain, and this is connected, among other things, with their polytheism. It is easy to show that Augustine went so much further in psychology because he was a monotheist. So far as I know we are still, unfortunately, without any investigation of the importance of monotheism for psychology. And he did not give himself up to empty dreams, but investigated with a truly “physiological psychology” all conditions of the inner life, from its elementary processes up to the most sublime moods; he became, because he was the counterpart of Aristotle, the true Aristotle of a new science,See the excellent parallel between them in Siebeck, l.c. p. 188 f.: “Among the important personalities of Antiquity two could hardly be found with characters so different as Aristotle and Augustine. In the former we have the Greek, restful and clear, and yet moved by energetic warmth of thought, who gives its purest scientific expression to the Hellenic ideal of the life of the cultured, contentment with the even and constant advance of the life of the thinker, examining the depths and wants of the soul, only in so far as they appear on the surface, in the external nature and garb of the affections, and discussing this whole domain, not properly in order to know the heart, but only for rhetorical purposes. The internal world of the soul is here described and criticised only in so far as it evinces itself in reciprocal action with the external, and in the form it assumes as determined by the co-operation of the latter. For the comprehensive and final problem with Aristotle is the scientific construction and form of the external world in nature and social life. Augustine’s tendency and frame of mind are quite the opposite. The external owes all its importance and value in his eyes to the form it assumes as reflected in the internal. Everything is dominated not by problems of nature and the State and secular ethics, but by those of the deepest wants of mind and heart, of love and faith, hope and conscience. The proper objects and the moving forces of his speculation are not found in the relation of inward to outward, but of inner to innermost, to the sense and vision of God in the heart. Even the powers of the intellect are looked at from a new point of view, owing to the influence exerted on them by the heart and will, and they lose, in consequence, their claim to sole supremacy in scientific thought. The cool analysis made by Aristotle of the external world, which also dissected and discriminated between the states of the soul, as if they were objects that existed externally, disappears in Augustine before the immediate experience and feeling of states and processes of the emotional life; but the fact that he presents them to us with the warmest personal interest in them, entirely prevents us from feeling the absence of the Aristotelian talent of acuteness in analytical dissection. While Aristotle avoids all personal and individual colouring in his views, and labours everywhere to let the matter in hand speak for itself, Augustine, even when bringing forward investigations of the most general purport, always speaks as if only of himself, the individual, to whom his personal feelings and sensations are the main thing. He is a priori certain that they must have a farther reaching meaning, since feeling and wishing are found to be similar potencies in every human heart. Questions of ethics, which Aristotle handles from the standpoint of the relation of man to man, appear in Augustine in the light of the relations between his own heart and that of this known and felt God. With the former the supreme decision is given by clear perception of the external by reason; with the latter, by the irresistible force of the internal, the conviction of feeling, which in his case—as is given in such perfection to few—is fused with the penetrating light of the intellect. . . . Aristotle knows the wants of the inner life only so far as they are capable of developing the life, supported by energetic effort and philosophic equanimity, in and with society. He seems to hold that clear thinking and restfully energetic activity prevent all suffering and misfortune to society or the individual. The deeper sources of dispeace, of pain of soul, of unfulfilled wants of the heart, remain dark in his investigation. Augustine’s significance begins just where the problem is to trace the unrest of the believing or seeking soul to its roots, and to make sure of the inner facts in which the heart can reach its rest. Even the old problems which he reviews and examines in their whole extent and meaning from the standpoint of his rich scientific culture, now appear in a new light. Therefore he can grasp, and, at the same time, deepen everything which has come to him from Hellenism. For Aristotle, everything that the intellect can see and analyse in the inner and outer world constitutes a problem; for Augustine, that holds the chief place which the life of feeling and desire forces on him as a new fact added to his previous knowledge. In the one case it is the calm, theoretical mind; in the other, the conscience excited by the unrest caused by love of God and consciousness of sin, from which the questions spring. But along with this, scientific interest also turned to a wholly novel side of actual life. No wonder that the all-sufficiency of the dissecting and abstracting intellect had its despotism limited. The intellect was now no longer to create problems, but to receive them from the depths of the world of feeling, in order then to see what could be made of them. Nor was it to continue to feel supremacy over the will, but rather the influence to which it was subject from it. The main subject of its reflections was to consist, henceforth, not in the external world, nor in the internal discussed by means of analogy with, and the method of, the external, but in the kernel of personality, conscience in connection with emotion and will. Only from this point might it return, in order to learn to understand them anew, to previous views of the inner and outer life. Aristotle, the Greek, was only interested in the life of the soul, in so far as it turned outward and helped to fathom the world theoretically and practically; Augustine, the first modern man (the expression occurs also in Sell, Aus der Gesch. des Christenthums, 1888, p. 43; I had already used it years ago), only took it into consideration, in so far as reflection upon it enabled him to conceive the inner character of personal life as something really independent of the outer world.” Aristotle and Augustine are the two rivals who contended in the science and tendency of the following centuries. Both, as a rule, were indeed degraded, Aristotle to empty distinctions and categories, and a hide-bound dogmatism, Augustine to a mysticism floating in all conceivable media, having lost the guidance of a sure observation of the inner nature. Even in the Pelagians Augustine energetically opposed Aristotelian rationalism, and his controversy with them was repeated over and over again in after ages. In the history of religion it was a fight between a really irreligious, theologically, labelled morality and religion; for even in its classical form, Aristotelianism is a morality without religion. which seems indeed to have forgotten that as a theory of perception, and as inner observation, it originated in the monotheistic faith and life of prayer. He disposed of all that we call the ancient classical temper, the classical conception of life and the world. With the last remains of its cheerfulness and naïve objectivity, he buried for a long time the old truth itself, and showed the way to a new truth of things. But this was born in him amid pains, and it has kept its feature of painfulness. Mohammed, the barbarian, smote into ruins, in the name of Allah, who had mastered him, the Hellenistic world which he did not know. Augustine, the disciple of the Hellenes, completed in the West the long prepared dissolution of this world, in the name of God, whom he had perceived to be the only reality;All Christian Hellenistic thinkers before Augustine were still refined polytheists, or, more correctly, the polytheistic element was not wholly eradicated in their case, seeing that they preserved a part of nature-religion. This is most evident among Origen’s successors. but he built up a new world in his own heart and mind. Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört, Die schöne Welt, Mit mächtiger Faust; Sie stürzt, sie zerfällt! Ein Halbgott hat sie zerschlagen! Wir tragen Die Trümmer ins Nichts hinüber Und klagen Ueber die verlorene Schöne. Prächtiger baue sie wieder, In deinem Busen baue sie auf! However, nothing really perished entirely, because everything was accomplished by a protracted transformation, and, besides, the old Hellenistic world continued in part to exist on the North-East coast of the Mediterranean. It was possible to travel back along the line which had been traced by a millennium down to Augustine, and the positive capital, which Neoplatonism and Augustine had received from the past and had changed into negative values, could also be re-established with a positive force. But something had undoubtedly been lost; we find it surviving in almost none but those who were ignorant of theology and philosophy; we do not find it among thinkers; and that is frank joy in the phenomenal world, in its obvious meaning, and in calm and energetic work.Compare even the state of feeling of Petrarch and the other Humanists. If it were possible to unite in science and in the disposition, the piety, spirituality, and introspection of Augustine, with the openness to the world, the restful and energetic activity, and unclouded cheerfulness of antiquity, we should have reached the highest level! We are told that such a combination is a phantom, that it is an absurd idea. But do we not honour the great minds, who have been granted us since Luther, simply because they have endeavoured to realise the “fancy picture”? Did not Goethe declare this to be his ideal, and endeavour to present it in his own life, in his closing epoch? Is it not in the same ideal that the meaning of evangelical and reforming Christianity is contained, if it is really different from Catholicism?

“I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing more? Nothing at all.”Soliloq., I. 7. Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino. In the knowledge of God was also included that of the Cosmus, see Scipio, Metaphysik, p. 14 ff. In these words Augustine has briefly formulated the aim of his spiritual life. That was the truthPlaying with husks and shells disgusted Augustine; he longed for facts, for the knowledge of actual forces. for which “the marrow of his soul sighed.” All truth was contained for him in the perception of God. After a brief period of sore doubting, he was firm as a rock in the conviction that there was a God, and that he was the supreme good (summum bonum);Augustine became a Manichæan because he did not get past the idea that the Catholic doctrine held God to be the originator of sin. Confess., VII. 16: “Audivi (verba Ego sum qui sum) sicut auditur in corde, et non erat prorsus unde dubitarem; faciliusque dubitarem vivere me, quam non esse veritatem (VI., 5). but who he was, and how he was to be found, were to him the great questions. He was first snatched from the night of uncertainty by Neoplatonism: the Manichæan notion of God had proved itself to be false, since its God was not absolute and omnipotent. Neoplatonism had shown him a way by which to escape the flux of phenomena, and the mysterious and harassing play of the transient, to reach the fixed resting-point he sought, and to discover this in the absolute and spiritual God (Confess. VI I., 26: “incorporea veritas”). Augustine traversed this ascending path from the corporeal world through ever higher and more permanent spheres, and he also experienced the ecstatic mood in the “excess” of feeling.Suggestions in Confess., VII. 13-16, 23. Here is described the intellectual “exercise” of the observation of the mutabilia leading to the incommutabile. “Et pervenit cogitatio ad id quod est, in ictu trepidantis aspectus. Tunc vero invisibilia tua, per ea quæ facta sunt, intellecta conspexi (this now becomes his dominant saying); sed aciem figere non valui: et repercussa infirmitate redditus solitis, non mecum ferebam nisi amantem memoriam et quasi olfacta desiderantem (quite as in Plotinus) quæ comedere nondum possem,” VIII. 1. But again in his famous dialogue (IX. 23-25), with his mother in Ostia, a regular Neoplatonic “exercise” is really described which ends with ecstasy (attigimus veritatem modice toto ictu cordis”). We afterwards meet extremely seldom with anything of the same kind in Augustine; on the other hand, the anti-Manichæan writings still show many echoes (“se rapere in deum,” “rapi in deum,” “volitare,” “amplexus dei”). Reuter says rightly (p. 472) that these are unusual expressions, only occurring exceptionally. But he must have forgotten the passages in the Confessions when he adds that no instructions are given as to the method to be followed. But at the same time he turned more energetically to those observations for which the Neoplatonists had only been able to give him hints—to his spiritual experience, and psychological analysis. He was saved from scepticism by perceiving that even if the whole of external experience was subject to doubt, the facts of the inner life remained and demanded an explanation leading to certainty. There is no evil, but we are afraid, and this fear is certainly an evil.Confess., VII. 7: “Ubi ergo malum et unde et qua huc irrepsit? Quæ radix ejus et quo semen ejus? An omnino non est? Cur ergo timemus et cavemus quod non est? Aut si inaniter timemus, certe vel timor ipse malum est . . . et tanto gravius malum, quanto non est quod timeamus. Idcirco aut est malum quod timemus, aut hoc malum est quia timemus.” There is no visible object of faith, but we see faith in us.De trinit., XIII. 3: “Cum propterea credere jubeamur, quia id quod credere jubemur, videre non possumus, ipsam tamen fidem, quando inest in nobis, videmus in nobis.” Thus—in his theory of perception—God and the soul entered into the closest union, and this union confirmed him in his belief in their metaphysical connection. Henceforth the investigation of the life of the soul was to him a theological necessity. No examination seemed to him to be indifferent; he sought to obtain divine knowledge from every quarter. The command to “know thyself” (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) became for him the way to God. We cannot here discuss the wealth of psychological discoveries made by him.As regards memory, association of ideas, synthetic activity of spontaneous thought, ideality of the categories, a priori functions, “determinant” numbers, synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, etc. Of course all this is only touched on by him; we have, as it were, merely flashes of it in his works; see Siebeck, 1.c. p. 179. He has applied his observations on self-consciousness in his speculation on the Trinity. But he only entered his proper element when he was inquiring into the practical side of spiritual life. The popular conception, beyond which even philosophers had not advanced far, was that man was a rational being who was hampered by sensuousness, but possessed a free will capable at every moment of choosing the good—a very external, dualistic view. Augustine observed the actual man. He found that the typical characteristic of the life of the soul consisted in the effort to obtain pleasureHe meant by this the legitimate striving after self-assertion, after Being, which he attributed to all organic, nay, even to inorganic, things; see De civ. dei, XI., 28. (cupido, amor); from this type no one could depart. It was identical with the striving to get possessions, enjoyment. As the attempt to attain the pleasant it was desire (libido), cupiditas, and was perfected in joy; as resistance to the unpleasant, it was anger (ira), fear (timor), and was completed in sadness (tristitia). All impulses were only evolutions of this typical characteristic; sometimes they partook more of the form of passive impression, sometimes they were more of an active nature, and they were quite as true of the spiritual as of the sensuous life.This is the most important advance in perception.

According to Augustine, the will is most closely connected with this life of impulse, so that impulses can indeed be conceived as contents of the will, yet it is to be distinguished from them. For the will is not bound to the nexus of nature; it is a force existing above sensuous nature.See Siebeck l.c. p. 181 f.; Hamma in the Tüb. Theol. Quartalschr., vol. 55, pp. 427 ff. 458; Kahl, Primat des Willens, p. 1 f. Augustine’s psychology of the will is undoubtedly rooted in indeterminism; but in his concrete observations he becomes a determinist. It is free, in so far as it possesses formally the capacity of following or resisting the various inclinations; but concretely it is never free; that never free choice (liberum arbitrium), but is always conditioned by the chain of existing inclinations, which form its motives and determine it. The theoretical freedom of choice therefore only becomes actual freedom when desire (cupiditas, amor) of good has become the ruling motive of the will; in other words, it is only true of a good will that it is free: freedom of will and moral goodness coincide. But it follows just from this that the will truly free possesses its liberty not in caprice, but in being bound to the motive which impels to goodness (“beata necessitas boni”). This bondage is freedom, because it delivers the will from the rule of the impulses (to lower forms of good), and realises the destiny and design of man to possess himself of true being and life. In bondage to goodness the higher appetite (appetitus), the genuine impulse of self-preservation, realises itself, while by satisfaction “in dissipation” it brings man “bit by bit to ruin.” It does not follow, however, from Augustine’s assertion of the incapacity for good of the individual spontaneous will, that the evil will, because it is not free, is also irresponsible; for since the will is credited with the power of yielding to the love of good (amor boni), it is guilty of the neglect (the defect).

From this point Augustine, combining the results of Neoplatonic cosmological speculation with the above analysis, now built up his metaphysic, or more correctly, his theology. But since in the epoch in which he pursued these observations, he turned to the asceticism of Catholic monachism, and also studied profoundly the Psalms (and the Pauline epistles), the simple grandeur of his living notion of God exerted a tremendous influence on his speculations, and condensed the different, and in part artificially obtained, elements of his doctrine of God,They have all besides a practical object, i.e., they correspond to a definite form of the pious contemplation of the divine, and a definite relation to it (a definite self-criticism). For details of the theology, see Dorner, Augustin, pp. 5-112. again and again into the supremely simple confession: “The Lord of heaven and earth is love; He is my salvation; of whom should I be afraid?”

By the Neoplatonic speculation of the ascent [of the soul] Augustine reached the supreme unchangeable, permanent Being,In Confess. VII. 16, he could now put the triumphant question: “Numquid nihil est veritas, quoniam neque per finita, neque per infinita locorum spatia diffusa est.” the incorporeal truth, spiritual substance, incommutable and true eternity of truth, the light incommutableNot common light; “non hoc illa erat; sed aliud, aliud valde ab istis omnibus. Nec ita erat supra mentem meam sicut oleum super aquam, nec sicut coelum super terram, sed superior, quia ipsa fecit me, et ego inferior, quia factus sum ab ea. Qui novit veritatem novit eam, et qui novit eam, novit æternitatem. Caritas novit eam. O æterna veritas, et vera caritas, et cara æternitas! tu es deus meus; tibi suspiro die ac nocte.” (Confess. VII. I6.) Further the magnificently reproduced reflection, IX. 23-25, De Trin. IV. 1. By being, Augustine did not understand a vacuous existence, but being full of life, and he never doubted that being was better than not-being. De civit. dei, XI. 26: “Et sumus et nos esse novimus et id esse ac nosse diligimus.” The triad, “esse, scire, amare” was to him the supreme thing; he never thought of the possibility of glorifying not-being after the fashion of Buddhism or Schopenhauer. (incorporea veritas, spiritalis substantia, incommutabilis et vera veritatis æternitas, the lux incommutabilis). Starting with this, everything which was not God, including his own soul, was examined by Augustine from two points of view. On the one hand, it appeared as the absolutely transient, therefore as non-existent; for no true being exists, where there is also not-being; therefore God exists alone (God the only substance). On the other hand, as far as it possessed a relative existence, it seemed good, very good, as an evolution of the divine being (the many as the embodiment, emanating, and ever-returning, of the one). Augustine never tires of realising the beauty (pulchrum) and fitness (aptum) of creation, of regarding the universe as an ordered work of art, in which the gradations are as admirable as the contrasts. The individual and evil are lost to view in the notion of beauty; nay, God himself is the eternal, the old and new, the only, beauty. Even hell, the damnation of sinners, is, as an act in the ordination of evils (ordinatio malorum), an indispensable part of the work of art.We cannot here discuss Augustine’s cosmology more fully (see the works by Gangauf and Scipio). His reflections on life and the gradation of organic and inorganic (“ordo, species, modus”) were highly important to later philosophy and theology, and especially continued to exert an influence in mediæval mysticism. So also the view that evil and good are necessary elements in the artistic composition of the world continued to make its presence actively felt in the same quarter. Yet—as in Augustine—the idea of the privative significance of evil always preponderated. But, indeed, the whole work of art is after all—nothing; a likeness, but ah! only a likeness of the infinite fulness of the one which alone exists. How deeply in earnest Augustine was with this acosmic Pantheism, which threatened to degenerate into cosmic Monism, how he never wholly abandoned it, is shown even by the expression “pulchritudo” (beauty) for God,This expression is frequent in all his writings. Even utterances like “;vita vitæ meæ,” etc., have at first an acosmic meaning, but, of course, were given a deeper sense by Augustine. by his doctrine of predestination, which has one of its roots here, and, finally, by the aesthetic optimism of his view of the world which comes out here and there even in his latest writings,Augustine never lost his optimistic joy in life in the sense of the true life, as is proved in his work, De civit. dei; but in contrasting the moods caused by contemplation of the world—æsthetic joy in the Cosmus, and sorrow over the world perverted by sin—the latter prevailed. Existence never became to Augustine a torment in itself, but that existence did which condemned itself to not-being, bringing about its own ruin. and by his uncertainty as to the notion of creation.Where Augustine put the question of creation in the form, “How is the unity of being related to plurality of manifestation?” the notion of creation is really always eliminated. But he never entirely gave up this way of putting the question; for, at bottom, things possess their independence only in their manifestation, while, in so far as they exist, they form the ground of knowledge for the existence of God. But besides this, Augustine still asserted vigorously the creatio ex nihilo (“omnes naturæ ex deo, non de deo,” De nat. bon. c. Manich., I.). See note 4, p. 120. But the very fact that, as a rule, Augustine was governed by a wholly different temper is a guarantee that the element here obtained was only a grounding to which he applied new colours. He would not have been the reformer of Christian piety if he had only celebrated, albeit in the most seductive tones,He discovered these, and inspired hundreds of mystics after him. We have no right to deny that this contemplative view of being, not-being, and the harmony of being evolving itself in the phenomenal, is also a sphere of piety. that Neoplatonic notion of God, which, indeed, ultimately rested on a pious natural sentiment.

The new elements resulted first from the psychological analysis briefly indicated above. He found in man, as the fundamental form of existence, the desire to reach happiness, goods, being, and he could harmonise this desire excellently with his Neoplatonic doctrine. He farther found the desire to obtain an ever higher happiness, and ever loftier forms of good, an inexhaustible and noble longing, and this discovery also agreed with the doctrine. Unrest, hunger and thirst for God, horror and disgust at the enjoyment of lower kinds of good, were not to be stifled; for the soul, so far as it exists, comes certainly from God, and belongs to Him (ex deo and ad deum). But now he discovered a dreadful fact: the will, as a matter of fact, would not what it would, or at least seemed to will. No, it was no seeming; it was the most dreadful of paradoxes; we will to come to God, and we cannot, i.e., we will not.We have the most profound description of this state in Confess. VIII, 17-26; Augustine calls it a “monstrum” (monstrous phenomenon). He solves the problem disclosed, in so far as it is capable of solution, not by an appeal to the enslaved will, accordingly not by the “non possumus,” but as an indeterminist by the reflection, “non ex toto volumus, non ergo ex toto [nobis] imperamus.” (21), “I was afraid that Thou mightest soon hear me, and heal me of the sickness of lust, whose satisfaction I wished more than its eradication. . . . And I was deluded, therefore I put off following Thee alone from day to day, because I had not yet seen any certain aim for my striving. And now the day was at hand, and the voice of my conscience exhorted me: ‘Didst thou not say thou wouldst not cast the vain burden from thee, only because the truth was still uncertain? Behold now thou art certain of the truth, but (thou wilt not).’ . . . The way to union with God, and the attainment of the goal, coincide with the will to reach this goal, though, indeed, only with the determined and pure will. . . . And thus during this inner fever and irresoluteness I was wont to make many movements with my body, which can only be performed when the will makes definite resolves, and become impossible if the corresponding limbs are wanting, or are fettered, worn out, asleep, or hindered in any way. If, e.g., I tore a hair out, beat my brow, or embraced my knee with folded hands, I did it because I willed it. But I might have willed and not done it, if the power of motion in my limbs had forsaken me. So many things, then, I did in a sphere, where to will was not the same as to be able. And yet I did not that which both I longed incomparably more to do, and which I could do whenever I really earnestly willed it; because, as soon as I had willed it, I had really already made it mine in willing. For in these things the ability was one with the will, and really to resolve was to do. And yet, in my case, it was not done; and more readily did my body obey the weakest willing of my soul, in moving its limbs at its nod, than the soul obeyed itself where it was called upon to realise its great desire by a simple effort of the will. How is such a prodigy possible, and what is its reason? The soul commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the soul commands itself, and is resisted. The soul commands the hand to be moved, and it is done so promptly that command and performance can scarcely be distinguished; and yet the soul is spirit, but the hand is a member of the body. The soul commands the soul itself to an act of will; it is its own command, yet it does not carry it out. How is such a prodigy possible, and what is its reason? The soul commands an act of will, I say; its command consists simply in willing; and yet that command is not carried out. Sed non ex toto vult; non ergo ex toto imperat. Nam in tantum imperat, in quantum vult, et in tantum non fit quod imperat, in quantum non vult. Quoniam voluntas imperat ut sit voluntas, nec alia sed ipsa. Non itaque plena imperat ideo non est quod imperat. Nam si plena esset, nec imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset. Non igitur monstrum partim velle, partim nolle, sed ægritudo animi est, quia non totus assurgit, veritate sublevatus, consuetudine prægravatus. Et ideo sunt duæ voluntates, quia una earum tota non est, et hoc adest alteri quod deest alteri.” Augustine felt this state along with the whole weight of responsibility; that responsibility was never lessened for him by the view that the will in not seeking God was seeking nothing, that it therefore by self-will was properly “annulling itself until it no longer existed.” Nor was it mitigated for him by the correlative consideration, that the individual will, ruled by its desire, was not free. Rather, from the dread sense of responsibility, God appeared as the good, and the self-seeking life of impulse, which determined the will and gave its motive, constituted evil. The “summum bonum” now first obtained its deeper meaning—it was no longer merely the permanent resting point for disturbed thinkers, or the exhilarating enjoyment of life for jaded mortals: it now meant that which ought to be,“What ought to be? How cannot the inner nature exhibit itself by reflection, but can by action?” (Scipio, Metaphysik des Aug., p. 7.) Augustine was the first to put this question clearly. “Antiquity conceived the whole of life, we might say, in a naïve fashion from the standpoint of science: the spiritual appeared as natural, and virtue as a natural force. that which should be the fundamental motive ruling the will, should give the will its liberty, and therewith for the first time its power over the sphere of the natural, freeing the inexhaustible longing of man for the good from the dire necessity of sinning (misera necessitas peccandi), and accordingly first making that innate longing effectual. In a word, it now meant the good. And thus the notion of the good itself was divested of all accretions from the intellect, and all eudaimonist husks and wrappings. In this contemplation that overpowered him, the sole object was the good will, the moral imperative vitalised, to renounce selfish pleasure. But at the same time he acquired the experience which he himself could not analyse, which no thinker will undertake to analyse, that this good laid hold of him as love, and snatched him from the misery of the monstrous inconsistency of existence.Augustine indeed could further explain why the form, in which the good takes possession of and delivers the soul, must consist in the infusion of love. So long as the soul along with its will is confronted by duty (an ought), and commands itself to obey, it has not completely appropriated the good; “nam si plena esset, nec imperaret ut esset, quia jam esset” (Confess. VIII. 21). Accordingly, the fact that it admits the duty, does not yet create an effective will ex toto. It must accordingly so love what it ought, that it no longer needs command itself; nay, duty (the ought) must be its only love; only then is it plena in voluntate bona. The “abyssus corruptionis nostræ” is only exhausted when by love we “totum illud, quod volebamus nolumus et totum illud, quod deus vult, volumus (Confess. IX. 1). Thereby the notion of God received a wholly new content: the good which could do that was omnipotent. In the one act of liberation was given the identity of omnipotent being and the good, the summum ὄν (supreme being) was holiness working on the will in the form of omnipotent love. This was what Augustine felt and described. A stream of divine conceptions was now set loose, partly given in the old language, but with a meaning felt for the first time, wonderfully combined with the statement of the philosophical knowledge of God, but regulating and transforming it. The Supreme Being (summum esse) is the Supreme Good; He is a person; the ontological defect of creaturely being becomes the moral defect of godlessness of will; evil is here as there negative;Confess. VII. 18: “Malum si substantia esset, bonum esset. Aut enim esset incorruptibilis substantia, magnum utique bonum; aut substantia corruptibilis esset, quæ nisi bona esset, corrumpi non posset.” But since evil thus always exists in a good substance (more accurately: springs from the had will of the good substance), it is absolutely inexplicable; see e.g., De civitat. dei, XII. 7: “Nemo igitur quærat efficientem causam malæ voluntatis; non enim est efficiens sed deficiens (that is, the aspiration after nothing, after the annulling of life, constitutes the content of the bad will), quia nec illa effectio sed defectio. Deficere namque ab eo, quod summe est, ad id, quod minus est, hoc est incipere habere voluntatem malam. Causas porro defectionum istarum, cum efficientes non sint, ut dixi, sed deficientes, velle invenire tale est, ac si quisquam velit videre tenebras vel audire silentium, quod tamen utrumque nobis notum est, neque illud nisi per oculos, neque hoc nisi per aures, non sane in specie, sed in speciei privatione. Nemo ergo ex me scire quærat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte, ut nescire discat, quod scire non posse sciendum est. Ea quippe quæ non in specie, sed in ejus privatione sciuntur, si dici aut intellegi potest quodammodo nesciendo sciuntur, ut sciendo nesciantur.” but in the former case it is the negation of substance (privatio substantiæ), in the latter that of good (privatio boni), meaning the defect arising from freedom. The good indeed still remains the divine being as fulness of life; but for man it is summed up in the “common morality” which issues from the divine being and divine love. That is, he cannot appropriate it save in the will, which gladly forsakes its old nature, and loves that which dwells above all that is sensuous and selfish. Nothing is good except a good will: this principle was most closely combined by Augustine with the other: nothing is good but God; and love became for him the middle term. For the last and highest point reached in his knowledge was his combination of the thought that “all substance was from God” (omnis substantia a deo) with the other that “all good was” from God (omne bonum a deo). The conception of God as universal and sole worker, shaded into the other that God, just because he is God and source of all being, is also the only author and source of good in the form of self-imparting love.Augustine says of love (De civ. XI. 28), that we not only love its objects, but itself. “Amor amatur, et hinc probamus, quod in hominibus, qui rectius amantur, ipse magis amatur.” This observation led him to see God everywhere in love. As God is in all being, so is he also in love; nay, his existence in being is ultimately identical with his existence in love. Therefore love is beginning, middle, and end. It is the final object of theological thought, and the fundamental form of true spiritual life. “Caritas inchoata inchoata justitia est; caritas provecta provecta justitia est; caritas magna magna justitia est; caritas perfecta perfecta justitia est” (De nat. et grat. 84). But since in life in general voluntas = caritas (De trin. XV. 38): “quid est aliud caritas quam voluntas?”, we here find once more the profound connection between ethics and psychology. It belongs just as essentially to God to be grace (gratia) imparting itself in love, as to be the uncaused cause of causes (causa causatrix non causata). If we express this anthropologically: goodness does not make man independent of God—that was the old conception—but in goodness the constant natural dependence of all his creatures on God finds expression as a willed dependence securing the existence of the creaturely spirit. The latter only exists in yielding himself, only lives in dying, is only free when he suffers himself to be entirely ruled by God, is only good if his will is God’s will. These are the grand paradoxes with which he contrasted the “monstrous” paradoxes discussed above. But meanwhile there is no mistake that the metaphysical background everywhere shows in the ethical view; it is seen, first, in the ascetic trait which clings to the notion of the good in spite of its simple form (joy in God); secondly, in uncertainty as to the notion of love, into which an intellectual element still enters; thirdly, in the conception of grace (gratia), which appears not infrequently as the almost natural mode of the divine existence.

The instruction how to hold communion with God displays still more clearly the interweaving of metaphysical and ethical views, that wonderful oscillation, hesitancy, and wavering between the intellectual and that which lives and is experienced in the depths of the soul.Augustine’s ability to unite the Neoplatonic ontological speculation with the results of his examination of the practical spiritual life was due inter alia especially to his complete abstinence, in the former case, from accepting ritualistic elements, or from introducing into his speculation matter taken from the Cultus and the religion of the second order. If at first the stage of spiritual development which he occupied (when outside the Church), of itself protected him from admitting these deleterious elements, yet it was a conspicuous and hitherto unappreciated side of his greatness that he always kept clear of ritualistic mysticism. Thereby he rendered an invaluable service not only to his disciples in mysticism, but to the whole Western Church. On the one hand, it is required to enjoy God; nay, he is the only “thing” (res) which may be enjoyed, all else may only be used. But to enjoy means “to cling to anything by love for its own sake” (alicui rei amore inhærere propter se ipsam”).De doctr. christ., I., 3 sq. God is steadfastly to be enjoyed—the Neoplatonists are reproached with not reaching this.See Confess., VII. 24: “et qæerebam viam comparandi roboris quod esset idoneum ad fruendum te, etc.,” 26: “certus quidem in istis eram, nimis taken infirmus ad fruendum te.” This enjoying is inseparably connected with the thought of God’s “beauty,” and in turn with the sense that he is all in all and indescribable.Augustine has often repeated the old Platonic assertion of the impossibility of defining the nature of God, and that not always with a feeling of dissatisfaction, but as an expression of romantic satisfaction (“ineffabilis simplex natura”; “facilius dicimus quid non sit, quam quod sit”). He contributed much, besides, to the relative elucidation of negative definitions and of properties and accidents, and created scholastic terminology; see especially De trinit., XV. He is the father of Western theological dialectic: but also the inventor of the dialectic of the pious consciousness. From the anti-Manichæan controversy sprang the desire to conceive all God’s separate attributes as identical, i.e., the interest in the indivisibility of God—God is essence, not substance; for the latter cannot be thought of without accidents; see De trinit., VII., 10; and this interest went so far as to hold that even habere and esse coincided in God (De civ., X1. 10: “ideo simplex dicitur quoniam quod habet hoc est”). In order to guard God from corruptibilitas, compositeness of any sort was denied. But, at this point, Augustine had, nevertheless, to make a distinction in God, in order to discriminate the divine world-plan from him, and not to fall completely into Pantheism. (The latter is stamped on many passages in the work De trinit., see e.g., IV., 3, “Quia unum verbum dei est, per quod facta sunt omnia, quod est incommutabilis veritas, ibi principaliter atque incommutabiliter sunt omnia simul, et omnia vita sunt et omnia unum sunt.”) But since he always harked to the conviction that being, and wisdom, and goodness, are identical in God, he did not reach what he aimed at. This difficulty increased still further for him, where he combined speculation as to the nature of God with that regarding the Trinity. (Dorner, p. 22 ff.) It is seen most clearly in the doctrine of the divine world-plan. It always threatens to submerge the world in the Son as a unity, and to take away its difference (it is wrong, however—at least for the period after c., A.D. 400—to say conversely that the intelligible world is for Augustine identical with the Son, or is the Son). The vacillation is continued in the doctrine of creation. But Dorner (p. 40 f.) is wrong when he says: “Augustine had no conception as yet that the notion of causality, clearly conceived, is sufficient to establish the distinction between God and the world.” Augustine had undoubtedly no such conception, but this time it is not he, but Dorner, who shows his simplicity. The notion of causality, “clearly conceived,” can never establish a distinction, but only a transformation. If he had meant to give expression to the former, he required to introduce more into the cause than the effect; that is, it was necessary to furnish the cause with properties and powers which did not pass into the causatum (effect). But this already means that the scheme of cause and effect is inadequate to establish the difference. Augustine, certainly, had no clear conception of such a thing; but he felt that mere causality was useless. He adopted the expedient of calling in “nihil” (nothing) to his aid, the negation: God works in nothing. This “nothing” was the cause of the world not being a transformation or evolution of God, but of its appearing as an inferior or irridescent product, which, because it is a divina operatio, exists (yet not independently of God), and which, so far as independent, does not exist, since its independence resides in the nihil. The sentence “mundus de nihilo a deo factus”—the root principle of Augustinian cosmology—is ultimately to be taken dualistically; but the dualism is concealed by the second element consisting in negation, and therefore only revealing itself in the privative form (of mutability, transitoriness). But in the end the purely negative character of the second element cannot be absolutely retained (Augustine never, certainly, identified it with matter); it purported to be absolute impotence, but combined with the divine activity it became the resisting factor, and we know how it does resist in sin. Accordingly, the question most fatal to Augustine would have been: Who created this nothing? As a matter of fact this question breaks down the whole construction. Absurd as it sounds, it is justified. Augustine cannot explain negation with its determinative power existing side by side with the divina operatio; for it is no explanation to say that it did not exist at all, since it merely had negative effects. Yet theory, sometimes acosmic, sometimes dualistic, in form, is everywhere corrected in Augustine, whether by the expression of a wise nescience, or by faith in God as Father. The criticism here used has been attacked by Loofs (R.-Encykl. 3, Vol. II., p. 271). We have to admit that it goes more deeply into the reason of his views than Augustine’s words require. But I do not believe that the statement given by Loofs is adequate: “God so created his creatures from nothing that some are less fair, less good than others, and, therefore, have less being (esse).” Could Augustine have actually contented himself with these facts without asking whence this “less”? But, on the other hand, Augustine thrust aside the thought that God was a substance (res) in the interest of a living communion with him. God was a person, and in the phrase “to cleave by love” (“amore inhærere”) the emphasis falls in that case on the love (amor) which rests on faith (fides), and includes hope (spes). “God to be worshipped with faith, hope, and love (“Fide, spe, caritate colendum deum”).Enchirid. 3. Augustine was so strongly possessed by the feeling, never, indeed, clearly formulated, that God is a person whom we must trust and love, that this conviction was even a latent standard in his Trinitarian speculations.See Vol. IV., p. 129 ff. I do not enter further into the doctrine of the Trinity, but remark that the term “tres personæ” was very fatal to Augustine, and that all his original efforts in dealing with the Trinity lead away from cosmical and hypercosmical plurality to conceptions that make it express inner, spiritual self-movement in the one God. Faith, hope, and love had, in that case, however, nothing further to do with “freedom” in the proper sense of the word. They were God’s gifts, and constituted a spiritual relation to Him, from which sprang good resolves (bonum velle) and righteousness (justitia). But, indeed, whenever Augustine looked from this life to eternal life, the possession of faith, love, and hope assumed a temporary aspect. “But when the mind has been imbued with the commencement of faith which works by love, it aspires by a good life to reach the manifestation in which holy and perfect hearts perceive the ineffable beauty whose complete vision is the highest felicity. This is surely what thou requirest, ‘what is to be esteemed the first and the last thing,’ to begin with faith, to be perfected in sight” (Enchir. 5; see De doctr., II. 34 sq.).Cum autem initio fidei quæ per dilectionem operatur imbuta mens fuerit, tendit bene vivendo etiam ad speciem pervenire, ubi est sanctis et perfectis cordibus nota ineffabilis pulchritudo, cujus plena visio est summa felicitas. Hoc est nimirum quod requiris, “quid primum, quid ultimum teneatur,” inchoari fide, perfici specie. Certain as it is that the Neoplatonic tendency comes out in this, it is as certain that we have more than a mere “remnant of mystical natural religion”; for the feeling that “presses upward and forward” from the faith in what is not seen, to the seeing of what is believed, is not only the innate germ of religion, but its enduring stimulus.We may here touch briefly on the question several times recently discussed, as to the supremacy of the will in Augustine. Kahl has maintained it. But Siebeck (1.c. 183 f.) has with reason rejected it; (see also my notice of Kahl’s book in the ThLZ., 1886, No. 25); and Kahl has himself to admit “that at the last stage of knowledge Neoplatonic intellectualism, which explains volition away in view of thought, has frequently traversed the logical consequences of Augustine’s standpoint.” But it is just the last stage that decides. On the other hand, Kahl is quite right in appreciating so highly the importance of the will in Augustine. The kernel of our nature exists indisputably according to Augustine in our will; therefore, in order that the veritas, the scire deum et animam may be able to obtain supremacy, and become, as it were, the unique function of man, the will must be won on its behalf. This takes place through God’s grace, which leads the soul to will and love spiritual truth, i.e., God. Only now is it rendered possible for the intellect to assume supremacy. Accordingly the freeing of the will is ultimately the substitution of the supremacy of the intellect for that of the will. (Compare, e.g., the passage Confess. IX. 24: “regio ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israel in æternum veritatis pabulo, et ubi vita sapientia est”; but for this life it holds true that “sapientia hominis pietas.”) Yet in so far as the supremacy of the intellect could not maintain itself without the amor essendi et sciendi, the will remains the co-efficient of the intellect even in the highest sphere. That is, briefly, Augustine’s view of the relation of the will and intellect. It explains why the return to Augustine in the Middle Ages brought about the complete subordination of the intellect to the will; for Augustine himself so presented the case that no inner state and no activity of thought existed apart front the will. But if that were so, Augustine’s opinion, that the vision (visio) of God was the supreme goal, could not but in the end pass away. It was necessary to demonstrate a goal which corresponded to the assured fact that man was will (see Duns Scotus). The idea of the world sketched from contemplation of the inner life and the sense of responsibility, which was combined with that of metaphysical cosmological speculation, led finally to a wholly different state of feeling from the latter. The optimism founded on aesthetics vanished before the “monstrum” of humanity which, infirm of will,See De civit. dei, XIV. 3 sq.; it is not the body (sensuousness) that is the ultimate cause of sin. willed not and did not what at bottom it desired, and fell into the abyss of perdition. They are only a few who suffer themselves to be saved by grace. The mass is a massa perditionis, which death allures. “Woe is thee, thou torrent of human custom! Who shall stop thy course? How long will it be before thou art dried up? and whom wilt thou, O offspring of Eve, roll into the huge and hideous ocean, which even they scarcely overpass who have climbed the tree [the Church]?”Confess. I. 25: Væ tibi flumen moris humani? quis resistet tibi? quamdiu non siccaberis? quosque volves Evæ, filius in mare magnum et formidolosum, quod vix transeunt qui lignum [ecclesiam] conscenderint? The misery of the earth is unspeakable; whatever moves and cherishes an independent life upon it is its own punishment; for he who decreed sins (the ordinator peccatorum) has ordained that every sin judges itself, that every unregulated spirit is its own punishment.There is a wonderful contrast in Augustine between the profound pessimistic view of the world, and the conception, strictly held in theory, that everything takes place under the uniform and unchangeable activity of God. What a difference between the statement of the problem and the result! And in order to remove this difference the metaphysician refers us to the—nothing. The course of the world is so confidently regarded as caused in whole and in detail by God, nay, is, as it were, taken up into the unchangeableness of God himself, that even miracles are only conceived to be events contrary to nature as known to us (Genes. ad lit. VI. 13; cf. De civ. X. 12; XXI. 1-8; nothing happens against nature; the world is itself the greatest, nay, the sole miracle; see Nitzsch, Aug’s Lehre v. Wunder, 1865; Dorner, p. 71 f.), and yet everything shapes itself into a vast tragedy. In this nothing there still indeed lurks in Augustine a part of Manichæism; but in his vital view of the world it is not the “nothing” which plays a part, but the sin of wicked pleasure—self-will.

But from the beginning the historical Christian tradition penetrated with its influence the sequence of thoughts (on nature and grace), which the pious thinker had derived from his speculations on nature and his spiritual experience. Brought up from boyhood as a Catholic Christian, he has himself confessed that nothing ever satisfied him which did not bear the name of Christ.Confess. III. 8; V. 25; etc. The description of the years when he wandered in doubt is traversed as with a scarlet cord by the bond that united him with Christ. Without many words, indeed with a modest reserve, he recalls in the Confessions the relation to Christ that had never died out in him, until in VII. 24 f., he can emphasise it strongly. We cannot doubt that even those expositions of his which are apparently indifferent to the Church traditions of Christianity—on the living personal God, the distinction between God and the world, on God as Creator, on grace as the omnipotent principle—were already influenced by that tradition. And we must remember that his intense study of Paul and the Psalms began whenever, having broken with Manichæism, he had been convinced by Neoplatonism that God was a spiritual substance (spiritalis substantia). Even the expositions in the earliest writings which are apparently purely philosophical, were already dominated by the Christian conviction that God, the world, and the Ego were to be distinguished, and that room was to be made for the distinction in mystical speculation. Further, all attempts to break through the iron scheme of God’s unchangeableness (in his active presence in the world) are to be explained from the impression made by Christian history upon Augustine.

However, we cannot here take in hand to show how Christ and the Church gradually obtained a fixed fundamental position in his mode of thought. His reply to Laurentius in the Enchiridion, that “Christ is the sure and peculiar foundation of the Catholic faith,” (certum propriumque fidei catholicæ fundamentum Christus est), would have been made in the same terms many years before, and, indeed, though his conceptions of Christ were then still uncertain, as early as about A.D. 387.See the avowals in Confess. VII. 25. Christ, the way, strength, and authority, explained for him the significance of Christ. It is very noteworthy that in the Confessions VII., 24 sq., and other passages where he brings the Christian religion into the question as to the first and last things, he does not produce general theories about revelation, but at once gives the central place to Christ and the Church.Naturally, general investigations are not wanting of the nature of revelation as a whole, its relation to ratio, its stages (punishment of sin, law, prophecy), etc., but they have no secure connection with his dogmatics; they are dependant on the occasions that called them forth, and they are not clearly thought out. In any case, however, so many elements are found in them which connect them with Greek speculations, and in turn others which exerted a powerful influence at a later date (see Abelard), that one or two references are necessary (cf. Schmidt, Origenes and Aug. als Apolegeten in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol. VIII.; Böhringer, p. 204 ff.; Reuter, p. 90 f., 350 ff., 400). Augustine occupies himself here, as always, with a problem whose factors ultimately do not admit of being reconciled. On the one hand, he never gave up the lofty appreciation of reason (ratio), of independent knowledge, in which being and life are embraced. Originally (in his first period, after A.D. 385), although he had already seen the importance of auctoritas, he set up as the goal of the ratio the overcoming of auctoritas, which required to precede it only for a time (De ord. II., 26, 27). “Ratio was to him the organ in which God reveals himself to man, and in which man perceives God.” In after times this thought was never given up; but it was limited by the distinction between subjective and objective reason, by the increasing perception of the extent of the influence exerted on human mason by the will, by the assumption that one consequence of original sin was ignorance, and, finally, by the view that while knowledge, due to faith, would always be uncertain here below, the soul longed after the real, i.e., the absolute and absolutely sure, knowledge. The latter alone superseded ratio as the organ by which God is known, as guide to the vita beata; the other limitations were limitations pure and simple. And the constancy with which, in spite of these, Augustine at all times valued ratio is proved by those striking expositions, which occur in his earliest and latest writings, of Christianity as the disclosure of the one true religion which had always existed. The whole work De civitate dei is, indeed, built upon this thought—the civitas dei not being first created by the appearance of Christ—which, indeed, has two other roots besides Rationalism, namely, the conception of the absolute immutability of God, and the intention to defend Christianity and its God against Neoplatonic and pagan attacks. (The first two roots, as can be easily shown, are reducible ultimately to one single conception. The apologetic idea is of quite a different kind. Christianity is held to be as old as the world, in order that the reproach of its late arrival may fall to the ground. Here the wholly incongruous idea is introduced that Christians before Christ had believed on his future appearance. Reuter has shown excellently (p. 90 ff.) how even the particularist doctrine of pre-destination has its share in the universalist and humanist conception; he also deserves the greatest gratitude for collecting the numerous passages in which that conception is elaborated.) Even before the appearance of Christ the civitas dei existed; to it belonged pagans and Jews. Christianity is as old as the world. It is the natural religion which has existed from the beginning under various forms and names. Through Christ it received the name of the Christian religion; “res ipsa quæ nunc Christiana religio nuncupatur, erat apud antiquos, nec defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque ipse Christus venit in carne, unde vera religio, quæ jam erat, cœpit appellari Christiana” (Retract. I., 12, 3); see especially Ep. 102 and De civit. XVIII., 47, where the incongruous thought is inserted that the unus mediator was revealed to the heathens who belonged to the heavenly Jerusalem in the earliest time. The latter idea is by no means inserted everywhere; there was rather up to the end of his life, in spite and because of his doctrine of particular predestinating grace, an undercurrent in Augustine’s thought: co-ordinating God and free knowledge, he recognised behind the system of the Church a free science, and in accordance therewith conceived also God and the world to be the abiding objects of knowledge. With this idea, however, as in the case of Origen, Christ at once disappears. The ultimate reason of this consists in the fact that Augustine, with all his progress in knowledge, never advanced to history. The great psychologist was still blind to the nature of historical development, to what personality achieved in history, and what history had accomplished fur mankind. He had only two methods of observation at his disposal—either the mythological contemplation of history, or a rationalistic neutralising. The man who felt so clearly and testified so convincingly that freedom lay in the change of will when it received a strength binding us to the good, was yet incapable as a thinker of drawing clearly the consequences of this experience. But those should not blame him who cannot free themselves from the illusion that an absolute knowledge of some sort must be possible to man; for the effort to obtain such a knowledge is the ultimate cause of the inability to understand history as history. He who is only happy with absolute knowledge is either blind to history, or it becomes a Medusa’s head to him. Yet rationalism is only the undercurrent, though here and there it does force its way to the surface. More surely and more constantly Augustine appeased with revelation his hunger for the absolute, which he was unable to distinguish from aiming at force and strength (God and goodness). His feelings were the same as Faust’s: “We long for revelation.” Now, it is very characteristic that in dealing with the notion of revelation, Augustine has expounded nothing more clearly than the thought that revelation is absolutely authoritative. We can leave out of account his other views on its necessity, nature, etc. The decisive fact for him is that revelation does not merely recommend itself by its intrinsic worth. Accordingly, the external attestation is the main point. Augustine discussed this (especially in his work De civit.) much more carefully and comprehensively than earlier Apologists, in order to establish the right to demand simple submission to the contents of revelation. Auctoritas and fides were inseparably connected; indeed, they occupied an almost exclusive relation to each other (see De util. cred., 25 sq.). We indeed find him explaining in his writings of all periods that authority is milk-food, and that, on the other hand, the demand in matters of religion for faith resting on authority is not exceptional, but that all the affairs of life of a deeper nature rest on such a faith. But these are simply sops to Cerberus. Man needs authority to discipline his mind, and to support a certainty not to be obtained elsewhere. Augustine was especially convinced of this as against heretics (Manichæans). Heathens he could refute to a certain extent from reason, heretics he could not. But even apart from this, since the power which hinds the will to God presented itself to him as the rock-fast conviction of the unseen, even the “strong” could not dispense with faith in authority. The gradual progress from faith to knowledge, which was well-known to him (“Every one who knows also believes, although not every one who believes knows,”) was still a progress constantly accompanied by faith. The saying, “fides præcedit rationem,” of which he has given so many variations (see e.g., Ep. 120, 2 sq.: “fides præcedit rationem,” or paradoxically: “rationabiliter visum est, ut fides præcedat rationem,”) did not signify a suspension of faith at the higher stages. Or, rather, and here the Sic et Non holds good, Augustine was never clear about the relation of faith and knowledge; he handed over this problem to the future. On the one hand he trusted ratio; but, on the other hand, he did not, relying only on God, and:is Genius ruling in experience. Faith’s authority was given for him in Scripture and the Church. But here, again, he only maintained and transmitted the disposition to obey, while his theoretical expositions are beset by sheer contradictions and ambiguities; for he has neither worked out the sufficiency, infallibility, and independence of Scripture, nor demonstrated the infallibility of the Church, nor defined the relation of Scripture and the Church. Sometimes Scripture is a court of appeal which owes its authority to the Church, sometimes the Church doctrine and all consuetudo are to be measured by Scripture (Scripture is the only source of doctrina Christiana), sometimes Church and Scripture are held to constitute one whole; in one place the Church seems to find in the Council its infallible mouthpiece, in the other, the perfectibility of Councils themselves is maintained. “The idea of the Church’s infallibility belongs to Augustine’s popular Catholic presuppositions which grew out of his Catholic faith. It was never directly or expressly expounded by him, or dogmatically discussed. Therefore he cannot have felt the necessity of adjusting an exhaustive or precise doctrine regarding the legitimate form of the supreme representation of the Church by supposition infallible. This uncertainty and vagueness perhaps” (rather, indisputably) “spring from the vacillations of his thought regarding authority and reason, faith and knowledge” (see Reuter, pp. 345-358; Böhringer, pp. 217-256; Dorner, pp. 233-244; further, above pp. 77-83, and Vol. III., p. 203 ff.). The two decisive principles on which he laid stress were that the Catholic Church alone introduces us into communion with Christ, and that it is only through communion with Christ that we participate in God’s grace. That is, he is only certain of the speculative conception of the idea of the good, and its real activity as love when it is proclaimed authoritatively by the Church and supported by the conception of Christ.

By the conception formed of Christ. Here a new element entered. Augustine supported, times without number, the old Western scheme of the twofold nature (utraque natura), the word and man one person (verbum et homo una persona)—(we may leave unnoticed the rare, inaccurate expressions “permixtio,” “mixtura,” e.g. Ep. 137, I11, 12), the form of God and form of a slave, and he contributed much to fortify this scheme in the West with its sharply defined division between what was done by the human, and what by the divine. But the unusual energy with which he rejected Apollinarianism—from his earliest to his latest writings—is enough to show that his deepest interest centred in the human soul of Jesus. The passages are extremely rare in which he adopts the same interpretation as Cyril of the confession: “the Word became flesh,” and the doctrine of the deification of all human nature by the Incarnation is not represented, or, at any rate, only extremely doubtfully represented, by him. (Passages referring to it are not wholly awanting, but they arc extremely rare.) He rather explains the incarnation of the Word from another point of view, and accordingly, though he has points of contact with Origen, he describes it quite differently from the Greeks. Starting from the speculative consideration, to him a certainty, that it is always the whole Trinity that acts, and that its operation is absolutely invariable, the Incarnation was also a work of the whole Trinity. The Trinity produced the manifestation held to signify the Son (De trin. in many places). The Word (verbum) was not really more closely related than the whole Trinity to the Son. But since the Trinity could not act upon Jesus except as it always did, the uniqueness and power of the Person of Jesus Christ were to be derived from the receptiveness with which the man Jesus met the operatio divina; in other words, Augustine started from the human nature (soul) in his construction of the God-man. The human nature received the Word into its spirit; the human soul, because it acted as intermediary (medians), was also the centre of the God-man. Accordingly, the Word did not become flesh, if that be taken to mean that a transformation of any sort took place, but the divina operatio trinitatis could so work upon the human spirit of Jesus, that the Word was permanently attached to him, and was united with him to form one person.The figure often used by Augustine that the Word was united with the man Jesus as our souls are with our bodies is absolutely unsuitable. Augustine borrowed it from antiquity without realising that it really conflicted with his own conception. This receptiveness of Jesus was, as in all other cases, caused by the election of grace; it was a gift of God (munus dei), an incomprehensible act of divine grace; nay, it was the same divine grace that forgives us our sins which led the man Jesus to form one person with the Word and made him sinless. The Incarnation thus appeared simply to be parallel to the grace which makes us willing who were unwilling, and is independent of every historical fact.Enchir., 36: “Hic omnino granditer et evidenter dei gratia commendatur. Quid enim natura humana in homine Christi meruit ut in unitatem personæ unici filii dei singulariter esset assumpta! Quæ bona voluntas, cujus boni propositi studium, quæ bona opera præcesserunt, quibus mereretur iste homo una fieri persona cum deo? Numquid antea fuit homo, et hoc ei singulare beneficium præstitum est, cum singulariter promereretur deum? Nempe ex quo homo esse cœpit, non aliud cœpit esse homo quam dei filius: et hoc unicus, et propter deum verbum, quod illo suscepto caro factum est, utique deus. . . . Unde naturæ humanæ tanta gloria, nullis præcedentibus meritis sine dubitatione gratuita, nisi quia magna hic et sola dei gratia fideliter et sobrie considerantibus evidenter ostenditur, ut intellegant homines per eandem gratiam se justifcari a peccatis, per quam factum est ut homo Christus nullum habere posset peccatum.” 40: “Natus Christus insinuat nobis gratiam dei, qua homo nullis præcedentibus meritis in ipso exordio naturæ suæ quo esse cœpit, verbo deo copularetur in tantam personæ unitatem, ut idem ipse esset filius dei qui filius hominis, etc.” De dono persev., 67. Op. imperf., I., 138: “Qua gratia homo Jesus ab initio factus est bonus, eadem gratia homines qui sunt membra ejus ex malis fiunt boni.” De prædest. 30: “Est etiam præclarissimum lumen prædestinationis et gratiæ ipse salvator, ipse mediator dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus, qui ut hoc esset, quibus tandem suis vel operum vel fidei præcedentibus meritis natura humana quæ in illo est comparavit? . . . Singulariter nostra natura in Jesu nullis suis præcedentibus meritis accepit admiranda (scil. the union with deity). Respondeat hic homo deo, si audet, et dicat: Cur non et ego? Et si audierit: O homo, tu quis es qui respondeas deo, etc.” De corrept. et grat. 30: “Deus naturam nostram id est animam rationalem carnemque hominis Christi suscepit, susceptione singulariter mirabili vel mirabiliter singulari, ut nullis justitiæ suæ præcedentibus meritis filius dei sic esset ab initio quo esse homo cœpisset, ut ipse et verbum, quod sine initio est, una persona esset.” De pecc. mer. II. 27. Augustine says in Confess. VII. 25: “Ego autem aliquanto posterius didicisse me fateor, in eo quod verbum caro factum est, quomodo catholica veritas a Photini falsitate dirimatur.” Our account given above will have shown, however, that he never entirely learnt this. His Christology, at all times, retained a strong trace of affinity with that of Paul of Samosata and Photinus (only all merit was excluded on the part of the man Jesus), because he knew that his faith could not dispense with the man Jesus, and he supplanted the pseudo-theological speculation as to the Word by the evangelical one that the Word had become the content of Christ’s soul.

2. The Donatist Controversy. The Work: De civitate Dei. Doctrine of the Church, and Means of Grace.

Augustine was still occupied with the controversy with the Manichæans, in which he so sharply emphasised the authority of the Catholic Church,The Manichæans professed, in the controversy of the day, to be the men of “free inquiry” (“docendi fontem aperire gloriantur” De utilit. 21). We cannot here discuss how far they were; Augustine did not conscientiously feel that his breach with them was a breach with free inquiry. Therefore the efforts from the outset to define the relations of ratio and auctoritas, and to save what was still possible of the former. when his ecclesiastical position—Presbyter, A.D. 392, Bishop, A.D. 396, in Hippo—compelled him to take up the fight with the Donatists. In Hippo these formed the majority of the inhabitants, and so violent was their hatred that they even refused to make bread for the Catholics. Augustine fought with them from 393 to 411, and wrote against them a succession of works, some of these being very comprehensive.Psalmus c. partem Donati—C. Parmeniani epist. ad Tichonium b. III.—De bapt. c. Donatistas, b. VII.—C. litteras Petiliani, b. III.—Ep. ad Catholicos c. Donatistas—C. Cresconium, b. IV.—De unico bapt. c. Petilianum—Breviculus Collationis c. Donatistis—Post collationem ad Donatistas. Further, at a later date Sermo ad Cæsareensis ecclesiæ plebem—De gestis cum Emerito—C. Gaudentium Donatistam episcopum, b. II. The Sermo de Rusticiano is a forgery by the notorious Hieronymus Viguerius. We must here take for granted a knowledge of the course of the controversy at Synods, and as influenced by the intrusion of the Civil power.Augustine supported, at least from A.D. 407, the suppression by force of the Donatists by the Christian state in the interest of “loving discipline.” The discussion of A.D. 411 was a tragi-comedy. Last traces of the Donatists are still found in the time of Gregory I., who anew invoked the aid of the Civil power against them. It was carried on upon the ground prepared by Cyprian. His authority was accepted by the opponents. Accordingly, internal antitheses developed in the dispute which had remained latent in Cyprian’s theory. The new-fashioned Catholic theory had been already stated impressively by Optatus (see above, p. 42 ff.). It was reserved to Augustine to extend and complete it. But, as it usually happens in such questions, every newly-acquired position opened up new questions, and for one solution created any number of problems. And thus Augustine left more problems than he had solved.

The controversy did not now deal directly with the hierarchical constitution of the Church. Episcopacy was an accepted fact. The competency of the Church was questioned, and therewith its nature, significance, and extent. That ultimately the constitution of the Church should be dragged into the same peril was inevitable; for the hierarchy is, of course, the tenderest part in a constitution based upon it.

The schism was in itself the greatest evil. But in order to get over it, it was necessary to go to its roots and show that it was utterly impossible to sever oneself from the Catholic Church, that the unity, as well as truth of the Church, was indestructible. The main thesis of the Donatists was to the effect that the empirical is only the true Church when those who propagate it, the priests, are “pure”; for no one can propagate what he does not himself possess.C. Litt. Petil I. 3: “Qui fidem a perfido sumpserit non fidem percipit, sed reatum.” I. 2: “Conscientia dantis adtenditur, qui abluat accipientis.” Other Donatistic theses ran (l.c.) “Omnes res origine et radice consistit, et si caput non habet aliquid, nihil est.” “Nec quidquam bene regenerat, nisi bono semine (boni sacerdotis) regeneretur.” “Quæ potest esse perversitas ut qui suis criminibus reus est, alium faciat innocentem?” The true Church thus needs pure priests; it must therefore declare consecration by traditores to be invalid; and it cannot admit the efficacy of baptism administered by the impure—heretics, or those guilty of mortal sins; finally, it must exclude all that is manifestly stained and unworthy. This was followed by the breach with such Christian communions as did not strictly observe these rules, and by the practice of re-baptism.The Donatists, of course, did not regard it as re-baptism, l.c. “non repetimus quod jam erat, sed damus quod non erat.” Separation was imperative, no matter how great or small the extent of the Church. This thesis was supplemented, during the period of the State persecutions, by a second, that the persecuted Church was the true one, and that the State had nothing to do with the Church.

Augustine’s counter-argument, based on Cyprian, Ambrosiaster, and Optatus, but partly disavowing, though with due respect, the first-named, went far beyond a bare refutation of the separatists. He created the beginnings of a doctrine of the Church, and means of grace, of the Church as institute of salvation, the organism of the good, i.e., of divine powers in the world. Nor did the Donatist controversy furnish him with his only motive for developing this doctrine. The dispute with the Manichæans had already roused his interest in the authority of the Church, and led him to look more closely into it than his predecessors (see above, p. 79 ff.), who, indeed, were quite at one with him in their practical attitude to the Church. The Pelagian controversy, the state of the world, and the defence of Christianity against heathen attacks, had an extremely important influence on conceptions of the Church. Thus Augustine created the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church on earth, and we attempt in what follows to give, as far as possible, a complete and connected account of it. Finally, the earthly Church was and remained absolutely nothing but a means for the eternal salvation of the individual, and therefore the doctrines of the Church was also meant to be nothing but a subsidiary doctrine. But if all dogmatic ran the risk, with its means and subsidiary conceptions, of obscuring the important point, the danger was imminent here. Does not the doctrine of salvation appear in Catholicism to be almost nullified by the “subsidiary doctrine,” the doctrine of the Church?Doctrine is, strictly speaking, inaccurate; for Catholicism does not know of any “doctrines” here, but describes an actual state of matters brought about by God.

Grace and Authority—these two powers had, according to Augustine’s self-criticism, effected his conversion. The authority was the Church. Every one knew what the Church was: the empirical, visible Church, which had triumphed ever since the days of Constantine. A “logical definition” of the Church was therefore unnecessary. The important point was to show that men needed an authority, and why it was the authority. The weak intellect needed revelation, which brings truth to the individual, before he himself is capable of finding it; this revelation is bound up in the Church. The fact that the Church was the authority for doctrine constituted for long Augustine’s only interest in it. He produced in support of this principle proofs of subjective necessity and of an objective nature; yet he never reached in his exposition the stringency and certainty which as a Catholic he simply felt; for who can demonstrate that an external authority must be authoritative? The most important point was that the Church proclaimed itself to be the authority in doctrine. One was certainly a member of the Church only in so far as he submitted to its authority. There was no other way of belonging to it. Conversely, its significance seemed, on superficial reflection, to be entirely limited to doctrinal authority. We occupy our true relation to God and Christ, we possess and expect heavenly blessings only when we follow the doctrinal instructions given by the Church.

Augustine embraced this “superficial reflection” until his ecclesiastical office and the Donatist controversy led him to more comprehensive considerations. He had arrived at his doctrine of predestinating grace without any external instigation by independent meditation on the nature of conversion and piety. The development of his doctrine regarding the Church, so far as it carried out popular Catholic ideas, was entirely dependent on the external circumstances in which he found himself placed. But he did not himself feel that he was stating a doctrine; he was only describing an actual position accepted all along by every Catholic, one which each had to interpret to himself, but without subtraction or addition. In addition to the importance of the Church as a doctrinal authority, he also felt its significance as a sacred institution which imparted grace. On its latter feature he especially reflected; but the Church appeared to him much more vividly after he had gained his doctrine of grace: it was the one communion of saints, the dwelling-place of the Spirit who created faith, love, and hope. We condense his most important statements.

1. The Catholic Church, held together by the Holy Spirit, who is also the bond of union in the Trinity, possesses its most important mark in its unity, and that a unity in faith, love, and hope, as well as in Catholicity.

3. The Pelagian Controversy. The Doctrine of Grace and Sin.

Augustine’s doctrine of grace and sin was constructed independently of the Pelagian controversy. It was substantially complete when he entered the conflict; but he was by no means clear as to its application in separate questions in the year of his conversion. At the time of his fight with Manichæism (see the Tres libri de libero arbitrio) he had rather emphasised, following the tradition of the Church teachers, the independence of human freedom, and had spoken of original sin merely as inherited evil. It was his clerical office, a renewed study of Romans, and the criticism of his spiritual development, as instituted in the Confessions, that first led him to the Neoplatonic Christian conviction that all good, and therefore faith, came from God, and that man was only good and free in dependence on God. Thus he gained a point of view which he confessed at the close of his life he had not always possessed, and which he opposed to the earlier, erroneous conceptionsDe praed. 7; De dono persev. 55; c. Jul. VI. 39; also the Retract. that friends and enemies frequently reminded him of It can be said that his doctrine of grace, in so far as it was a doctrine of God, was complete as early as A.D. 387; but it was not, in its application to Bible history, or to the problem of conversion and sanctification (in the Church), before the beginning of the fifth century. It can also be shown that he was at all times slightly influenced by the popular Catholic view, and this all the more as he was not capable of drawing the whole consequences of his system, which, if he had done so, would have led to determinism.

This system did not evoke Pelagianism. Pelagius had taken offence, indeed, before the outbreak of the controversy, at Augustine’s famous sentence: “Grant what thou commandest, and command what thou dost desire,” and he had opposed it at Rome;De dono persev. 53: “Cum libros Confessionum ediderim ante quam Pelagiana hæresis exstitisset, in eis certe dixi deo nostro et sæpe dixi: Da quod jubes et jube quod vis. Quæ mea verba Pelagius Romæ, cum a quodam fratre et episcopo meo fuissent eo præsente commemorata, ferre non potuit et contradicens aliquanto commotius pæne cum eo qui commemoraverat litigavit. but by that date his doctrine was substantially settled. The two great types of thought, involving the question whether virtue or grace, morality or religion, the original and inalienable constitution of man, or the power of Jesus Christ was supreme, did not evolve themselves in the controversy. They gained in clearness and precision during its course,De doctr. Christ. III. 46: “Hæresis Pelagiana multum nos, ut gratiam dei quæ per dominum nostrum Jesum Christum est, adversus eam defenderemus, exercuit.” but both arose, independently of each other, from the internal conditions of the Church. We can observe here, if anywhere, the “logic” of history. There has never, perhaps, been another crisis of equal importance in Church history in which the opponents have expressed the principles at issue so clearly and abstractly. The Arian dispute before the Nicene Council can alone be compared with it; but in this case the controversy moved in a narrow sphere of formulas already marked off by tradition. On the other hand, in spite of the exegetical and pseudo-historical materials that encumbered the problems in this instance also, there is a freshness about the Pelagian controversy and disputants that is wanting in the Greek contentions.Pelagius and his friends were always convinced that the disputed questions, while extremely important, were not dogmatic. We can once more, therefore, study very clearly what at that time was held to be dogma; (see De gestis Pelag. 16: Pelagius denied at the Synod at Diospolis that statements of high dogmatic import were his; when it was proposed that he should anathematise those who taught them, he replied: “Anathematizo quasi stultos, non quasi hæreticos, si quidem non est dogma.” Cælestius says of Original sin (De pecc. orig. 3): “licet quæstionis res sit ista, non hæresis.” He also declared in the Libellus fidei (26) submitted at Rome: “si quæ vero præter fidem quæstiones natæ sunt . . . non ego quasi auctor alicujus dogmatis definita hæc auctoritate statui.” Hahn, § 134. This was also the view at first of Pope Zosimus (Ep. 3, 7). Julian (Op. imp. III. 106) saw dogmas in the doctrine of the Trinity and Resurrection, “multisque aliis similibus.” The essentially literary character of the dispute, the absence of great central incidents, did not prejudice it any way; the main issue was all the freer of irrelevant matter. But it is its most memorable feature that the Western Church so speedily and definitely rejected Pelagianism, while the latter, in its formulas, still seemed to maintain that Church’s ancient teaching. In the crucial question, whether grace is to be reduced to nature, or the new life to grace, in the difficulty how the polar antitheses of “creaturely freedom and grace” are to be united,Augustinianism and Pelagianism were akin in form, and opposed to the previous mode of thought, in that both conceptions were based on the desire for unity. They sought to get at the root of religion and morality, and had ceased to be satisfied with recognising freedom and grace as independent and equivalent original data, as if religion with its blessings were at the same time superior and subordinate to moral goodness. The “either—or” asserted itself strongly. the Church placed itself resolutely on the side of religion. In doing so it was as far from seeking to recognise all the consequences that followed from this position as it had been a hundred years earlier at Nicæa; indeed it did not even examine them. But it never recalled—perhaps it was no longer possible to recall—the step taken as soon as rationalistic moralism clearly revealed its character.

Not only is the inner logic of events proved by the simultaneous and independent emergence of Augustinianism and Pelagianism, but the how strikes us by its consistency. On the one side we have a hot-blooded man who had wrestled, while striving for truth, to attain strength and salvation, to whom the sublimest thoughts of the Neoplatonists, the Psalms, and Paul had solved the problems of his inner life, and who had been over-powered by his experience of the living God. On the other, we have a monk and a eunuch,Pelagius, a monk leading a free life—Cælestius, “naturæ vitio eunuchus matris utero editus,” both laymen, Cælestius auditorialis scholasticus. Pelagius was a Briton (an Irishman? called Morgan?), but in view of the intercourse between different countries at the time, the birthplace is somewhat indifferent. Cælestius was won over by Pelagius in Rome, and then gave up his worldly career. both without traces of any inner struggles, both enthusiasts for virtue, and possessed by the idea of summoning a morally listless Christendom to exert its will, and of leading it to rnonachist perfection; equally familiar with the Fathers, desirous of establishing relations with the East, and well versed in Antiochene exegesis;It is uncertain whether Pelagius had been in the East before he appeared in Rome. Cælestius had heard Rufinus in Rome, and stated that the latter would have nothing to do with the “tradux peccati” (De pecc. orig. 3). Marius Mercator has even sought to deduce Pelagianism from Theodore of Mopsuestia’s teaching, and supposed that Rufinus “the Syrian” (identical (?) with Rufinus of Aquileia) brought it to Rome. Others have repeated this. While the direct points of contact at the beginning are problematical, it is certain (1) that Pelagianism and Theodore’s teaching approximate very closely (see Gurjew, Theodor v. Mopsu. 1890 [in Russian] p. 44 ff.); (2) that Theodore took up sides in the controversy against the teaching of Augustine and Jerome: he wrote a work “against those who maintain that men sin by nature, and not at their own discretion;” (see Photius cod. 177); (3) that the Pelagians looked to him as a protector and Julian of Eclanum fled to him; (4) that the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians were convinced that they could count on the East (and even on the Church of Constantinople) for support, and that some of them studied in Constantinople. Theodore’s distinctive doctrine of Grace is not found in Pelagian writings; for this reason he could not ally himself thoroughly with Julian (see Kihn, Theodor v. Mopsu. p. 42 ff.). But their affinity was unquestionable. It is therefore no mere inference that leads Cassian (c. Nestor. I. 3 sq.) to combine the Nestorians with the Pelagians (“cognata hæresis”). The interests and methods of both were the same. The comparison with Eunomius and Aetius is also pertinent. but, above all, following that Stoic and Aristotelian popular philosophy—theory of knowledge, psychology, ethics and dialectics—which numbered so many adherents among cultured Christians of the West. The third member of the league, Julian of Eclanum, the early widowed Bishop, was more active and aggressive than the reserved and prudent Pelagius,De pecc. orig. 13: “Quid inter Pelagium et Cælestium in hac quæstione distabit, nisi quod ille apertior, iste occultior fuit; ille pertinacior, iste mendacior, vel certe ille liberior, hic astutior.” “Cælestius incredibili loquacitate.” Many adherents of the new teaching preferred to be called “Cælestiani.” more circumspect than Cælestius, the agitator, and more cultured than either. Overbearing in manner, he had a talent for dialectics, and, more stubborn than earnest, was endowed with an insatiable delight in disputing, and a boyish eagerness to define conceptions and construct syllogisms. He was no monk, but a child of the world, and jovial by nature. He was, indeed, the first, and up to the sixteenth century, the unsurpassed, unabashed representative of a self-satisfied Christianity. Pelagius and Cælestius required the aid of Julian, if the moralistic mode of thought was not to be represented from one side alone—the religious view needed only one representative. Certainly no dramatist could have better invented types of these two contrasted conceptions of life than those furnished by Augustine on the one hand, and the two earnest monks, Pelagius and Clestius, and the daring, worldly bishop Julian on the other.The earnestness and “holiness” of Pelagius are often attested, especially by Augustine himself and Paulinus of Nola. His untruthfulness, indeed, throws a dark shadow on his character: but we have not the material to enable us to decide confidently how far he was entrapped into it, or how far he reserved his opinion in the legitimate endeavour to prevent a good cause being stifled by theology. Augustine, the truthful, is here also disposed to treat charitably the falsehoods of his opponent. But we must, above all, reflect that at that time priests and theologians lied shamelessly in self-defence, in speeches, protocols, and writings. Public opinion was much less sensitive, especially when accused theologians were exculpating themselves, as can be seen from Jerome’s writings, though not from them alone. The people who got so angry over Pelagius’ lies were no small hypocrites. Augustine was entitled to be wroth; but his work De gestis Pelagii shows how considerate and tolerant he remained in spite of everything. Pelagius and Cælestius must have belonged to those lucky people who, cold by nature and temperate by training, never notice any appreciable difference between what they ought to do and what they actually do. Julian was an emotional character, a young man full of self-confidence (c. Julian II. 30: “itane tandem, juvenis confidentissime, consolari te debes, quia talibus displices, an lugere?”), who, in his youth, had had dealings with the Roman Bishop Innocent (c. Julian I. 13) and Augustine, “vir acer ingenio, in divinis scripturis doctus, Græca et Latina lingua scholasticus; prius quam impietatem Pelagii in se aperiret, clarus in doctoribus ecclesiæ fuit” (Gennad. script. eccl. 46). In particular, he was unusually learned in the history of philosophy. Early author and bishop, he seems, like so many precocious geniuses, never to have got beyond the stage reached by the clever youth. Fancy and passionate energy checked his growth, and made him the fanatical exponent of the moralistic theory. In any case he is not to be taken lightly. The ancient Church produced few geniuses so hold and heedless. His criticism is often excellent, and always acute. But even if we admitted that his whole criticism was correct, we would find ourselves in the end in possession of nothing but chaff. We also miss in his case that earnest sense of duty which we do not look for in vain in Pelagius. For this very reason, the delightful impression produced by a serene spirit, who appeared to avenge despised reason and authoritative morality, is always spoiled by the disagreeable effect caused by the creaking sound of a critical chopping-machine. An excellent monograph on Julian by Bruckner will appear immediately in the “Texten and Unters.”

We have thus already indicated the origin of Pelagianism. It is the consistent outcome of the Christian rationalism that had long been wide spread in the West, especially among the more cultured, that had been nourished by the popular philosophy influenced by Stoicism and Aristotelianism,Cicero’s words: “virtutem nemo unquam acceptam deo retulit,” could be inscribed as a motto over Pelagianism. and had by means of Julian received a bias to (Stoic) naturalism.Pelagianism and Augustinianism are also akin in form, in that in both the old dramatic eschatological element, which had hitherto played so great a rôle in the West, and had balanced moralism, wholly disappears. But Julian was the first to secularise the type of thought. (We may not overlook the fact that it originally fell back upon monachism, still in its early stages in the West, and that the two phenomena at first sought a mutual support in each other.)The Antiochene theologians also were notoriously zealous defenders of monachism. Nature, free-will, virtue and law, these—strictly defined and made independent of the notion of God—were the catch-words of Pelagianism: self-acquired virtue is the supreme good which is followed by reward. Religion and morality lie in the sphere of the free spirit;Here we have a third point (see p. 170, n. 1) in which Pelagianism and Augustinianism are akin in form. Neither is interested in the mysticism of the cultus; their authors rather strive to direct spiritual things in spiritual channels, though Augustine, indeed, did not entirely succeed in doing so. they are won at any moment by man’s own effort. The extent to which this mode of thought was diffused is revealed, not only by the uncertain utterances of theologians, who in many of their expositions show that they know better,See the remarks on Ambrose, p. 50. Perhaps the three rules of Tichonius best show the confusion that prevailed (Aug. de doctr. Christ. III. 46: “opera a deo dari merito fidei, ipsam vero fidem sic esse a nobis ut nobis non sit a deo.” Yet Augustine sought (c. Julian. L. I.) to give traditional evidence for his doctrine. but above all by the Institutes of Lactantius.One passage (IV. 24 sq.) became famous in the controversy: “oportet magistrum doctoremque virtutis homini simillimum fieri, ut vincendo peccatum doceat hominem vincere posse peccatum . . . ut desideriis carnis edomitis doceret, non necessitatis esse peccare, sed propositi ac voluntatis.” In what follows we have first to describe briefly the external course of the controversy, then to state the Pelagian line of thought, and finally to expound Augustine’s doctrine.Our sources are the writings of Pelagius, Cælestius, and Julian (chiefly in Jerome and Augustine) Augustine’s works (T. X. and c. 20, letters among which Epp. 186, 194 are the most important), Jerome, Orosius, Marius Mercator, and the relevant Papal letters. Mansi T. IV:, Hefele, Vol. II. For other literature see above, p. 61. Marius was the most active opponent of the Pelagians towards the close of the controversy, and obtained their condemnation in the East (see Migne, T. 48, and the Art. in the Dict. of Chr. Biog).

I. We first meet with Pelagius in Rome. In every century there have appeared preachers in Italy who have had the power of thrilling for the moment the vivacious and emotional Italians. Pelagius was one of the first (De pecc. orig. 24: “He lived for a very long time in Rome”). Roused to anger by an inert Christendom, that excused itself by pleading the frailty of the flesh and the impossibility of fulfilling the grievous commandments of God, he preached that God commanded nothing impossible, that man possessed the power of doing the good if only he willed, and that the weakness of the flesh was merely a pretext. “In dealing with ethics and the principles of a holy life, I first demonstrate the power to decide and act inherent in human nature, and show what it can achieve, lest the mind be careless and sluggish in pursuit of virtue in proportion to its want of belief in its power, and in its ignorance of its attributes think that it does not possess them.”Pelag. Ep. ad Demetr.: “ne tanto remissior sit ad virtutem animus ac tardior, quanto minus se posse credat et dum quod inesse sibi ignorat id se existimet non habere.” In opposition to Jovinian, whose teaching can only have encouraged laxity, he proclaimed and urged on Christians the demands of monachism; for with nothing less was this preacher concerned.He was, perhaps, not the first; we do not know whom Augustine meant in De pecc. orig. 25 (“Pelagius et Cælestius hujus perversitatis auctores vel perhibentur vel etiam probantur, vel certe si auctores non sunt, sed hoc ab aliis didicerunt, assertores tamen atque doctores”), and De gest Pelag. 61 (“post veteres hæreses inventa etiam modo hæresis est non ab episcopis seu presbyteris vel quibuscumque clericis, sed a quibusdam veluti monachis”). Pelagius and Cælestius may themselves be understood in the second passage. Of unquestioned orthodoxy,The Confession of Faith, afterwards tendered (Hahn, § 133), is clear and confident in its dogmatic parts. The unity of the Godhead is not so strongly pronounced in the doctrine of the Trinity as with Augustine; Pelagius resembled the Greeks more strongly in this respect also. prominent also as exegete and theologian in the capital of Christendom,At Rome Pelagius wrote the Ep. to Paulinus of Nola, the three books De fide trinitatis, his Eulogia and Commentaries on Paul’s Epistles, to which Augustine afterwards referred. The latter have been preserved for us among Jerome’s works; but their genuineness is suspected. Augustine mentions, besides, an Ep. ad Constantium episc. (De grat. 39); it is not known when it was written. so barren in literary work, he was so energetic in his labour that news of his success penetrated to North Africa.De gestis Pelag. 46: “Pelagii nomen cum magna ejus laude cognovi.” He took to do with the practical alone. Apparently he avoided theological polemics; but when Augustine’s Confessions began to produce their narcotic effects, he opposed them. Yet positive teaching, the emphasising of the freedom of the will, always remained to him the chief thing. On the other hand, his disciple and friend CælestiusBy him are three works de monasterio. “Cælesti opuscula,” De gratia, 32. seems to have attacked original sin (tradux peccati) from the first. His converts proclaimed as their watchword that the forgiveness of sin was not the object of infant baptism.So Augustine heard when in Carthage; see De pecc. mer. III. 12. When Alaric stormed Rome, the two preachers retreated by Sicily to North Africa. They intended to visit Augustine; but Pelagius and he did not meet either in Hippo or Carthage.De gestis Pelag. 46. Probably the former left suddenly when he saw that he would not attain his ends in Africa, but would only cause theological strife. On the other hand, Cælestius remained, and became candidate for the post of Presbyter in Carthage. But as early as A.D. 412 (411) he was accused by Paulinus, Deacon in Milan (afterwards Ambrose’s biographer), at a Synod held in Carthage before Bishop Aurelius.Marius Merc. Common. and Aug., De pecc. orig., 2 sq. It is worthy of note that the complaint came from a disciple of Ambrose. This establishes the continuity of the Antipelagian teaching. The points of the complaint, reduced to writing, were as follows:—He taught “that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he had or had not sinned—that Adam’s sin injured himself alone, and not the human race—infants at birth are in that state in which Adam was before his falsehood—that the whole human race neither dies on account of Adam’s death or falsehood, nor will rise again in virtue of Christ’s resurrection—the law admits men to the kingdom of heaven as well as the gospel—even before the advent of our Lord there were impeccable men, i.e., men without sin—that man can be without sin and can keep the divine commands easily if he will.”“Adam mortalem factum, qui sive peccaret sive non peccaret moriturus fuisset—peccatum Adæ ipsum solum læsit, non genus humanum—parvuli qui nascuntur in eo statu sunt, in quo fuit Adam ante prævaricationem—neque per mortem vel prævaricationem Adæ omne genus hominum moritur, nec per resurrectionem Christi omne genus hominum resurget—lex sic mittit ad regnum cœlorum quomodo et evangelium—et ante adventum domini fuerunt homines impeccabiles, i.e., sine peccato—hominem posse esse sine peccato et mandata dei facile custodire, si velit.” On the transmission of these propositions, see Klasen, Pelagianismus, p. 48 f. Cælestius declared at the conference that infants needed baptism and had to be baptised; that since he maintained this his orthodoxy was proved; that original sin (tradux peccati) was at any rate an open question, “because I have heard many members of the Catholic Church deny it, and also others assent to it.”“Quia intra Catholicam constitutos plures audivi destruere nec non et alios adstruere.” He was, nevertheless, excommunicated. In the Libellus Brevissimus, which he wrote in his own defence, he admitted the necessity of baptism if children were to be saved; but he held that there was a kingdom of heaven distinct from eternal life. He would not hear of forgiveness of sin in connection with infant baptism.De pecc. mer. I. 58, 62. He was indisputably condemned because he undid the fixed connection between baptism and forgiveness, thus, as it were, setting up two baptisms, and offending against the Symbol. He now went to Ephesus,He is said to have stayed before this in Sicily, but that is merely a guess on Augustine’s part, an inference from the spread of Cwlestian heresies there. See Augustine’s interesting letters, Epp. 156, 157, 22, 23 sq. From these we learn that Cælestius actually taught: “divitem manentem in divitiis suis regnum dei non posse ingredi, nisi omnia sua vendiderit; nec prodesse eidem posse, si forte ex ipsis divitiis mandata fecerit.” In the “definitiones Cælestii” a document which came to Augustine from Sicily, and whose origin is indeed uncertain, the Stoic method of forming definitions is noteworthy. In it there also occurs the famous definition of sin—“that which can be let alone”—(Gœthe gives the converse description: “What, then, do you call sin? With everyone I call it what can not be let alone.”) The whole argument serves to prove that since peccatum vitari potest, man can be sinless (De perfect. just. 1 sq.). In the passage just cited, and again at Diospolis (De gestis Pelag. 29-63) a work by Cælestius is mentioned, whose title is unknown. Not a few sentences have been preserved (l.c.): “Plus facimus quam in lege et evangelis jussum est—gratiam dei et adjutorium non ad singulos actus dari, sed in libero arbitrio esse, vel in lege ac doctrina—dei gratiam secundum merita nostra dari, quia si peccatoribus illam dat, videtur esse iniquus—si gratia dei est, quando vincimus peccata, ergo ipse est in culpa, quando a peccato vincimur, quia omnino custodire nos aut non potuit aut noluit—unumquemque hominem omnes virtutes posse habere et gratias—filios dei non posse vocari nisi omni modo absque peccato fuerint effecti—oblivionem et ignorantiam non subjacere peccato, quoniam non secundum voluntatem eveniunt, sed secundum necessitatem—non esse liberum arbitrium, si dei indigeat auxilio, quoniam in propria voluntate habet unusquisque aut facere aliquid aut non facere—victoriam nostram non ex dei esse adjutorio, sed ex libero arbitrio—si anima non potest esse sine peccato, ergo et deus subjacet peccato, cujus pars, hoc est anima, peccato obnoxia est—pænitentibus venia non datur secundum gratiam et misericordiam dei, sed secundum merita at laborem eorum, qui per pænitentiam digni fuerint misericordia.” We readily see, what indeed has not hitherto been clearly perceived, that this writing of Cælestius must have been the real cause of offence. It could not but open the eyes even of the waverers. We return to it in the text. there became Presbyter, and afterwards betook himself to Constantinople.

4. Augustine’s Interpretation of the Symbol (Enchiridion ad Laurentium). The New System of Religion.

After the exposition given above p. 106 f., we shall best conclude our account of Augustine’s rôle in the history of dogma, by reviewing the expositions given in the Enchiridion of the contents of the Catholic religion. Everything is combined in this book to instruct us as to the nature of the revision (and on the other hand of the confirmation) by Augustine of the popular Catholic dogmatic doctrine that gave a new impress to the Western Church. We shall proceed first to give a minute analysis of the book, and then to set down systematically what was new and at the same time lasting.

Augustine begins by saying that the wisdom of man is piety (“hominis sapientia pietas est” or more accurately “θεοσέβεια”) (2). The answer to the question how God is to be worshipped, is—by faith, hope, and love. We have accordingly to determine what is meant by each of these three virtues (3). In them is comprised the whole doctrine of religion. They cannot, however, be established by reason or perception, but must be derived from Holy Scripture, and be implicitly believed in on the testimony of the sacred writers (4). When the soul has attained this faith, it will, if faith works in love, strive to reach that vision by which holy and perfected souls perceive the ineffable beauty, the complete contemplation of which is supreme blessedness. “The beginning in faith, the completion in sight, the foundation Christ.” But Christ is the foundation only of the Catholic faith, although heretics also call themselves by his name. The evidence for this exclusive relationship between Christ and the Catholic Church would carry us too far here (5). We do not intend to enter into controversy, but to expound (6). The Symbol and the Lord’s Prayer constitute the contents of faith (symbol), and of hope and love (prayer); but faith also prays (7). Faith applies also to things which we do not hope for, but fear; and further to our own affairs and those of others. So far as it—like hope—refers to invisible, future blessings, it is itself hope. But without love it profits nothing, because the devils also believe. Thus everything is comprehended in faith, which works by love and possesses hope (8)

Augustine now passes to the Symbol (the ancient Apostolic creed), in order to state the contents of faith. In § 9-32, he deals with the first article. The knowledge of nature and physics does not belong to faith—besides, scholars conjecture rather than know in this matter (opinantes quam scientes). It is enough for the Christian to believe that the goodness of the creator is simply the first cause of all things, so that there is no nature unless either it is he himself, or is of him. Further, that this creator is the “Trinity, supremely and equally, and unchangeably good” (trinitas summe et æquabiliter et immutabiliter bona), and that while created things do not Possess this quality, they are good; nay, everything collectively is very good, and produces a wonderful beauty, in which evil, set in its right place, only throws the good into relief (9, 10). Augustine at once passes to the doctrine of evil. God permits it only because he is so powerful that he can make good out of evil, i.e., he can restore the defect of the good (privatio boni), evil being represented as such defect (morbus [disease] vulnus [wound]). In the notion of that which is not supremely good (non summum bonum esse) we have the capacity for deterioration; but the good, which is involved in the existence of any substance, cannot be annihilated, unless the substance itself be destroyed. But in that case corruption itself also ceases, since it can never exist save in what is good: evil can only exist in what is good (in a bonum). This is expounded at length (11-15). The causes of good and evil must be known, in order to escape the errors and infirmities (ærumnæ) of this life. On the other hand, the causes of great movements in nature—Augustine returns to § 9—need not be known; we do not even know the conditions of our health, which yet lie nearest us (16)!

But is not every error an evil, and what are we to think of deception, lying? These questions are minutely discussed in §§ 17-22. Every case of ignorance is not an error, but only supposed knowledge is, and every error is not hurtful; there is even a good error, one that is of use. But since it is unseemly (deforme atque indecens) for the mind to hold the truth to be false, and the uncertain certain, our life is for that very reason wretched, because at times we need error that we may not lose our life. Such will not be that existence, “where truth itself will be the life of our soul” (ubi ipsa veritas vita animæ nostræ erit). But the lie is worst, so bad that even liars themselves hate being lied to. But yet falsehood offers a difficult problem. (The question of lying in an emergency, whether it can become a duty for a righteous man, is elaborately discussed.) Here again the most important point is to determine wherein one errs: “it is far more tolerable to lie in those things that are unconnected with religion than to be deceived in those without belief in, or knowledge of, which God cannot be worshipped” (18).“Longe tolerabilius est in his quæ a religione sunt sejuncta mentiri, quam in iis, sine quorum fide vel notitia deus coli non potest, falli.” E.g., to tell anyone falsely that a dead man is still alive is a much less evil than to believe erroneously that Christ will die once more. Looked at accurately, every error is an evil, though often, certainly, a small one. It is possible to doubt whether every error is also sinful—e.g., a confusion about twins, or holding sweet to be bitter, etc.; at all events, in such cases the sin is exceedingly small and trivial (minimum et levissimum peccatum), since it has nothing to do with the way that leads to God, i.e. with the faith that works in love. Error is, indeed, rather an evil than a sin, a sign of the misery of this life. In any case, however, we may not, in order to avoid all error, seek to hold nothing to be true—like the Academicians; for it is our duty to believe. Besides the standpoint of absolute nescience is impracticable; for even he who knows not must deduce his existence from this consciousness of nescience (20). We must, on the contrary, avoid the lie; for even when we err in our thought, we must always say what we think.C. 22. “Et utique verba propterea sunt instituta, non per quæ se homines invicem fallunt, sed per quæ in alterius quisque notitiam cogitationes suas perferat.” (Compare Talleyrand). Even the lie which benefits another is sinful, although men who have lied for the general advantage have contributed a great deal to prosperity (22). Augustine returns to § 16: we must know the causes of good and evil. The sole first cause of the good is the goodness of God; the cause of evil is the revolt of the will from the unchangeable God on the part of a being, good but changeable, first, an angel, then man (23). From this revolt follow all the other infirmities of the soul [ignorance, concupiscence, etc.] (24). But the craving for blessedness (appetitus beatitudinis) was not lost.

We now have an exposition of Adam’s endowment, the Fall, original sin, the sentence of death, the massa damnata, which suffers along with the doomed angels, etc. God’s goodness is shown, however, in his grant of continued existence to the wicked angels, for whom there is no conversion besides, and in his preservation of men. Although it would have been only justice to give them also over to eternal punishment, he resolved to bring good out of evil (25-27). It was his merciful intention, i.e., to supplement from mankind the number of the angels who persevered in goodness, rendered incomplete by the fall of some, in order that the heavenly Jerusalem might retain its full complement, nay, should be increased by the “sons of our Holy Mother” [filii sanctæ matris] (28-29). But the men chosen owe this not to the merits of their own works (to free will); for in themselves they are dead like the rest (suicides), and are only free to commit sin. Before they are made free, accordingly, they are slaves; they can only be redeemed by grace and faith. Even faith is God’s gift, and works will not fail to follow it. Thus they only become free, when God fashions them anew (into the nova creatura), producing the act of will as well as its accomplishment (“quamvis non possit credere, sperare, diligere homo rationalis, nisi velit”—although rational man cannot believe, hope, or love, unless he will).C. 32: “Ex utroque fit, id est, ex voluntate hominis et misericordia dei.” That is, God makes the will itself good (misericordia præveniens) and constantly assists it [miseric. subsequens] (30-32).

The exposition of the second article follows in §§ 33-55. Since all men are by nature children of wrath, and are burdened by original sin and their own sins, a mediator (reconciliator) was necessary, who should appease this wrath (justa vindicta) by presenting a unique sacrifice. That this was done, and we from being enemies became children, constitutes the grace of God through Jesus Christ (33). We know that this mediator is the “Word” that became flesh. The Word was not transformed, but assumed our complete human nature from the virgin, being conceived not by the libido matris, but by faith—and therefore sinlessly.Augustine’s whole conception of the sinfulness mingled with all procreation, and his view that sexual desire is due not to nature as originally cleated, but to sin, have admittedly their roots in the earliest period. But they were expressed with Augustine’s thoroughness only by the Gnostics, Marcion and—the author of the fragment De resurrectione ascribed to Justin. The parallel offered by the latter (c. 3) is extremely striking. There is not yet, naturally, any question of sin being propagated through sexual union; that union is held simply to be sinful; μήτρας ἐστὶν ἐνέργεια τὸ κυΐσκειν καὶ μορίου ἀνδρικοῦ τὸ σπερμαίνειν· ὥσπερ δέ, εἰ ταῦτα μέλλει ἐνεργεῖν ταύτας τὰς ἐνεργείας, οὕτως οὐκ ἀναγκαῖον αὐτοῖς ἐστιν τὸ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐνεργεῖν (ὁρῶμεν γοῦν πολλὰς γυναῖκας μὴ κυϊσκούσας, ὡς τὰς στείρας, καὶ μήτρας ἔχουσας), οὕτως οὐκ εὐθέως καὶ τὸ μήτραν ἔχειν καὶ κυΐσκειν ἀναγκάζει· ἀλλὰ καὶ μὴ στεῖραι μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς, παρθενεύουσαι δέ, κατήργησαν καὶ τὴν συνουσίαν, ἕτεραι δὲ καὶ ἀπὸ χρόνου· καὶ τοὺς ἄρσενας δὲ τοὺς μὲν ἀπ᾽ἀρχῆς παρθενεύοντας ὁρῶμεν, τοὺς δὲ ἀπὸ χρόνου, ὥστε δι᾽ αὐτῶν καταλύεσθαι τὸν δι᾽ ἐπιθυμίας ἄνομον γάμον· There are also beasts that refrain from having connection, ὥστε καὶ δι ἀνθρώπων καὶ δἰ ἀλόγων καταργουμένην συνουσίαν πρὶν τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος ὁρᾶσθαι· καὶ ὁ κύριος δὲ ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς ὁ Χριστὸς οὐ δι᾽ ἄλλο τι ἐκ παρθένου ἐγεννήθη, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα καταργήσῃ γέννησιν ἐπιθυμίας ἀνόμου καὶ δείξῃ τῷ ἄρχοντι καὶ δίχα συνουσίας ἀνθρωπίνης δινατὴν εἶναι τῷ θεῷ τὴν ἀνθρώπου πλάσιν· The mother remained a virgin in giving birth (in partu) (34). We have now a short discussion on Christ as “God and man in unity of person, equal to God, and as man less than God” (35). Christ, the man who was deemed worthy to be assumed by God to form one person with him, is the most splendid example of grace given gratis, and not according to merits. The same grace that fell to the man Christ and made him sinless falls to us in justification from sins. It also revealed itself in Christ’s miraculous birth, in connection with which, besides, the Holy Ghost did not act like a natural father. It was rather the whole Trinity that created the offspring of the virgin: the man Jesus, like the world, is the creation of the Trinity. But why precisely the Holy Ghost is named, it is hard to say. In any case, the man Jesus was not the son of the Spirit, but the latter is probably named in order to point to the grace that, existing without any preceding merits, had become in the man Jesus an attribute which in some way was natural (quodammodo naturalis); for the Holy Spirit is “so far God that he may be called the gift of God” [sic deus, ut dicatur etiam dei donum] (36-40). This is followed again by a long section (41 to 52) on sin and the relation of Christ to it. Christ was free from original and actual sin, but was himself—on account of similarity to sinful flesh—absolutely called sin. That is, he became a sacrifice for sin, representing our sin in the flesh in which he was crucified, “that in some way he might die to sin, in dying to the flesh,”“Ut quodammodo peccato moreretur, dum moritur carni.” and from the Resurrection might seal our new life (41). That is bestowed on us in baptism. Everyone dies to sin in baptism—even the children, who die to original sin—and in this respect sin is to be understood collectively; for even in Adam’s sin many forms of sin were contained. But children are obviously infected not only by Adam’s sin, but also by those of their parents. For their birth is corrupt, because by Adam’s sin nature was perverted; moreover the actual sins of parents “although they cannot thus change nature, impose guilt on the children” (etsi non ita possunt mutare naturam, reatu tamen obligant filios). But Augustine refrains from deciding how far the sins of ancestors project their influence in the chain of descent. It is all expiated by the mediator, the man Jesus Christ, who was alone equipped with such grace as not to need regeneration; for he only accepted baptism by John in order to give a grand example of humility, just as he also submitted to death, not from compulsion, but in order to let the devil receive his rights (42-49). Christ is thus Adam’s anti-type; but the latter only introduced one sin into the world, while Christ took away all that had since been committed. All were condemned in Adam; none escapes the condemnation without Christ. Baptism is to be solemnised as “the grand mystery in the cross of Christ” (mysterium grande in cruce Christi); for according to Paul baptism is “nothing but the similitude of Christ’s death; but the death of Christ crucified is nothing but the similitude of the remission of sin, that as in him a true death took place, so in us a true remission of sins.”“Nihil aliud nisi similitudo mortis Christi; nihil autem aliud mortem Christi crucifixi nisi remissionis peccati similitudinem, ut quemadmodum in illo vera mors facta est, sic in nobis vera remissio peccatorum.” This is elaborated in accordance with Rom. VI; we are dead to sin through baptism (50-52). The clauses of the Symbol are now enumerated down to the “sitting at the right hand” with the observation: “It was so carried out that in these matters the Christian life which is borne here should be typified not only mystically by words but also by deeds.”“Ita gestum est, ut his rebus non mystice tantum dictis sed etiam gestis configuraretur vita Christiana quæ hic geritur.” That is established in connection with each separate article. Thus the “sitting at the right hand” means: “set your affections on those things that are above” (quæ sursum sunt sapite). On the other hand, the Return of Christ has no reference to our earthly life. It belongs entirely to the future. The judgment of the living and dead may also suggest to us the just and unjust (53-55).

To the third article §§ 56-113 are devoted; it is accordingly most elaborately elucidated. §§ 56-63 treat of the Holy Ghost, who completes the Trinity, and so is no part of creation, and also of the Holy Church. This is the temple and city of the Trinity. But it is here regarded as a whole. That is, it includes the section which exists in heaven and has never experienced a fall—the angels who aid the pilgrim part (pars peregrinans) being already united with it by love (56). The Church in heaven is void of evil and unchangeable. Augustine admits that he does not know whether there are degrees of rank among the angels, whether the stars belong to them, or what the truth is as to their bodily form (57-59). It is more important to determine when Satan invests himself in the form of an angel of light (60). We shall only know the state of the heavenly Church when we belong to it ourselves. The Church of this world, for which Christ died, we do know; for the angels he did not die; yet the result of his work also extends to them, in so far as enmity to them is at an end, and their number is once more complete. Thus by the one sacrifice the earthly host is again united with the heavenly, and the peace is restored that transcends all thought—not that of angels, but of men; but even angels, and men who have entered the state of felicity, will never comprehend the peace of God as God himself does (61-63).

Augustine now passes to the “remission of sins” (64-83): “by this stands the Church on earth” (per hanc stat ecclesia qua in terris est). So far as our sins are forgiven, “the angels are even now in harmony with us” (concordant nobiscum angeli etiam nunc). In addition to the “great indulgence,” there is a continuous remission of sins, which even the most advanced of the righteous need, for they often descend to their own level and sin. Certainly the life of the saints may be free from transgressions, but not from sin (64). But even for grave offences there is forgiveness in the Church after due penance; and the important point is not the time of penance, but the anguish of the penitent. But since this emotion is concealed from our fellow-men, and cannot be inspected, the bishops have rightly instituted penitential seasons “that the Church may also be satisfied,” the Church beyond whose pale there is no forgiveness; for it alone has received the pledge of the Holy Ghost (65). Evils remain in this world in spite of the salutaria sacramenta, that we may see that the future state is their goal. There are punitive evils; for sins last on, and are punished in this life or the next (66). We must certainly not fancy that faith by itself protects from future judgment (ὡς διὰ πυρός), it is rather only the faith that works in love (faith and works). By “wood and stubble” we are not to understand sins, but desires after earthly things lawful in themselves (67, 68). It is credible that a purifying fire exists for believers even after death (69)—sinners can only be saved by a corresponding penance combined with almsgiving. Almsgiving is now discussed in detail (69-77). At the Last Judgment the decision turns on it (Mat. XXV. 34 ff.). Of course we are at the same time to amend our lives; “God is to be propitiated for past sins by alms, not by any means to be bribed that we may always be allowed to commit sins with impunity.”“Per eleemosynas de peccatis præteritis est propitiandus deus, non ad hoc emendus quodam modo, ut peccata semper liceat impune committere.” Accordingly some Catholics must even then have looked on alms as conferring a license. God blots out sins “if due satisfaction is not neglected” (si satisfactio congrua non negligatur), without giving permission to sin (70). Daily prayer furnishes satisfaction for small and light daily sins (71).“Delet omnino hæc oratio minima et quotidiana peccata.” The forgiveness, also, that we bestow on others is a kind of alms. Speaking generally, everything good we give to others, advice, comfort, discipline, etc., is alms. By this we besides help to gain forgiveness of our own sins (72). But the highest stages of almsgiving are forgiveness of sins and love of our enemies (73).Augustine here says with great truth that love of our enemies is possible only to a small minority (the perfect). But even those who do not attain it are heard if they utter the fifth petition in faith. Those virtues everyone must practise, that he himself may be forgiven (74). But all these alms fail to benefit us unless we amend ourselves; that is, the alms we give to ourselves are the most important. Of him alone who has mercy on himself is the saying true: “Give alms and all is right (pure) with you.” We must love ourselves with the love that God has bestowed on us; this the Pharisees, who only gave outward alms, did not do, for they were the enemies of their own souls (75-77). The divine judgment, however, can alone determine what sins are light or grave. Many things permitted by the apostles—e.g., matrimonial intercourse prompted by desire—are yet sinful; many sins which we consider wholly trifling (e.g., reviling), are grave; and many—e.g., unchastity—which custom has brought us to look on lightly, are dreadful, even though Church discipline itself has become lax in dealing with them (78-80). All sin springs either from ignorance or weakness. The latter is the more serious; but divine grace alone aids us to overcome either (81). Unfortunately, from false weakness and shame, public penance is frequently withheld. Therefore God’s mercy is not only necessary in the case of penitence, but also that men may resolve to show penitence. But he who disbelieves in and despises the forgiveness of sin in the Church commits the sin against the Holy Ghost (82, 83).

The resurrection of the body is dealt with in §§ 84-113. First, the resurrection of abortions and monstrosities is discussed (85-87); then the relation of the new body to its old material—every particle of which need not pass into the former; and further, the corporeal difference, the stainlessness and spirituality of bodies in the future state (88-91). We must not concern ourselves with the constitution of the bodies of the lost who also rise again, although we are here confronted by the great paradox that a corruptible body does not die nor an incorruptible feel pain).In hell “mors ipsa non moritur.” (92). Those will have the mildest punishment who have only original, but not actual, sin. Damnation in general will be marked by degrees, depending in each case on the measure of sin (93). Augustine now comes to speak of predestination in detail (94-108): “no one is saved except by undeserved mercy, and no one is condemned except by a deserved judgment.”“Nisi per indebitam misericordiam nemo liberatur et nisi per debitum judicium nemo damnatur.” That is the theme. It will become manifest in eternal life why of two children the one is accepted out of mercy, and the other rejected in accordance with justice. God’s refusal of salvation is not unjust, though all might have been saved if he had willed; for nothing happens without his will or permission (95). Even in permitting evil his action is good, or the first article of the Symbol would no longer hold true (96). But if God’s will cannot be frustrated by any choice of his creatures, how does the fact that all are not saved agree with the assurance that “he wills that all should be saved” (1 Tim. II. 4)? The usual answer, that men will not, is obviously false; for they cannot hinder God’s will, as he can certainly turn even the bad into a good will. Accordingly, God does not will that all be saved, but he justly sentences sinners to death (Rom. IX.), that he who receives salvation may boast in the Lord. God is free in his election to grace; he would not have been to be blamed if he had redeemed no one after Adam’s Fall; so neither is he to be blamed if in his mercy he redeems only a few, that none may boast of his own merits, but in the Lord. God’s will is expressed in the case of the lost as much as in that of the saved (“in the very deed by which they opposed his will, his will regarding them was done”).“Hoc ipso quod contra voluntatem fecerunt ejus, de ipsis facta est voluntas ejus.” So great are the works of the Lord that nothing that takes place against his will happens outside (præter) of it. A good son wishes his father to live, but God, whose will is good, decides that he should die. Again, a bad son wishes his father to die, and God also wills this. The former wills what God does not; the latter what he does. Yet the former stands nearer God; for in the case of men it is the final intention that counts, while God accomplishes his good will even through the bad will of men. He is always just and always omnipotent (97-102). Therefore 1 Tim. II. 4 can only mean that God wills all classes of men to be saved, or that all those whom he resolves to save will be saved. In any case it is not to be imagined that he desires to save all, but is prevented (103).

Had God foreknown that Adam, in keeping with his constitution, would have retained forever the will to avoid sin, he would have preserved him in his original state of salvation. But he knew the opposite, and therefore shaped his own will to effect good through him who did evil. For man must have been so created originally as to be able to do good and evil. Afterwards he will be changed, and will no longer be able to will evil; “nor will he therefore be without free choice” (nec ideo libero carebit arbitrio); for free will still exists, even if a time comes when we cannot will evil, just as it even now exists, although we can never will our own damnation. Only the order of things had to be observed, first the “posse non,” then the “non posse.” But grace is always necessary, and would have been even if man had not sinned; for he could only have attained the “non posse” by the co-operation of grace. (Men can indeed starve voluntarily, but mere appetite will not keep them alive; they require food.) But since sin entered, grace is much greater, because the will had itself to be freed in order that it might co-operate with grace (104-106.) Eternal life, though a reward of good works, is also a gift of grace, because our merits are God’s gifts. God has made one vessel to honour and another to dishonour, that none should boast. The mediator who redeemed us required also to be God, “that the pride of man might be censured by the humility of God” (ut superbia humana per humilitatem dei argueretur), and that man might be shown how far he had departed from God, etc. (107, 108). After this long excursus, Augustine returns to § 93, and deals (log) with the intermediate state (in abditis receptaculis), and the mitigation obtained by departed souls through the Mass, and the alms of survivors in the Church; for there are many souls not good enough to be able to dispense with this provision, and not bad enough not to be benefited by it. “Wherefore here (on the earth) all merit is acquired by which anyone can be relieved or burdened after this life.”Quocirca hic (in terra) omne meritum comparatur, quo possit post hanc vitam relevari quispiam vel gravari. What the Church does for the dead (pro defunctis commendandis) is not inconsistent with Rom. XIV. 10; II. Cor. V. 10. For those who are wholly good it is a thanksgiving, for those not altogether bad an atonement, for those entirely wicked it is resultless, but gives comfort to the survivors; nay, while it makes remission complete (plena), it renders damnation more tolerable (110). After the Judgment there are only two states, though there are different grades in them. We must believe in the eternal duration of the pains of hell, although we may perhaps suppose that from time to time God lightens the punishment of the lost, or permits some sort of mitigation. “Death will continue without end, just as the collective eternal life of all saints will continue” (111-113).Manebit sine fine mors, sicut manebit communiter omnium vita æterna sanctorum.

Following his programme, Augustine ought now to have discussed in detail hope and love (prayer); but he omits doing so, because he has really touched on everything already. He therefore confines himself to affirming that hope applies solely to what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, that three petitions refer to eternal, four to temporal, benefits, and that Matthew and Luke do not really differ in their versions of the Prayer (114-116). As regards love, he points out that it is the greatest of all. It, and not faith and hope, decides the measure of goodness possessed by a man. Faith and hope can exist without love, but they are useless. The faith that works in love, i.e., the Holy Spirit by whom love is infused into our hearts, is all-important; for where love is wanting, fleshly lust reigns (117). There are four human conditions: life among the deepest shades of ignorance (altissimis ignorantiæ tenebris), under the law (which produces knowledge and conscious sin), under grace or good hope, and under peace (in the world beyond). Such has also been the history of God’s people; but God has shown his grace even at the first and second stages (118), and thus even now man is laid hold of sometimes at the first, sometimes at the second, stage, all his sins being forgiven in his regeneration (119), so that death itself no longer harms him (120). All divine commands aim at love, and no good, if done from fear of punishment or any other motive than love, is done as it ought. All precepts (mandata) and counsels (consilia) given by God are comprised in the command to love God and our neighbour, and they are only rightly performed when they spring, at present in faith, in the future in immediate knowledge, from love. In the world of sight each will know what he should love in the other. Even now desire abates as love increases, until it reaches the love that leads a man to give his life for another. But how great will love be in the future state, when there no longer exists any desire to be overcome!

No one can mistake the popular Catholic features of this system of religion. It is based on the ancient Symbol. The doctrines of the Trinity and the Two Natures are faithfully avowed. The importance of the Catholic Church is strictly guarded, and its relation to the heavenly Church, which is the proper object of faith, is left as indefinite as the current view required. Baptism is set in the foreground as the “grand mystery of renovation,” and is derived from Christ’s death, in which the devil has obtained his due. Faith is only regarded as a preliminary condition; eternal life is only imparted to merits which are products of grace and freedom. They consist of works of love, which are summed up in almsgiving. Almsgiving is freely treated; it constitutes penance. Within the Church forgiveness is to be had for all sins after baptism, if only a fitting satisfaction is furnished (satisfacere ecclesiæ; satisfactio congrua). There is a scale of sins, from crimes to quite trivial daily offences. For this reason, wicked and good men are graded; but even the best (sancti, perfecti) can only be sinless in the sense that they commit none but the lightest sins. The saints are the perfect ascetics; asceticism is the culmination of love; but all do not need to practise it; we must distinguish between commands and counsels. In the future state both felicity and perdition will also be graded. Departed souls, if at death they have only left trivial sins unatoned for by penance, will be benefited by the masses, alms, and prayers of survivors. They are placed in a purgatory that cleanses them in the form of a decreed punishment.The Enchiridion is not the only work in which Augustine has spoken of this ignis purgatarius. If here popular Catholic elements are already strengthened, and the way prepared for their future elaboration, that is equally true of the doctrines of the intermediate state, the temporary mitigation of the punishment of the lost, the help afforded by holy angels to the Church of the present world, the completion—by means of redeemed mortals —of the heavenly Church reduced in number through the Fall of the wicked angels, the virginity of Mary even in partu,The growing Marian dogma (see Vol. IV., p. 314) was thus strengthened rather than weakened by Augustine. He agreed entirely with Ambrose and Jerome (against Jovinian). By a woman came death, by a woman came life; Mary’s faith conceived the Saviour. Julian’s remarkable objection to the doctrine of original sin, that it made Mary to be subject to the devil (nascendi conditione), Augustine met by saying (Op. imp. IV. 122): “ipsa conditio nascendi solvitur gratia renascendi.” We may not maintain it to be certain (see Schwane II., p. 691 f.) that Augustine thus implicitly taught Mary’s immaculate conception. On the other hand, he undoubtedly held her to be without active sin; see De nat. et gr. 36: “Excepta itaque s. virgine Maria, de qua propter honorem domini nullam prorsus, cum de peccatis agitur, haberi volo quæstionem; unde enim scimus, quid ei plus gratiæ collatum fuerit ad vincendum omni ex parte peccatum, quæ concipere et parere meruit, quem constat nullum habuisse peccatum? hac ergo virgine excepta si omnes illos sanctos et sanctas, cum hic viverent, congregare possimus et interrogare, utrum essent sine peccato, quid fuisse responsuros putamus, utrum hoc quod ista dicit an quod Johannes apostolus?” Gen. ad litt. X. 18-21. Augustine helped to give Mary a special position between Christ and Christians, simply because he first emphasised strongly the sinfulness of all men, even the saints, and then excepted Mary. Mary’s passive receptivity in relation to grace is emphasised with the same words as that of the man Jesus. and the grace of Christ as being greater than Adam’s sin. This also applies to the opinion that the ignorant adherence to a false religion is worse than the knowing utterance of a lie, and to many other doctrines developed by Augustine in other writings. Finally, the conception of salvation that holds it to consist in “vision” and “fruition” is at the root of and runs through everything. Yet the most spiritual fact, the process of sanctification, is attached to mysteriously operating forces.

But on the other hand, this system of religion is new. The old Symbol—the Apostles interpreted by the Nicene—was supplemented by new material which could only be very loosely combined with it, and which at the same time modified the original elements. In all three articles the treatment of sin, forgiveness, and perfecting in love is the main matter (10-15; 25-33; 41-52; 64-83). Everything is presented as a spiritual process, to which the briefly discussed old dogmatic material appears subordinated. Therefore, also, the third article comes into the foreground; a half of the whole book is devoted to the few words contained in it. Even in the outline, novelty is shown: religion is so much a matter of the inner life that faith, hope, and love are all-important (3-8). No cosmology is given in the first article; indeed, physical teaching is expressly denied to form part of dogmatics (9, 16 f.). Therefore any Logos doctrine is also wanting. The Trinity, taught by tradition as dogma, is apprehended in the strictest unity; it is the creator. It is really one person; the “persons,” as Augustine teaches us in other writings, are inner phases (moments) in the one God; they have no cosmological import. Thus the whole Trinity also created the man Christ in Mary’s womb; the Holy Ghost is only named because “spiritus” is also a term for “God’s gift” (donum dei). Everything in religion relates to God as only source of all good, and to sin; the latter is distinguished from error. Hereby a breach is made with ancient intellectualism, though a trace of it remains in the contention that errors are very small sins. Wherever sin is thought of, so is free, predestinating grace (gratia gratis data). The latter is contrasted with the sin inherited from Adam; it first gives freedom to the enslaved will. The exposition of the first article closes with the reference to prevenient and subsequent mercy. How different would have been the wording of this article if Augustine had been able to give an independent version!

The case is not different with the second article. The actual contents of the Symbol are only briefly touched on—the Second Advent is merely mentioned without a single Chiliastic observation. On the other hand, the following points of view come to the front. On the one side we have the unity of Christ’s personality as the man (homo) with whose soul the Word united itself, the predestinating grace, that introduced this man into personal unity with the Deity, although he possessed no merits (hence the parallel with our regeneration); the close connection of Christ’s death with redemption from the devil, atonement, and baptism (forgiveness of sins). But on the other side we find the view of Christ’s appearance and history as loftiness in humility, and as the pattern of the Christian life. Christ’s significance as redeemerSin and original sin are again discussed in §§ 41.52, but they are now looked at from the standpoint of their removal through the baptism that emanates from Christ’s death. is quite as strongly expressed for Augustine in this humility in splendour, and in his example of a Christian life (see S. Bernard and S. Francis), as in his death. He fluctuates between these two points of view. The Incarnation wholly recedes, or is set in a light entirely unfamiliar to the Greeks. Thus the second article has been completely changed.

The chief and novel point in the third article consists in the freedom and assurance with which Augustine teaches that the forgiveness of sins in the Church is inexhaustible. When we consider the attitude of the ancient Church, Augustine, and Luther, to the sins of baptised Christians, an external criticism might lead us to say that men grow more and more lax, and that the increasing prominence given to grace (the religious factor) was merely a means of evading the strict demands made by the gospel on morality—the Christian life. And this view is also correct, if we look at the great mass of those who followed those guides. But in their own case their new ideas were produced by a profounder consciousness of sin, and an absorption in the magnitude of divine grace as taught by Paul. Augustine stands midway between the ancient Church and Luther. The question of personal assurance of salvation had not yet come home to him; but the question: “How shall I get rid of my sins, and be filled with divine energy?” took the first place with him. Following the popular Catholic view, he looked to good works (alms, prayer, asceticism); but he conceived them to be the product of grace and the will subject to grace; further, he warned Christians against all external doing. As he set aside all ritualistic mysticism, so he was thoroughly aware that nothing was to be purchased by almsgiving pure and simple, but that the issue depended on an inner transformation, a pure heart, and a new spirit. At the same time he was sure that even after baptism the way of forgiveness was ever open to the penitent, and that he committed the sin against the Holy Ghost who did not believe in this remission of sins in the Church. That is an entirely new interpretation of the Gospel saying. The concluding section of the Symbol (resurrectio carnis) is explained even more thoroughly than the forgiveness of sins in its third treatment in the third article. But after a short discussion of the subject proper—the doctrine of predestinationThe doctrine of predestination—before Augustine almost unheard of in the Catholic Church—constituted the power of his religious life, as Chiliasm did that of the post-apostolic, and mysticism that of the Greek Church. In Augustine, in addition to its Biblical and Neoplatonic supports, the doctrine had indeed a strong religious root—free grace (gratia gratis data). But the latter by itself does not explain the importance which the doctrine had gained in his case. As everything that lives and works in nature is attached to something else, and is never found in an independent state, so, too, there is no distilled piety, On the contrary, so long as we men are men, precisely the most vital piety will be least isolated and free. None but the dogmatist can construct such a religion. But history teaches that all great religious personalities have connected their saving faith inextricably with convictions which to the reflecting mind appear to be irrelevant additions. In the history of Christianity there are the three named—Chiliasm, mysticism, and the doctrine of predestination. It is in the bark formed by these that faith has grown, just as it is not in the middle of the stem, but at its circumference, where stem and bark meet, that the sap of the plant flows. Strip the tree, and it will wither! Therefore it is well-meant, but foolish, to suppose that Augustine would have done better to have given forth his teaching without the doctrine of predestination.and a view which as doctrine is likewise virtually new, and takes the place of Origen’s theory of Apokatastasis—the main theme is the supposition of an intermediate state, and of a cleansing of souls in it, to which the offerings and prayers of survivors can contribute.

Piety: faith and love instead of fear and hope. Theory of religion: something higher than aught we call doctrine, a new life in the power of love. The doctrine of Scripture: the substance—the gospel, faith, love and hope—God. The Trinity: the one living God. Christology: the one mediator, the man Jesus into union with whose soul the Deity entered, without that soul having deserved it. Redemption: death for the benefit of enemies and humility in greatness. The Sacraments: the Word side by side with the Symbols. Salvation (felicity): the beata necessitas of the good. The good: blessedness in dependence on God. History: God works everything in accordance with His good pleasure. With that compare the dogmatics of the Greeks!An excellent comparison between Origen and Augustine occurs in Bigg, The Christian Platonists, pp. 284-290. He has sharply emphasised the inconsistencies in Augustine’s doctrine of the primitive state, original sin, and grace, but he has not overlooked the advance made by Augustine on Origen. If we evolve Augustine’s doctrine from predestination, then Bigg is right when he says: “Augustine’s system is in truth that of the Gnostics, the ancestors of the Manichees. For it makes no real difference whether our doom is stamped upon the nature given to us by our Creator, or fixed by an arbitrary decree.”

The extent and position of dogma were also modified by this revolution. The old dogmas of the undivided Church, simply because they passed into the background, and were no longer expressive of piety itself, became more rigid; they more and more received the character of a legal system. The new dogmas, on the contrary, the doctrines of sin and grace in which piety lived, did not yet receive in their positive form the position and value of the old, nor were they definitely stated in rounded formulas.The resistance of the Pelagians and their associates was also a resistance to the formation of new dogmas in general. Exactly like the Eusebians in the Arian conflict, they also fought against the new construction of dogmas by the North African Church on formal grounds. Thus, through the instrumentality of Augustine, the extent and importance, in the history of dogma, of the doctrine of the Church became more uncertain. On the one hand, that doctrine was referred back to the gospel itself; on the other, it was much less sharply marked off than before from theology, since the new thoughts were not enclosed in fixed formulas. There was formed round the old dogma, which held its ground as an inflexible authority, a vast indefinite circle of doctrines, in which the most important religious conceptions lived, and which yet no one was capable of examining and weaving into a fixed connection. That is the state of dogma in the Middle Ages. Side by side with the growing inflexibility, the process of internal dissolution had already begun.

During the storms of the tribal migrations, just before the power of barbarianism broke in, God bestowed on the Church a man who judged spiritual things spiritually, and taught Christendom what constituted Christian piety. So far as we can judge, the young Germano-Roman peoples, like the Slays, would have remained wholly incapable of ever appropriating independently and thoroughly the contemporary Christian religion, the Church system transmitted to them as law and cultus in fixed formulas, they would never have pierced through the husk to the kernel, if along with that system they had not also received Augustine. It was from him, or rather from the Gospel and Paulinism under his guidance, that they derived the courage to reform the Church and the strength to reform themselves.

We have already described in Vol. III. of our present work, as far as it bore on the history of dogma, the part taken by the West during this period in the Christological controversies of the East, the great impetus given to the papacy by the successors of Damasus, and further by Leo I. and his successors. We have shown how the papal power was in the sixth century embroiled, and (under Justinian) almost perished, in the East Gothic and Byzantine turmoils; how the fifth Council produced a schism in the West, and shook the position of the papacy, and how on the other hand the latter regained and strengthened its importance through the instrumentality of Gregory I.Gregory, certainly, had almost to abandon the fifth Council. The papal power received its greatest accession of authority from the days of Damasus to the end of the fifth century: it was then settled that the primacy was to be a permanent institution of the Catholic Church. This accession of strength was partly due to the fact that in that century the Chair of St. Peter was occupied by a number of peculiarly capable, clever, and energetic Bishops. But the advance was caused to a still greater extent by external conditions. The most important may be mentioned here. (1) The dogmatic complications in the East gave the Popes an opportunity of acting as umpires, or of exhibiting in full light the doctrinal correctness “characteristic of the Chair of St. Peter.” (2) The Western Roman Empire leant ultimately for support, in its decline, on the Roman Bishop (see the Ep. Valent. III. to Leo. I.); when it perished the latter was its natural heir, since the central political power in the West was gone, and the Byzantine Emperor had not the power, the leader of the German hosts not the prestige, necessary to restore it. (3) The storms of the tribal migration drove the Catholics of Western countries, which were seized by Arians, into the arms of Rome; even where this did not happen at once, the opposition ceased which had been previously offered to the claims of the Roman Bishop by the provinces, especially North Africa. (4) The patriarchal constitution never got established in the West, and the Metropolitan only succeeded in part; thus the development into the papal constitution was ensured for the future. (5) The transactions with the political power of Eastern Rome and the Imperial Bishop there now compelled the Roman Bishops, that they might not be at a disadvantage in dealing with Constantinople, to deduce their peculiar position, which they owed to the capital of the world, entirely from their spiritual (their apostolic or Petrine) dignity. But this exclusive basing of the Roman Chair on Peter afforded the firmest foundation at a time when all political force tottered or collapsed, but the religious was respected. Even the thought of political sovereignty, so far as such a thought could arise in the Roman Empire at all, seems to have dawned on Leo’s successors. In any case, the position of the papacy was so secure at the close of the fifth century, that even the frightful storms of the sixth century were unable to uproot it. That in the West—outside of Rome—the theory of the Roman Bishop (following Matt. XVI.) came but slowly to be recognised, and that the attempt was made to retain independence as far as the exigencies of the case permitted, ought to be expressly noticed. Theologians only admitted that the Roman Bishop represented ecclesiastical unity, and did not assent to the papistical inference that it was the prerogative of Rome to govern the Churches. We also reviewed the important work, in which Vincentius of Lerinum standing on Augustine’s shoulders, described the antiquitas catholicæ fidei, i.e., the Catholic conception of tradition.Vol. III., p. 230 ff. The whole West was agitated in our period by the storms of the tribal migrations. The ancient world received its final blow, and the Church itself, so far as it was composed of Romans, seemed to run wild under the horror and pressure of the times.Salvian. de gubern. I II. 44: “Ipsa ecclesia, quæ in omnibus esse debet placatrix dei, quid est aliud quam exacerbatrix dei? aut præter paucissimos quosdam, qui mala fugiunt, quid est aliud pœne omnis cœtus Christianorum quam sentina vitiorum?” The young peoples which streamed in were Christian, but Arian. In the kingdom of the Franks alone there arose a Catholic, German nation, which began slowly to be fused with the ancient Roman population; but the Church, with its cultus, law, and language, remained Latin: victus victori legem dat. The Franks were at the outset in the Latin Church, as at the present day the Mongolian tribes of Finland are in the Greek Church of Russia. This Latin Church, which, however, had parted in Franconia with the Roman Bishop, or was only connected with him by respect for him, preserved its old interests in Gaul and Spain, and continued its former life until the end of the sixth century.See Hatch, “The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches,” Lecture viii., and “The Growth of Church Institutions,” p. 1 f. Even up till that time the old civilisation had not wholly perished in it, but it was almost stifled by the barbarianism, which resulted from fusion with the invading populace. In North Africa, in spite of dreadful sufferings, Catholic Latin ecclesiasticism held its ground till on into the seventh century. But the Church, once so independent in its relations with Rome, found itself compelled more than once in this period to turn for succour to Rome for its self-preservation. The position of Italy, i.e., of the Roman Bishop, was wholly peculiar, for the Church of Middle and Lower Italy never played any part in Church history. So far as a Catholic Church still existed in the West in the German Empire, it represented the remnant of the shattered Western Roman Empire, and therefore lay in the sphere of power of the Roman Bishop, even if this relationship might not take any definite shape for the moment. But this Roman Bishop was himself fettered to the East, and political and ecclesiastical ties compelled him to look more to the East than the West. The fact that he nevertheless did not lose his connection with the latter, he, in the sixth century, owed more to his past, and his impregnable position in Rome, than to a deliberate policy.The recognition in Rome of the fifth Council had almost alienated Italy and North Africa from the Pope.

Under the Catholic Bishops who had survived in Gaul and North Africa as representatives of the Roman Empire, a not altogether unimportant part of the history of dogma was enacted in our period, viz., the fight for and against complete Augustinianism. The Roman Bishop, though much more concerned with the Christological and political questions of the East, intervened also in this matter. At the close of our period, when absolute darkness had settled on the West, the great monachist Pope and “father of superstitions” introduced the ecclesiastical world to the Middle Ages in the form required by uncivilised peoples. In doing so, he had not to do violence to his own convictions; for the civilisation that was passing away inclined to barbarianism.Yet classical culture was never quite extinct in Italy (Rome). Its representatives in the sixth century were Cassiodorus, the pious churchman, on the one hand, and Boethius, the latitudinarian, on the other. The former laboured earnestly on behalf of the Church and monachism of his time (compare also the exertions of Junilius); the latter was the instructor of a later age (see above, p. 34).

1. The Conflict between Semi-Pelagianism and Augustinianism.

Augustine and the North-African Church had succeeded in getting Pelagianism condemned; but this did not by any means involve the acceptance of Augustinianism in the Church. Augustine’s authority, indeed, was very great everywhere, and in many circles he was enthusiastically venerated;See the Ep. Prosperi ad Aug. [225]. Here Augustine is called “ineffabiliter mirabilis, incomparabiliter honorandus, præstantissimus patronus, columna veritatis ubique gentium conspicua, specialis fidei patronus.” but his doctrine of gratia irresistibilis (absolute predestination) met with opposition, both because it was new and unheard of,See Vincentius’ Commonitorium. and because it ran counter, not only to prevalent conceptions, but also to clear passages of Holy Scripture. The fight against it was not only a fight waged by the old conception of the Church against a new one—for Semi-Pelagianism was the ancient doctrine of Tertullian, Ambrose, and Jerome—but the old gospel was also defended against novel teaching; for Semi-Pelagianism was also an evangelical protest, which grew up on Augustinian piety, against a conception of the same Augustine that was intolerable as doctrine.Semi-Pelagianism also rests undoubtedly on Augustinian conceptions. Loof’s designation of it as “popular Anti-Pelagian Catholicism” is perfectly just (see Theol. Lit. Ztg. 1895, Col. 568, against Krüger, l.c. Col. 368). “Semi-Pelagianism” is a malicious heretical term. The literary leaders of this doctrine were in no respect influenced, so far as I see, by Pelagius, nor did they learn anything from him; on the contrary, they take their stand—the later the more plainly (but not more Augustinian)—on doctrines of Augustine, and it is impossible to understand them apart from his teaching. “Semi-Pelagianism” is popular Catholicism made more definite and profound by Augustine’s doctrines. The Semi-Pelagians are accordingly the Eusebians of the doctrine of grace. See also Sublet, Le Semi-Pélagianisme des Origines. Namur, 1897. Accordingly, it is not strange that “Semi-Pelagianism” raised its head in spite of the overthrow of Pelagianism; rather it is strange that it was ultimately compelled to submit to Augustinianism. This submission was never indeed perfectly honest. On the other hand, there lurked an element of “Semi-Pelagianism” in Augustinianism itself; viz., in the doctrines of the primitive state, of righteousness—as the product of grace and the will—and of merits. When Augustinianism triumphed, these points necessarily came to the front. But a situation was thus created that was wholly insecure, capable of various interpretations, and untrue in itself.

Augustine himself found by experience that his doctrine of grace produced internal disturbances among the monks at Hadrumetum. Free-will was done with; men could fold their hands; good works were superfluous; even at the Last Judgment they were not taken into account. Augustine sought to appease them by his treatise, De gratia et lib. arbitrio, and he followed this with his work, De correptione et gratia, when he heard that doubts had risen whether the erring and sinful should still be reprimanded, or if their case was sufficiently met by intercession. Augustine strove in these writings to remove the misunderstandings of the monks, but he formulated his doctrine of grace more sharply than ever, trying, however, to retain free choice and the popular Catholic view. A year or two afterwards (428-9) he was informed by his devoted friends, Prosper, Tyro,On him see Wörter’s Progr., Freiburg, 1867, and Hauck in the R. E. and HilaryNot to be confounded with Hilary of Arles, the Semi-Pelagian. (Epp. 225, 226,), that at Marseilles and other places in France there was an unwillingness to admit the strict doctrine of predestination, and the view that the will was completely impotent,The opposition was at first cautious. because they paralysed Christian preaching. Augustine replied, confirming his friends, but giving new offence to his opponents by his two writings, De prædestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiæ. He died soon afterwards, bequeathing his mantle to disciples whose fidelity and steadfastness had to atone for their want of independence. The Gallican monks (“servi dei”) now advanced to open opposition.An accurate description of the controversy has been given by Wiggers in the 2nd vol. of his “Pragmatische Darstellung des Augustinismus and Pelagianismus (1833); see also Luthardt, Die L. v. fr. Willen (1863). The later development from Gregory I. to Gottschalk is described by Wiggers in the Ztsch. f. d. hist. Theol., 1854-55-57-59. It is quite intelligible that monks, and Greek-trained monks, should have first entered the lists. Among them the most prominent were Johannes Cassianus, father of South Gallican monachism See De cœnobiorum institutis 1. XII. Cf. Hoch, L.d. Johannes Cass. v. Natur u. Gnade, 1895 (besides Krüger, Theol. Lit.-Ztg. 1895, Col. 368 ff.). and disciple of Chrysostom and Vincentius of Lerinum.The Commonitorium is directed exclusively against Augustine. The fact that it has reached us only in a mutilated form is explained, indeed, by its opposition to him. Apart from it, Prosper has preserved for us Vincentius’ objections to Augustine. The former has especially formulated his standpoint in the 13th Conference of his “collationes patrum,” which bears the title “De protectione dei.”He speaks still more frankly and therefore “more like a Pelagian” in the Institutions. He takes objection above all to absolute predestination, the particularism of grace, and the complete bondage of the will. His teaching as to grace and liberty is as follows.

God’s grace is the foundation of our salvation; every beginning is to be traced to it, in so far as it brings the chance of salvation and the possibility of being saved. But that is external grace; inner grace is that which lays hold of a man, enlightens, chastens, and sanctifies him, and penetrates his will as well as his intelligence. Human virtue can neither grow nor be perfected without this grace—therefore the virtues of the heathens are very small.Here Cassian has learned thoroughly Augustine’s teaching, and we see that he not only accommodated himself to it, but had been convinced by it. But the beginnings of the good resolve, good thoughts, and faith—understood as the preparation for grace—can be due to ourselves. Hence grace is absolutely necessary in order to reach final salvation (perfection), but not so much so in order to make a start. It accompanies us at all stages of our inner growth, and our exertions are of no avail without it (libero arbitrio semper co-operatur); but it only supports and accompanies him who really strives, “who reaches forward to the mark.” Yet at times God anticipates the decision of men, and first renders them willing—e.g., at the call of Matthew and Paul; but even this—rare—action of grace is not irresistible. Free-will is never destroyed by God—that we must hold, even if we admit the incomprehensibleness of divine grace. Similarly, we must hold firmly to the conviction that God wills earnestly the salvation of all, and that therefore Christ’s redemption applies not only to the small number of elect, but to all men. The contrary doctrine involved “a huge blasphemy” (ingens sacrilegium). Predestination can therefore be only grounded on prescience—and the proposition that it was foreknown what anything would have been, if it had been at all, had at that time arisen in connection with the question of those dying in infancy.Some maintained, namely, that the fate of these children was decided by how they would have acted if they had lived; for that was known to God. But Cassian has hardly given an opinion on the relation of prescience and predestination. Regarding the primitive state, he taught that it was one of immortality, wisdom, and perfect freedom. Adam and Eve’s Fall had entailed corruption and inevitable sinfulness on the whole race. But with a free, though a weakened, will, there also remained a certain ability to turn to the good.Statements by Cassian. (Coll. XIII. 3): “non solum actuum, verum etiam cogitationum bonarum ex deo esse principium, qui nobis et initia sanctæ voluntatis inspirat et virtutem atque opportunitatem eorum quæ recte cupimus tribuit peragendi . . . deus incipit quæ bona sunt et exsequitur et consummat in nobis, nostrum vero est, tit cotidie adtrahentem nos gratiam dei humiliter subsequamur.” 5: “gentiles veræ castitatis (and that is the virtue κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν) virtutem non agnoverunt.” 6: “semper auxilio dei homines indigere nec aliquid humanam fragilitatem quod ad salutem pertinet per se solam i.e., sine adiutorio dei posse perficere.” 7: “propositum dei, quo non ob hoc hominem fecerat, tit periret, sed ut in perpetuum viveret, manet immobile, cuius benignitas cum bonæ voluntatis in nobis quantulamcunque scintillam emicuisse perspexerit vel quam ipse tamquam de dura silice nostri cordis excuderit, confovet eam et exsuscitat et confortat . . . qui enim ut pereat unus ex pusillis non habet voluntatem, quomodo sine ingenti sacrilegio putandus est non universaliter omnes, sed quosdam salvos fieri velle pro omnibus? ergo quicumque pereunt, contra illius pereunt voluntatem . . . deus mortem non fecit.” 8: “tanta est erga creaturam suam pietas creatoris, ut non solum comitetur eam, sed etiam præcedit iugiter providentia, qui cum in nobis ortum quendam bonæ voluntatis inspexerit, inluminat eam confestim atque confortat et incitat ad salutem, incrementum tribuens ei quam vel ipse plantavit vel nostro conatu viderit emersisse.” 9: “non facile humana ratione discernitur quemadmodum dominus petentibus tribuat, a quærentibus inveniatur et rursus inveniatur a non quærentibus se et palam adpareat inter illos, qui eum non interrogabant.” 10: “libertatem scriptura divina nostri confirmat arbitrii sed et infirntitatem.” 11: “ita sunt hæc quodammodo indiscrete permixta atque confusa, ut quid ex quo pendeat inter multos magna quæstione volvatur, i.e., utrum quia initium bonæ voluntatis præbuerimus misereatur nostri deus, an quia deus misereatur consequamur bonæ voluntatis initium (in the former case Zacchæus, in the latter Paul and Matthew are named as examples).” 12: “non enim talum deus hominem fecisse credendus est qui nec velit umquam nec possit bonum . . . cavendum nobis est, ne ita ad dominium omnia sanctorum merita referamus, ut nihil nisi id quod malum atque perversum est humanæ adscribamus naturæ . . . dubitari non potest, inesse quidem omni animæ naturaliter virtutum semina beneficio creatoris inserta, sed nisi hæc opitulatione dei fuerint excitata, ad incrementum perfectionis non potuerunt pervenire.”

2. Gregory the Great.

The doctrine of grace taught by Pope Gregory the Great (590 to 604) shows how little Augustinianism was understood in Rome, and how confused theological thought had become in the course of the sixth century. A more motley farrago of Augustinian formulas and crude work-religion (ergismus) could hardly be conceived. Gregory has nowhere uttered an original thought; he has rather at all points preserved, while emasculating, the traditional system of doctrine, reduced the spiritual to the level of a coarsely material intelligence, changed dogmatic, so far as it suited, into technical directions for the clergy, and associated it with popular religion of the second rank. All his institutions were wise and well considered, and yet they sprang from an almost naif monastic soul, which laboured with faithful anxiety at the education of uncivilised peoples, and the training of his clergy, ever adopting what was calculated by turns to disquiet and soothe, and thus to rule the lay world with the mechanism of religion.After reading Gregory’s abundant correspondence, we gain a high respect for the wisdom, charity, tolerance, and energy of the Pope. Because Gregory, living in an age when the old was passing away and the new presented itself in a form still rude and disjointed, looked only to what was necessary and attainable, he sanctioned as religion an external legality, as suited to train young nations, as it was adapted to the Epigones of ancient civilisation, who had lost fineness of feeling and thought, were sunk in superstition and magic, and did homage to the stupid ideals of asceticism.Yet side by side with this external legality there are not wanting traits of Gospel liberty; see the letters to Augustine. It is the accent that changes the melody, and the tone makes the music. Gregory created the vulgar type of mediæval Catholicism by the way he accented the various traditional doctrines and Church usages,So Lau. Gregor d. Grosse, p. 326: “Without perceiving, perhaps, the significance of what he did, he prepared the way for the development of later Catholicism by imperceptibly altering the conception of the tradition received from a preceding age.” and the tone to which he tuned Christian souls is the key we hear echoed by Catholicism down to the present day.Gregory was most read of the Western Church Fathers, as the literature of the Middle Ages and our libraries show. Even in the seventh century he was extolled by tasteless and uncritical writers as wiser than Augustine, more eloquent than Cyprian, more pious than Anthony (“nihil illi simile demonstrat antiquitas” Ildefond. de script. I). The voice is the voice of Gregory, and also of Jerome, but the hands are Augustine’s. Only in one respect he was not Augustine’s disciple. Akin to Cyprian and Leo I. and well versed in jurisprudence, he laid stress on the legal element in addition to the ritual and sacramental. Through him the amalgamation of doctrine and Church government made a further advance in the West.Lau gives a detailed account of Gregory’s teaching; l.c. pp. 329-556. We see here the extent of Gregory’s dependence on Augustine. He especially lays as great stress on Holy Scripture being the rule of life and doctrine. The most profound of Augustine’s thoughts are touched on, but they are all rendered superficial.

A few lines are sufficient to depict the emasculated Augustinianism represented by Gregory. Reason, science, and philosophy, are more strongly depreciated by him than by Augustine (Evang. II. hom. 26);“Fides non habet meritum, cui humana ratio præbet experimentum” (§ 1). Tertullian, certainly, had already said that (Apolog. 21) once. miracle is the distinguishing mark of the religious. Reason can, indeed, establish the existence of God, but it is only “by faith that the way is opened to the vision of God” (per aditum fidei aperitur aditus visionis dei; Ezech. II. hom. 5, following Augustine). The doctrine of angels and the devil comes to the front, because it suited popular and monastic piety. We can call Gregory the “Doctor angelorum et diaboli.” As regards the angels, he took particular delight (see Evang. II. hom. 34) in working out their ranks (under the influence of Greek mysticism), in glorifying Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael—the hero of miracle, the great messenger and warrior against the spirits of the air, and the medicine-man—in the exact division of angelic tasks and the idea of guardian spirits; he held that angels watched over men, as the latter did over cattle. He who thought so little of Græco-Roman culture sanctioned its most inferior parts in his doctrine of the angels. His monkish fancy dealt still more actively in conceptions about the devil and demons, and he gave new life to ideas about Antichrist, who stood already at the door, because the world was near its end. As the Logos had assumed human nature, so the devil would be incarnate at the end of the world (Moral. 31, 24; 13, 10). Before Christ appeared, the devil possessed all men of right, and he still possesses unbelievers. He raged through the latter; but as regarded believers he was a powerless and cheated devil. The doctrines of redemption, justification, grace, and sin show an Augustinianism modified in the interests of miracle, sacred rites and monachism. The God-man—whose mother remained a virgin at and after the birth—was sinless, because he did not come into the world through fleshly lust. He is our redeemer (redemptor) and mediator—these titles being preferred—and he especially propitiated the devil by purchasing men from him with his death,The deception theory is thus given by Gregory in its most revolting form. The devil is the fish snapping at Christ’s flesh, and swallowing the hidden hook, his divinity; see Moral. 33, 7, 9. and he abolished the disunion between angels and men. It is also remarked incidentally that Christ bore our punishments and propitiated God’s wrath. But, besides redemption from the devil, the chief thing is deliverance from sin itself. It was effected by Christ putting an end to the punishment of original sin, and also destroying sin itself, by giving us an example.Moral. I. 13: “Incarnatus dominus in semetipso omne quod nobis inspiravit ostendit, ut quod præcepto diceret, exemplo suaderet.” II. 24: “Venit inter homines mediator dei et hominum, homo Christus Jesus, ad præbendum exemplum vitæ hominibus simplex, ad non parcendum malignis spiritibus rectus ad debellandum superbiam timens deum, ad detergendam vero in electis suis immunditiam recedens a malo.” This amounts to saying that Christ’s work was incomplete, i.e., that it must be supplemented by our penances, for it transformed the eternal punishment of original sin into temporary penalties, which must be atoned for, and it acts mainly by way of example.Lau. p. 434: “The chief stress is placed on instruction and example; reconciliation with God, certainty of which is absolutely necessary to man’s peace of mind, is almost entirely passed over; and deliverance from punishment is inadequately conceived, as referring merely to original sin, or is regarded purely externally. . . . All that Gregory can do to give man peace is to direct him to penance and his good works.” He speaks of even the holiest remaining in constant uncertainty as to their reconciliation. He can make nothing of the thesis that our sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake. God rather punishes every sin not atoned for by penance, even if he pardons it; see Moral. IX. 34: “Bene dicit Hiob (IX. 28): Sciens quod non parceris delinquenti, quia delicta nostra sive per nos sive per semetipsum resecat, etiam cum relaxat. Ab electis enim suis iniquitatum maculas studet temporali afflictione tergere, quas in eis in perpetuum non vult videre,” In his commentary on 1 Kings (1. IV. 4, 57), which was hardly transcribed indeed in its present form by Gregory himself, we even read: “Non omnia nostra Christus explevit, per crucem quidem suam omnes redemit, sed remansit, ut qui redimi et regnare cum eo nititur, crucifigatur. Hoc profecto residuum viderat, qui dicebat: si compatimur et conregnabimus. Quasi dicat: Quod explevit Christus, non valet nisi ei, qui id quod remansit adimplet.” In fact, in Gregory’s teaching, Christ’s death and penance appear side by side, as two factors of equal value.Therefore we find over and over in the Moral. in reference to the expiation of sins: “sive per nos, sive per deum.”

We must remember this, or we may assign too high a value to another line of thought. Gregory regards Christ’s death as an offering (oblatio) for our purification: Christ presents it constantly for us, ever showing God his (crucified) body.Moral. i. 24: “Sine intermissione pro nobis holocaustum redemptor immolat, qui sine cessatione patri suam pro nobis incarnationem demonstrat; ipsa quippe ejus incarnatio nostræ emundationis oblatio est; cumque se hominem ostendit, delicta hominis interveniens diluit. Et humanitatis suæ mysterio perenne sacrificium immolat, quia et hæc sunt æterna, quæ mundat.” But this apparently high pitched view after all means very little. It has risen from the observance of the Lord’s Supper. What was constantly done by the priest has been transferred to Christ himself. But both oblations, related as they are to our “purification,” possess their sole value in the mitigation of sin’s penalties. Still another consideration was at work in this case, one that, though relying on Biblical statements, sprang in reality from wholly different sources. It is the conception of Christ’s continual intercession. But this intercession must be combined with the whole apparatus of intercessions (of angels, saints, alms and masses for the dead, which were conceived as personified forces), to see that we are here dealing with a heathen conception, which, though it had indeed long been established in the practice of the Church, was only now elevated into a theory—that of “aids in need.” Gregory’s candid avowal that the death of Christ was not absolutely necessary, showed how indefinite was his view of the part it played in this mediation. As God created us from nothing, he could also have delivered us from misery without Christ’s death. But he willed to show us the greatness of his compassion by taking upon himself that from which he desired to deliver us; he willed to give us an example, that we should not dread the misfortune and miseries of the world, but should avoid its happiness; and he sought to teach us to remember death.Moral. 20, 36; 2, 37. Ezek. 1. II. hom. 1, 2. Here occur fine ideas: “Nos minus amasset, nisi et vulnera nostra susciperet” (M. 20, 36). Nor has Gregory yet sketched a theory of Christ’s merit—after the analogy of the merits which we can gain. That was reserved for the Middle Ages; but he has examined Christ’s work from the point of view of masses for the dead and the intercession of saints.

In the doctrines of the primitive state, original sin, sin, faith and grace, the Augustinian formulas are repeated—after the Canons of Orange, without irresistible grace and particular election.See the proof of positive points of agreement between Gregory and the Canons of Oranges in Arnold, Cæsarius, p. 369 f. Yet Gregory never himself appealed to those resolutions. But a very real significance was attributed to free-will, which Augustine had abstractly admitted. Here we have the fully developed doctrines of free and prevenient grace, of the primitive state and original sin; (the carnal lust of parents is the cause of our life, therefore the latter is sinful; the “disobedience” or “disorderliness” of the genital organs is the proof of original sin; intercourse in marriage is never innocent). And side by side with all this, we have a calm statement of the doctrine of the will, which is merely weakened, and of free choice (liberum arbitrium) which must follow grace, if the latter is to become operative,How could a bishop, who felt himself to be the pastor of all Christendom, have then made pure Augustinianism the standard of all his counsels?—and yet grace is first to determine the will to will. From the first two powers co-operate in all good, since free-will must accept what grace offers. It can therefore be said “that we redeem ourselves because we assent to the Lord redeeming us.”Moral. 24, 10; gee also 33, 21; “Bonum quod agimus et dei est et nostrum, dei per prævenientem gratiam, nostrum per obsequentem liberam voluntatem. . . . Si nostrum non est, unde nobis retribui præmia speramus? Quia ergo non immerito gratias agimus, scimus, quod ejus munere prævenimur; et rursum quia non immerito retributionem quærimus, scimus, quod obsequente libero arbitrio bona eligimus, quæ ageremus.” See Ep. III. 29: Christ will comfort us richly at the judgment, when he observes that we have punished our faults by ourselves. Predestination is simply reduced in the case of sinners and elect to prescience, while at the same time it is maintained in other passages that it rests on God’s free power and grace. The latter assumption was necessary, because Gregory also adhered to “a fixed and definite number of the elect”—to supply the place of angels; but ultimately all belong to that number whose perseverance in faith and good works God knew beforehand.

After all, everything spiritual is reduced to the rites of the Church. As in the East, these come to the front; but they are regarded in a different way. In the East more scope is given to religious sentiment, which exalts itself and luxuriates in the whole of the Cultus as a divino-human drama; in the West, as befitted the Roman character, everything is more prosaic and calculating. Man accomplishes and receives; submissive obedience is the chief virtue; merits are rewarded, but on the humble a merit not his own is also bestowed: that is grace. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and penance are the central points in the legal process of grace. We are baptised: thereby inherited guilt is expiated, and all sins committed before baptism are blotted out; but original sin is not obliterated, and the guilt of later sins remains.Moral. IX. 34: “Salutis unda a culpa primi parentis absolvimur, sed tamen reatum ejusdem culpæ diluentes absoluti quoque adhuc carnaliter obimus.” The casuistical treatment of sins is by no means puritanical in Gregory. He displays in this matter a lofty wisdom united with charity, and gives directions which were certainly the best for the circumstances of the time. He says once (Ep. XI. 64): “It is characteristic of pious souls to imagine that they are guilty of faults when there is absolutely none.” It must be cancelled or atoned for. For this there are numerous means, which are as necessary as they are uncertain. A man must make himself righteous; for righteousness is the supreme virtue (radix virtutum). He is instructed to pray, give alms, and mourn over life. But he is further told: “Those who trust in no work of their own run to the protection of the holy martyrs, and throng to their sacred bodies with tears, entreat that they may merit pardon at the intercession of the saints.”Moral. XVI. 51: “Hi qui de nullo suo opere confidunt, ad sanctorum martyrum protectionem currunt atque ad sacra eorum corpora fletibus insistunt, promereri se veniam iis intercedentibus deprecantur.” This practice of resorting to saints and relics had existed for a long time, but Gregory has the merit of systematising it, at the same time providing it with abundant material by means of his “Dialogues,” as well as his other writings.Similar things to those recorded by Gregory were often narrated at an earlier date; but no Western writer before him had developed these superstitions to such an extent—and he was the most influential bishop. Miracles wrought by relics were to him every-day events; the miraculous power of some was so great that everyone who touched them died. Everything that came in contact with them was magnetised. What powerful intercessors and advocates must then the saints be, when even their bodies did such deeds! Gregory therefore sought to preserve the attachment of influential people by sending relics and—slaves. On pictures, see Ep. IX. 52; IX. 105; XI. 13. A cloud of “mediators” came between God and the soul: angels, saints, and Christ; and men began already to compute cunningly what each could do for them, what each was good for. Uncertainty about God, perverse, monkish humility, and the dread entertained by the poor unreconciled heart of sin’s penalties, threw Christians into the arms of pagan superstition, and introduced the “mediators” into dogmatics. But in terrifying with its principle: “sin is in no case absolved without punishment” (nullatenus peccatum sine vindicta laxatur),Moral, IX. 34, or: “delinquenti dominus nequaquam parcit, quia delictum sine ultione non deserit. Aut enim ipse homo in se pænitens punit, aut hoc deus cum homine vindicans percutit.” the Church not only referred men to intercessors, alms, and the other forms of satisfaction, to “masses for the dead,” which obtained an ever-increasing importance, but it even modified hell, placing purgatory in front of heaven; it thereby confused conscience and lessened the gravity of sin, turning men’s interest to sin’s punishment. Gregory sanctioned and developed broadly the doctrine of purgatory,See Dial. IV. (25) and 39. After God has changed eternal punishments into temporary, the justified must expiate these temporary penalties for sin in purgatory. This is inferred indirectly from Matth. XII. 31, directly from 1 Cor. III. 12 f. There are perfect men, however, who do not need purgatory. already suggested by Augustine.See above, p. 232. The power of the Church, of prayers, and intercessors extended, however, to this purgatory of his.Dial. IV. 57: “Credo, quia hoc tam aperte cum viventibus ac nescientibus agitur, ut cunctis hæc agentibus ac nescientibus ostendatur, quia si insolubiles culpæ non fuerint, ad absolutionem prodesse etiam mortuis victima sacræ oblationis possit. Sed sciendum est, quia illis sacræ victimæ mortuis prosint, qui hic vivendo obtinuerunt, ut eos etiam post mortem bona adjuvent, quæ hic pro ipsis ab aliis fiunt.”

The whole life even of the baptised being still stained at least by small sins, their constant attitude must be one of penitence, i.e., they must practise penance, which culminates in satisfactions and invocations to “Aids in need.” Gregory systematised the doctrine of penance in the exact form in which it passed over into the Middle Ages.On the older Western order of penance, see Preuschen, Tertullian’s Schriften de pænit. and de pudicit. 1890; Rolff’s Das Indulgenzedict des röm. Bischofs Kallist 1893 (Texte and Unters. Vol. Part 3); Götz, Die Busslehre Cyprian’s 1895; Karl Muller, Die Bussinstitution in Karthago unter Cyprian (Zeitschr. f. K.-Gesch., Vol. 16 [1895-96] p. 1 ff., p. 187 ff.). Penance included four points, perception of sin and dread of God’s judgments, regret (contritio), confession of sin, and satisfaction (satisfactio). The two first could also be conceived as one (conversio mentis).1 Reg. 1. VI. 2, 33: “tria in unoquoque consideranda sunt veraciter pænitente, videlicet conversio mentis, confessio oris et vindicta peccati.” Moral 13, 39: “convertuntur fide, veniunt opere, convertuntur deserendo mala, veniunt bona faciendo.” Voluntarily assumed pains constitute satisfactio. The chief emphasis was still held to fall on “conversion,” even penance was not yet attached to the institution of the Church and the priest; but “satisfaction” was necessarily felt to be the main thing. The last word was not indeed yet said; but already the order of penance was taking the place due to faith; nay, it was called the “baptism of tears.”Evang. 1. I. hom. 10: “Peccata nostra præterita in baptismatis perceptione laxata sunt, et tamen post baptisma multa commisimus, sed laxari iterum baptismatis aqua non possumus. Quia ergo et post baptisma inquinavimus vitam, baptizemus lacrimis conscientiam.” And the Lord’s Supper was also ultimately drawn into the mechanism of penance. In this case, again, Gregory had only to accentuate what had long been in use. The main point in the Lord’s Supper was that it was a sacrifice, which benefited living and dead as a means of mitigation (laxatio). As a sacrifice it was a repetition of Christ’s—hence Gregory’s development of the ceremonial ritual—and it is self-evident that this was conceived altogether realistically. In this rite (eucharistia, missa, sacrificium, oblatio, hostia, sacramentum passionis, communio), the passion of Christ;Evang. 1. II. hom. 37, 7: “Singulariter ad absolutionem nostram oblata cum lacrimis et benignitate mentis sacri altaris hostia suffragatur, quia is, qui in se resurgens a mortuis jam non moritur, adhuc per hanc in suo mysterio pro nobis iterum patitur. Nam quoties ei hostiam suæ passionis offerimus, toties nobis ad absolutionem nostram passionem illius reparamus.” who “is entire in the single portions” (in singulis portionibus totus est), was repeated for our atonement. Yet even here the last word was not yet uttered, transubstantiation was not yet evolved. Indeed, we find, accompanying the above, a view of the Lord’s Supper, which lays stress on our presenting ourselves to God as the victim (the host), in yielding ourselves to him, practising love, rendering daily the sacrifice of tears, despising the world, and—daily offering the host of the body and blood of Christ.See Dial. IV. 58, 59. Gregory already laid great stress on the frequency of masses. He also approved of their use to avert temporal sufferings. He tells with approval of a woman having delivered her husband from prison by their means, and he sees in them generally the remedy against all torments in this world and in purgatory. Only to eternal blessedness the mass does not apply.

What has been left here of Augustinianism? All the popular Catholic elements which Augustine thrust aside and in part remodelled have returned with doubled strength! The moral and legal view has triumphed over the religious. What we see aimed at in Cyprian’s work, De opere et eleemosynis, now dominates the whole religious conception, and the uncertainty left by Augustine as to the notion of God, because his ideas regarding God in Christ were only vague, has here become a source of injury traversing the whole system of religion. For what does Gregory know of God? That, being omnipotent, he has an inscrutable will;That is the impression that was preserved of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination. being the requiter, he leaves no sin unpunished; and that because he is beneficent, he has created an immense multitude of institutions for conveying grace, whose use enables the free will to escape sin’s penalties, and to exhibit merits to God the rewarder. That is Gregory’s notion of God, and it is the specific conception held by the Roman Catholic Church: Christ as a person is forgotten. He is a great name in dogmatics, i.e., at the relative place; but the fundamental questions of salvation are not answered by reference to him, and in life the baptised has to depend on “means” which exist partly alongside, partly independently of him, or merely bear his badge. From this standpoint is explained the whole structure of Gregory’s theory of religion, which once more sets up fear“Deus terrores incutit”—often. and hope instead of faith and love, and for the grace of God in Christ substitutes not an improved, but merely a more complicated doctrine of merit. And yet Augustine could not have complained of this displacement of his ideas; for he had left standing, nay, had himself admitted into his system, all the main lines of this theory of religion. Even the manifest and grave externalisation of sin, the direction that we must be ever bathed in tears, while at the same time zealous and watchful to escape the penalties of sin, the perversion of the notion of God and sin, as if God’s sole concern was to be satisfied, since he was the requiter—all these thoughts have their points of contact in the range of Augustine’s conceptions.The term “tutius,” and the via tutior already play a great part in Gregory’s writings; see e.g., Dial. IV. 58: “Pensandum est, quod tutior sit via, ut bonum quod quisque post mortem suam sperat agi per alios, agit ipse dum vivit per se.” Accordingly that is only tutius, and not a self-evident duty. The darkest spot in mediæval piety, the fact that it commanded constant contrition, while at the same time it incited the penitent to make calculations which deadened the moral nerve and changed regret for sin into dread of punishment—this source of evil, which makes religious morality worse than non-religious, was from this time perpetuated in the Catholic Church of the West.Gregory also expressly forbids anyone to be certain of his salvation; for this he could, indeed, appeal to Augustine. His letter to the Empress Gregoria’s lady of the bed-chamber is most instructive (V. 25). This poor woman wished to have assurance of her salvation, and had written the Pope that she would ply him with letters until he should write that he knew by a special revelation that her sins were forgiven. What an evangelical impulse in A.D. 596! The Pope replied, first, that he was unworthy of a special revelation; secondly, that she should not be certain of forgiveness until, the last day of her life having come, she should no longer be in a position to deplore her sins. Till then she must continue to fear; for certainty is the parent of indolence; she must not strive to obtain it lest she go to sleep. “Let thy soul tremble for a little while just now, that it may afterwards enjoy unending delight.”

Among the young uncivilised peoples, all ecclesiastical institutions occupied a still more prominent place than had been given them even by the development of the Church in the Roman Empire. The philosophical and theological capital of antiquity, already handed down in part in compendia, was propagated in new abridgements (Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rabanus, etc.). John Scotus the unique excepted,Johannes Scotus Erigena’s system (chief work: De divisione nature, see Migne CXXII.; Christlieb 1860, Huber 1861, see Ritter and Baur), does not belong to the history of dogma in the West, for it is an entirely free, independent reproduction of the Neoplatonic (pantheistic) type of thought, as represented by the Areopagite and especially “the divine philosopher Maximus Confessor,” whom Scotus had read. Augustine also undoubtedly influenced him; but he has not brought his speculation any nearer Christianity. The most learned and perhaps also the wisest man of his age, he maintained the complete identity of religio vera and philosophia vera, and thus restored to its central place the fundamental thought of ancient philosophy. But to him, only nominally conceding a place to authority beside reason, the philosophia vera was that monism of view in which the knowledge of nature and that of God coincide, thought and being in that case also coinciding. (Everything is nature, and finally indeed, “nature which does not create and is not created,” and the notion of being existing in the human mind is the substance of being itself: “intellectus rerum veraciter ipsæ res sunt.”) Acosmic idealism is carried by Scotus (as by Stephan bar Sudaili) to the point at which even deity disappears in the intellect of man. All agreements with Church doctrines rest with Scotus on accommodation; they do not spring, however, from perplexity, but from the clear insight that wrappings must exist. In reality, even the living movement of nature itself is only an appearance. Without influence, indeed regarded with suspicion in his own time, he did not afterwards become the instructor of the West, though Western mystics have learnt much from him. He was too much of a Greek. In love and power of systematic construction he was phenomenal, and speculative philosophers rightly revere him as a master. no one was now able to probe that intellectual world to its ultimate ideas and perceptions, and make it part of their own spiritual experience.It is, on the other hand, wonderful with what strength of memory and intellect men like Alcuin and Paulinus of Aquileia familiarised themselves with the separate lines of Augustine’s thought. Alcuin also lived a life of Augustinian piety. To the historian of civilisation everything in the epoch is interesting; in the Carlovingian age, the foundations were laid for the developments of the Middle Ages; but to the historian of dogma, if we are to consider not the appropriation of familiar material, but the advance of evolution, that period does not offer much.

The Carlovingian epoch was a great, and in many respects an unsuccessful, essay at a renaissance of antiquity. It was not the product of the slow natural evolution of the Germano-Roman peoples, but Charlemagne and his circle sought to gain by storm a higher culture for the Frankish Empire, by a frequently forced return to antiquity, or by the establishment in their midst of Byzantine culture. Antiquity was still a living thing in Constantinople. Springer has shown, in dealing with the history of art, that the Carlovingian school is to be regarded as the after-bloom of ancient, and not as the beginning of mediæval, art; and this applies also to theological and philosophical efforts. The Carlovingian period marks the epoch-making beginnings in the history of institutions;See Hatch: An introductory lecture on the study of ecclesiastical history, 1885. in the history of spiritual 1ife it is an appendix to that of the ancient world. Therefore the history of dogma in the Middle Ages begins, strictly speaking, with the age of Clugny.On the history of dogma in the Carlovingian age, see Schwane, Dogmengesch. der mittleren Zeit. 1882; Bach, Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters I. Th. 1873, Thomasius-Seeberg, Dogmengesch. II. 1, 1888: Reuter, Gesch. der relig. Aufklärung im Mittelalter, 1875, I. pp. 1-64. The last book discusses the efforts to promote culture. Cf. also Göbl, Gesch. der Katechese im Abendland 1880, and Spiess, Gesch. des Unterrichtswesens in Deutschland von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Mitte des 13 Jahrhunderts, 1885. Further the histories of the German Church by Rettberg and Hauck. On “popular theology” among Anglo-Saxons, Saxons, and Franks, see Bach, l.c. I., p. 81 ff. It is also useless to discuss, in connection with this branch of study, the so-called popular forms of German Christianity found in poetical and prose fragments. For, firstly, their popular character is very limited; secondly, popular Christianity has hardly exercised any influence at all on institutions, not to speak of dogma. He who wished to reach a higher theological culture, read Augustine and Gregory, Gregory and Augustine, and he felt himself to be merely a disciple in relation to these and the other Latin Fathers, having still to learn the lessons delivered to him.John Scotus forms an exception, and so also does, in some sense, Fredegis of Tours, so far as the latter took an independent view of the ominous “nihil” presented by Augustinian metaphysics. Ahner has, however, shown in his Dissertation on Fredegis and his letter “De nihilo et tenebris” (1878) that this work has been over-estimated by earlier scholars.

At that time many of the clergy were undoubtedly keenly desirous of culture; to see this we have only to look at the manuscripts preserved from the eighth and ninth centuries.Our gratitude is due to Schrörs for having given in his monograph on Hinkmar (1884), pp. 166-174, an account of the ancient works read or quoted by the great Bishop. What an amount of learning and reading is evident from this comparison, and yet Hinkmar was by no means the greatest scholar. It is also interesting to notice that Hinkmar held strictly to the edict of Gelasius. Nor must we overlook the fact that a small number of scholars went further than those belonging to the period A.D. 450-650, that they advanced beyond Isidore and Gregory to Augustine himself, saw through the emasculation of religion and its perversion into a ceremonial service and belief in miracle, and returned to the spiritual teaching of Augustine.A greater interest in Dialectics was also shown by many teachers of the Carlovingian period than by earlier theologians. Compare Alcuin’s work, De fide trinitatis, which also displays a valiant effort to reach systematic unity in theological thought. Fredegis, Alcuin’s discipulus dulcissimus, was also reproved by Agobard as a “philosopher” for his preference for dialectics, the syllogism, and vexed questions. (“Invenietis nobilitatem divini eloquii non secundum vestram assertionem more philosophorum in tumore et pompa esse verborum” Agobardi lib. c. object. Fredegisi abb.) Yet his teaching as to auctoritas and ratio was not different from Augustine’s; but distrust was caused by the earnest attempt, on the basis of authority, to use reason in dealing with dogma. In the dispute between Agobard and Fredegis many controversial questions emerged which would have become important if the opponents had really developed them. But the lofty figure of the African Bishop set bounds to any further advance. The best looked up to him, but none saw past him, not even Alcuin and Agobard, though the latter has also studied Tertullian.On Alcuin, see Werner’s monograph (1881). Radbert had also read Tertullian. It is very attractive to study, in connection with Church history, the energetic efforts of the Carlovingian Augustinians, to observe their attempts, following but surpassing the great Emperor, to purify the traditional form of religion, and to narrow the range of a stupid awe of the mysteries and of a half-heathen superstition. But it would merely lead to confusion in the history of dogma if we were to try to examine these attempts.The conditions which heralded the Carlovingian Renaissance consisted in the political position of the Frankish Empire, the flourishing of theological studies among the Anglo-Saxons (Bede), the ecclesiastical activity of Boniface on the Continent, and the partly new, partly revived, relations of the Empire to Rome and Constantinople. The fact that elements of culture from England, Rome, Lombardy, and finally also the East converged at Charlemagne’s Court, and found so energetic a Mæcenas in the king, made possible the renaissance, which then continued to exist under Louis the Pious, and at the Court of Charles the Bald. We cannot over-estimate the contribution made by Constantinople. We need only recall the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus, and John of Damascus, which at that time had reached the Frankish Kingdom. Not only John Scotus, but e.g., Hinkmar, read or quoted the Pseudo-Dionysius. Some knowledge of Greek was possessed by a few Anglo-Saxons from the days of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus in Canterbury; but they were to a much greater extent teachers of Augustinianism; yet not in the Christological question (see under). It was in Augustine along with the Areopagite that the mediæval mysticism of the West—and also Scotus—found its source; for it is very one-sided to make the latter alone responsible for mysticism. The Franks’ love of culture received its greatest strength from the acquisition of the Crown of Imperial Rome, A.D. 800. What had formerly been a voluntary aspiration now assumed the appearance of a duty and obligation; for the king-emperor of the Franks and Romans was the successor of Augustine and Constantine. But how rapidly all this blossom withered! Walafrid writes truly in the prologue to Einhard’s Life of Kaiser Karl: “When King Karl assembled wise men, he filled with light, kindled by God, the mist-shrouded, and so to speak almost entirely dark, expanse of the kingdom entrusted to him by God, by the new radiance of all science such as till then had been in part wholly unknown to these barbarians. But now, since these studies once more relapse into their opposite, the light of wisdom, which finds few who love it, becomes ever rarer.”

The transactions and determining events important to the history of dogma in our epoch divide into the following groups. 1. Controversies as to Byzantine and Roman Christology contrasted with that of Augustine and the West, and between the Gregorian system of doctrine and Augustine’s theory of predestination.In these conflicts the controversy as to Augustine is represented. See also the dispute as to the Lord’s Supper. 2. Disputes shared in by Rome against the East regarding the filioque, and against Rome and the East about images.These controversies are of universal interest in Church history. 3. The development of the practice and theory of the Mass and of penance.In this development the dogmatic interest of the Carlovingians was alone really acute, leading to new definitions, if not at once expressed in strictly dogmatic forms. To this subject also belongs the doctrine of the saints (Mary), relics, and indulgences.

I. (a.) The Adoptian Controversy.See Bach, l.c. Walch, Ketzerhistorie, Vol. IX.; Hefele, Concil. Gesch. III.,² p. 642 ff. (628 ff.); Helfferrich, D. westgothische Arianismus u. die spanische Ketzergeschichte 1860; Gams, Kirchengesch. Spaniens, Vol. II.; Dorner, Entwickel. Gesch. Vol. II.; Hauck, K.-Gesch. Deutschlands, Vol. II., p. 256; Opp. Alcuini ed. Froben; Mansi, T. XII., XIII.; Migne, T. XCVI.-CI.

After the Western Christological formula of the two natures had been forced on the East at the fourth Council, the latter had at the fifth Council given the formula a Cyrillian interpretation, which it confirmed by condemning the Three Chapters. Since the Roman Bishop had to accede to the new definition, which was regarded in the West as a revolt from that of Chalcedon, a schism took place in Upper Italy, which was only got over with difficulty, extending into the seventh century, and damaging the Pope’s prestige in the West. The Monothelite controversies brought the schism to an end,Yet not yet everywhere. and the sixth Council restored the formula of Chalcedon in the new version .af the problem—the question as to the will in Christ. But men were far from drawing the consequences of the formula in the East, or in Rome itself. Mysticism, which taught the complete and inseparable union of the divine and human, and celebrated its triumph in all the ritual institutions of the Church, had long overgrown the intractable dogmatic formula and stifled its influence. But the case was different with many Western Bishops, so long as they had not yet been reached by Greek mysticism, and still were under the influence of the ancient Western tradition, especially Augustine. They held the Christological theory that the Holy Trinity had effected the Incarnation by the second Person of the Godhead, the Son, selecting a man (homo) in virtue of eternal election—without antecedent merits on the part of the man—by uniting with him to form a personal unity, and by thus adopting him to perfect sonship.See Augustine’s Christology above, p. 127 ff. The idea of the adoptio of the man Jesus, or human nature, also occurs in Tertullian, Novatian, Marius Victorinus, and Hilary. This scheme is distinguished toto coelo from the Greek one (received in Rome) of the fifth Council, even if—as happened—the whole of human nature was also understood by the homo. For, according to the prevailing Greek conception, the God-Logos; in the moment of the Incarnation, so assumed human nature and received it into the unity of his being (ἰδιοποιεῖν), that it participated completely in the dignity, and accordingly in the sonship, of the Son, the incarnate Logos thus being in every respect as much the one real Son of God as the pre-existent. To hold Jesus Christ as Son of Man to be merely the adopted Son of God destroyed, according to Greek ideas, the whole mystery of the Incarnation, and took the Church back to the abyss of Nestorianism. Conversely, it was possible for one who took his stand on Augustinian Christology to feel that the contention that the Son of Man was as essentially Son of God as the Logos, was a relapse into Docetism or even Pantheism—the fusion of divine and human. The great claim of Cyril’s conception consisted in its maintenance of the perfect unity of the Redeemer’s personality,So far as the retention of this is the condition of understanding Jesus Christ, the Greek conception is superior to the Adoptian. the justification of the other in its adherence to Christ’s real humanity. This humanity was to the opposite party in truth only a theorem, whose avowal permitted them to deify in concreto everything human in Christ,The defenders of the anti-Adoptian Christology (Alcuin’s) have not latered their tactics at the present day. Thus Bach says (l.c. I., p. 109 ff.): “The Adoptians had no presentiment of that which the (Greek) Fathers call the pneumatic quality of Christ’s flesh. Christ’s body is to them that of common human nature in every respect. In this kenotic (!!) we have the basis of Adoptian dualism. . . . Felix, like Elipandus, does not understand the pneumatic human nature in Christ.” If these words suggest any meaning at all, they show that the modern historian of dogma is as honest a Docetic as the orthodox after Justinian’s heart. while the Adoptians were only able to postulate the unity of the Son of God and Son of Man.The case is precisely the same as in Christological conflicts generally from the days of Apollinaris. There is right and wrong on both sides, but after all on neither, because the conception of a divine nature in Christ leads either to Docetism or the double personality. All speculations that seek to escape these consequences can display at most their good intentions.

I. (b). The Controversy as to Predestination.Sources, collected by the Jansenist Maugin, Veterum auct. qui IX. sæc. de prædest. et gratia scripserunt, Paris 1650; see the works of Carlovingian theologians in the time of Charles the Bald, Mansi, T. XIV. and XV.; Gfrörer, Gesch. der Karol. Vol. I., and K.-Gesch., Vol. III. 2; Dümmlei, Gesch. des ostfränk. Reichs, Vol. I.; Hauck, K.-Gesch. Deutschlands, Vol. II.: Wiggers in the Ztschr. f. d. hist. Theol. 1859; Weizsäcker in the Jahrbb. f. deutsche Theol. 1859; Hefele, Concil,-Gesch. IV²., p. 130 ff.; Bach, Op. cit. I., p. 219 ff; Reuter l.c. I., p. 43 ff; Borrasch, Der Mönch Gottschalk, 1868; Monographs on Hinkmar by v. Noorden and Schrörs; Freystedt, Der wissensch. Kampf im Prädest.-Streit des 9 Jahrh.; also, Der synodale Kampf im Prädest.-Streit des 9 Jahrh. (Ztschr. f. wissensch. Theol. Vol. 36, pp. 315-368; New Series, Vol. I., pp. 447-478), and Studien zu Gottschalk (Ztschr. f. K. Gesch., Vol XVIII., p. 1 ff.).

The revival of theological science in the ninth century led to a thorough study of Augustine. But the theology of Gregory I. had already accustomed men to combine the formulas of Augustinianism with the Pelagianism required by the system of the cultus. Hence a renewal of the controversy would hardly have taken place had not the monk Gottschalk of Orbais asserted the doctrine of predestination with as much energy as Augustine had done in his latest writings, and had he not been opposed by Hinkmar, whom his jealous colleagues would gladly have charged with heresy. It was not his use of Augustinian formulas that lifted Gottschalk out of the mass of theologians, and gave a startling effect to his confession. It was the fact that the doctrine of predestination had become the strength and support of his being after a misspent life. Here again it is palpable that words are not everything, that they remain a tinkling cymbal as long as they are not the expression of experience. Many joined and followed Gottschalk in speaking as he did at the time; but he alone was persecuted as a heretical teacher, because the opposition felt that he alone was dangerous to their Church system.

Gottschalk’s teaching regarding predestination was not different, either in matter or form, from that of Augustine, Fulgentius, and Isidore;Gottschalk is especially dependent on Fulgentius. On Isidore’s doctrine of predestination, see Wiggers, Ztschr. f. d. hist. Theol. 1855; on Bede’s, l.c. 1857. but it must also be said that he taught nothing but predestination. With the devotion, at first of resignation, and afterwards of fanaticism, he committed himself to the hands of God who does all things according to his good pleasure, and does nothing without having determined it irrevocably from the beginning. Predestination is the content of the Gospel, is the object of faith. It is the truth—that twofold predestination to life and death, according to which eternal life is decreed for the good, and death for the sinner, in which, therefore, some are appointed to life, and the rest to death. Nothing is to be set aside that the Church elsewhere teaches, or that it does; but it is a revolt from the Gospel to obscure in the hearts of men the certainty of this eternal unchangeable dispensation of divine grace—for justice and punishment are also good. Until his death Gottschalk defended inflexibly this faith of his, in the living and original language of the convinced advocate.On Gottschalk’s life till the outbreak of the dispute, see Hefele, 1.c. The Augustinian spirit, and Augustine’s language in the Confessio prolixior (Migne, CXXI., p. 349): “Tui profecto sic semper indigent omnes electi tui, quo videlicet tibi de te solo semper valeant placere. Quemadmodum palmites indigent vite, quo fructum queant ferre, vel aër aut oculi luce, quo vel ille lucidus esse vel illi possint videre. . . . te igitur supplex invoco . . . ut largiaris indigentissimo mihi per gratuitae gratiæ tuæ invictissimam virtutem, etc.”

But what did the historical Christ, or the Christ of the sacramentally ordered Church, mean here? If the hidden God with his hidden will was a comfort to Gottschalk, then that comfort consisted in the assurance that this God had also predestinated some to life, and the assurance flowed from the economy which culminated in Christ. For from what other source was it known that eternal predestination also embraced the pardon of a section of mankind? The assurance of the individual gained nothing by this; but among the opposition also no one would have anything to do with certainty of salvation; the individual did not count for much to himself or others. Individualism was not yet developed. Christ accordingly was not in question. Even the resolute defender of predestination looked to him when he thought of election to life. But the system of the Sacraments, legal demands and works, which constituted the Church itself, tottered, as it must always totter, wherever religion is recalled from externality to the inner life. This recall was accomplished in a much more abstract way in the present instance than by Augustine. The most profound of the African’s expositions on liberating grace and the blessed necessity of goodness (beata necessitas boni), which form the background of the doctrine of predestination, do not tell strongly upon Gottschalk. Nor had the Frankish monk been able to appropriate the Neoplatonic speculation, that had been toned down or transferred to a wholly different sphere of ideas by Augustine’s teaching. And, again, he did not know the dialectic of the notion of time, which is inseparable from Augustine’s conception. Yet he was not unfamiliar with dialectics; indeed, if we may trust the accounts given us, he at first took pleasure in the problem on dialectical grounds; but the fire he played with afterwards mastered him. The subject matter itself became precious to him. It corresponded to his own mood, ever growing gloomier, and he championed it with the zeal of the missionary. It was not original sin, or sin that he regarded as the chief subject, but the unchangeableness and wisdom of God. He was a theologian in the narrowest sense of the term.

Gottschalk was first opposed by Rabanus in his letters to Noting and Eberard—shortly before A.D. 848.See Opp. Raban. in Migne, CXII., p. 1530 sq., Kunstmann, Rabanus Magnentius Maurus 1841. He was accused of teaching that right faith and good works were of no avail to him who was not appointed to salvation, and that God forced men to sin and perdition (invitum hominem facit peccare).The view of Rabanus himself, that great, pure, truly pious and unpolitical prince of the Church, was Semi-Pelagian. Other opponents soon arose, and it was declared that he taught a predestination to sin. At the Council of Mainz (848) Rabanus got him condemned,Fragment of a confession of Gottschalk laid before the Synod in Hinkmar, De prædest. 5, Migne, CXXV., p. 89 sq. (Hefele, p. 138): “gemina prædestinatio . . . similiter omnino omnes reprobos, qui damnabuntur propter ipsorum mala merita, incommutabilis deus per justum judicium suum incommutabiliter prædestinavit ad mortem merito sempiternam.” and handed over, by command of King Lewis, to Hinkmar to whose province as monk he belonged.Migne, CXII., p. 1574. In his letter to Hinkmar, Rabanus declares a predestination as regards wickedness to be simply erroneous, and he is able to tell already of people, who, seduced by Gottschalk, gave up pious practices because, forsooth, they were wholly useless.Op. cit. Hinkmar got the judgment against the “miserable monk” repeated at an imperial synodal diet at Chiersey (849). He was deposed from his office, scourged, and rendered harmless in prison.Hincm. De prædest. 2; Migne, CXXV., p. 85; cf. Migne, CXXI, p. 1027. Neither Rabanus nor Hinkmar seems at first to have formed as yet any idea of the difficulty of the whole question—caused by the authority of Augustine and other Fathers. Hinkmar contented himself with referring God’s prescience to good or evil, but predestination to goodness alone.Hinkmar’s large works on the question in dispute were not written till several years later; (yet see the writing Ad reclusos et simplices, A.D. 849-50; Gundlach in the Ztschr. für K.-Gesch., Vol. X., p. 258 ff.; Freystedt, l.c. p. 320 ff., 358 ff.). The first in three books (856 and 857) was so extensive, that it was not transcribed, and so has perished (see Schrörs, p. 136 f. ). The second, De prædestinatione dei et libero arbitrio, was also prolix enough and very meaningless (written 859 to 860, Schrörs, p. 141 ff.). In the introduction to this work, the history of the sect of predestinationists, which is said to have risen even in St. Augustine’s lifetime, is described in a very unhistorical fashion. The sect has now revived, and its newer members adhere to Fulgentius, who never enjoyed a lofty prestige in the Church (c. 3, 8, 13). Hinkmar’s main proposition is that predestination to punishment embraces compulsion to commit sin. “Præscivit deus hominem ad pœnam.” Accordingly there is only a predestination of, not to, punishment. But the position of the case soon changed. Gottschalk composed two confessions, in which he stated his teaching, supporting it from Scripture and the Fathers,Migne, CXXI., pp. 347-349: “Confiteor, deum omnipotentem et incommutabilem præscisse et prædestinasse angelos sanctos et homines electos ad vitam gratis æternam, et ipsum diabolum . . . cum ipsis quoque hominibus reprobis . . . propter præscita certissime ipsorum propria futura mala rnerita prædestinasse pariter per justissimum judicium suum in mortem merito sempiternam.” “Credo siquidem atque confiteor præscisse teante sæcula quæcunque erant futura, sive bona sive mala, prædestinasse vero tantummodo bona. Bona autem a te prædestinata bifariam sunt tuis a fidelibus indagata . . . i.e. in gratiæ beneficia et justitiæ simul judicia . . . Frustra electis prædestinasses vitam, nisi et illos prædestinasses ad ipsum. Sic etiam . . . omnibus quoque reprobis hominibus perennem merito prædestinasti pœnam, et eosdem similiter prædestinasti ad eam, quia nimirum sine causa et ipsis prædestinasses mortis perpetuæ pœnam, nisi et ipsos prædestinasses ad eam: non enim irent, nisi destinati, neque profecto destinarentur, nisi essent prædestinati.” From Gottschalk’s standpoint both confessions are conciliatory. and he also wrote essays in which he emphasised the particularism of Christ’s saving work,Gottschalk frequently maintained that Christ did not die for the reprobi, though he taught a certain general redemption of all the baptised; see Hincm. De præd. 29, 34, 35; Migne, CXXV., p. 289 sq., 349 sq., 369 sq. subordinating the latter strictly to the premundane decree of God. He also, in a letter to Amolo, gave expression to the particularly objectionable principle “that baptism and the other sacraments were given in vain to those who perished after receiving them;” for “those of the number of the faithful who perish were never incorporated in Christ and the Church.”Hefele, p. 169: “baptistum et alia sacramenta frustatorie eis dari, qui post eorum perceptionem pereunt;” for “qui ex numero fidelium pereunt, Christo et ecclesiæ nunquam fuerunt incorporati.” But it was perceived in the more cultured South, apart from Mainz and Rheims, that it was not Gottschalk but his opponents who diverged from Augustine’s teaching. The best theologians ranged themselves on the side of the Confessor e.g., Prudentius of Troyes, Ratramnus of Corbie, then also the learned and acute Lupus of Ferrières,See Freystedt, i.e., p. 329 ff. the priest Servatus Lupus and Remigius of Lyons, for the most part disciples of Alcuin.Bach (I., p. 232 ff.) has analysed and discussed the various writings of these men.

There now began a lively theological controversy (849-50), which was not, however, violent enough to involve the rest of the Church and the Pope, and which was unspeakably unsatisfactory, because staunch Augustinians neither could nor would abandon the ruling ecclesiastical system, and had therefore to seek for compromises where Gottschalk’s results endangered it, and because the Frankish Semi-Pelagians soon saw that they would have to approximate their phraseology to Augustinianism. Among the writings in defence of Gottschalk there were accordingly many shades of opinion, but so were there also on the other side.Men at that time disputed about predestination, just as “positive” theologians to-day quarrel among themselves about the right of historical criticism. Some defend this right, others would restrict or abolish it; but even the former don’t really believe in it, since they take care not to carry out its conclusions. Florus Magister, e.g., advocated the twofold (gemina) predestination, but yet opposed Gottschalk, since he rejected the thought of the irresistibleness of grace.Bach, I., p. 240. Amolo of Lyons treated him in a friendly spirit; but no one else showed so emphatically that Gottschalk’s teaching did away with the historical redemption, the fruits of Christ’s death, and sacramental grace.Bach, I., p. 241 ff. The only one who took up a consistent standpoint, and from it opposed the monk, was John Scotus. His teaching did not rest on Augustine’s doctrine of predestination but on the Neoplatonic and Augustinian ontology, which he developed boldly. According to this, evil and death were nothing. Unchangeable being had only one unchangeable will, namely itself, and it evolved itself alone. Everything else consisted in negation, was nothing actual, and bore this very not-being in itself as a punishment. Applying this to the question of predestination, it followed that those were right who would only admit one predestination.De divina prædest. Migne, CXXII., p. 355 sq. The Synods at Valencia and Langres (859) condemned the work, after Prudentius and Florus Magister had written against it. But friend and foe felt, without seeing through the pantheism of Scotus, that this was a case of casting out the devil by the aid of Beelzebub (“commentum diaboli”). There was only one way out of the difficulty besides that given by Scotus. This was to give up altogether putting the question in the form of the predestination problem, to hold to the historical Christ, and to do justice to Augustine’s doctrine of grace by reducing the Church system to the experience of the new birth and faith. But no one discovered this expedient,Amolo came nearest it. and so the whole controversy necessarily became a maze of insincerity, partly objective, partly conscious. Augustine’s authority, however, was so powerful that the result, if we may speak of such a thing, came nearer Gottschalk’s teaching in words than to the original utterances of Rabanus and his comrades (of whom Pardulus also was one). The latter sought to carry their distinction between prescience and predestination (as regards evil and punishment), and would therefore have nothing said of persons being predestined to punishment. When God foresaw evil, he predestined punishment for those who should not deserve to be redeemed by grace; room, accordingly, is left indirectly to free-will, although, so far as words go, the saved are saved solely in virtue of election. The artificial distinction here made (predestination of life and of the good, prescience of the wicked, predestination of punishment) is apparently defensible, even on an Augustinian basis, since Hinkmar now spoke of a complete loss of freedom through Adam’s Fall. But the distinction was in truth meant to open a door for the entrance of Semi-Pelagianism. This doctrine was adopted at a new Synod of Chiersey (853) under Hinkmar’s leadership.The four chapters of Chiersey yielded more to Augustinianism than was consistent with truthfulness: I. “Deus hominem sine peccato rectum cum libero arbitrio condidit et in paradiso posuit, quem in sanctitate justitiæ permanere voluit. Homo libero arbitrio male utens peccavit et cecidit, et factus est massa perditionis totius humani generis. Deus autem bonus et justus elegit ex eadem massa perditionis secundum præscientiam suam, quos per gratiam prædestinavit ad vitam, et vitam illis prædestinavit æternam. Ceteros autem, quos justitiæ judicio in massa perditionis reliquit, perituros præscivit, sed non ut perirent prædestinavit, pœnam autem illis, quia justus est, prædestinavit æternam. Ac per hoc unam dei prædestinationem tantummodo dicimus, quæ aut ad donum pertinet gratiæ, aut ad retributionem justitiæ.” II. “Libertatem arbitrii in primo homine perdidimus, quam per Christum dominum nostrum recepimus. Et habemus liberum arbitrium ad bonum, præventum et adjutum gratia. Et habemus liberum arbitrium ad malum, desertum gratia. Liberum autem habemus arbitrium quia gratia liberatum et gratia, de corrupto sanatum.” III. “Deus omnes homines sine exceptione vult salvos fieri, licet non omnes salventur. Quod autem quidem salvantur, salvantis est donum; quod autem quidem pereunt, pereuntium est meritum.” The fourth chapter says that Christ adopted the nature of each man, and accordingly died for each, though all are not redeemed. The cause of this fact is that those not redeemed are infideles or are deficient in the faith that works by love; “poculum humanæ salutis, quod confectum est infirmitate nostra et virtute divina, habet quidem in se, ut omnibus prosit, sed si non bibitur non medetur.” Mansi, XIV., p. 919.

But what took place here was not authoritative in the Archbishopric of SensSee on Prudentius and the Synod of Sens, Hefele, p. 188 f. The four chapters of this Synod, which teach the gemina prædestinatio, are by Prudentius: see Migne, CXXV., p. 64. and the Empire of Lothar. Remigius of Lyons sharply attacked the four chapters of Chiersey as running counter to Scripture and the Fathers.Migne, CXXI., p. 1083: “Libellus de tenenda immobiliter scripturæ veritate” as an official paper of the Church of Lyons. At the great Synod held at Valencia of the provinces of Lyons, Vienne and Arles (855), canons were adopted which adhered much more closely to Augustine, and contained the teaching of Remigius. Dislike to the powerful Hinkmar also played a part in their composition. The Synod rejected the four chapters: they had been entered on with too little prudence (“minus prospecte suscepta.”) It taught the double predestination, applied the latter to persons also, and maintained that Christ shed his blood for believers. The question whether God willed to save all men was carefully evaded. If the Synod disowned a predestination to sin, it did not thereby abandon strictly Augustinian ground. On the contrary, the contention that condemnation was based on prescience, and that in the Church’s Sacraments “nothing was futile or delusive” (nihil sit cassum, nihil ludificatorium) shows the anxiety felt not to give up what was held valid by the Church.It is superfluous to give the canons here—they are very prolix; see Mansi, XV., p. 3; Hefele, IV., p. 193 ff.; Schrörs, p. 133 ff. If we compare the resolutions of the two Synods word for word, the differences are extremely subtle, and yet the little addition (plus) of the alien co-efficient attached to Augustinianism in the Chiersey decrees is highly significant. Rabanus, Hinkmar, and Charles’s Synod take their stand on ecclesiastical empiricism, and try, because they must, to come to terms with Augustinianism, therein yielding more than can have been agreeable to them. Remigius, Prudentius, and Lothar’s Synod take their stand on Augustinianism, and yet would not give up this ecclesiastical empiricism. But in neither case did anyone permit the suggestion of a doubt as to whether this empiricism and Augustinianism were compatible.

Political affairs prevented the threatened breach from being consummated. The matter was taken up again in the reign of King Charles, Lothar’s son. A few slight modifications of the chapters of Valencia were decided on at Langres (859) in order to enable Charles the Bald, who had subscribed those of Chiersey, to approve of them.Mansi, XV., p. 537; Hefele, p. 205. The great Synod of Savonieres (859), at which there were present bishops from three kingdoms, as well as the sovereigns themselves, Charles the Bald, Charles of Provence, and Lothar of Lothringen, adopted the modified chapters of Valencia, and also, as it appears, those passed at Chiersey; the members did not condemn one another on account of disbelief or belief in twofold predestination (gemina predestinatio), and this meant the greatest advance towards peace.Mansi, XV., p. 529; Hefele, p. 206. Hinkmar, indeed, did not doubt that there had been and was a predestinationist heresy, which it was necessary to oppose, and whose adherents appealed unjustifiably to Augustine. He composed at the time his prolix work, De prædestinatione (against Remigius and others), under the auspices of his theological king. But the kings’ need of peace was stronger than the zeal of bishops fighting in the dark. At the great Synod of the three realms at Toucy (860), the case postponed at Savonières was brought to an end in a comprehensive synodal edict, which dealt indefinitely with the real kernel of the question, and was destitute of meaning and badly arranged. Controversial points were left alone, and those were confessed on which all were agreed. Hinkmar composed this document. Besides predestination to life, which was set forth in good Augustinian language, it was declared that God willed to save all, that Christ died for all, and that while free-will required to be redeemed and healed after the Fall, it had never been wholly lost.The prolix Ep. synodalis in Mansi, XV., p. 563; Hefele, p. 217 ff. Prædestinatio ad mortem is not mentioned. If the worth of a confession depends on its really expressing the existing belief, then the triumph of Hinkmar’s formula was really more valuable than would have been that of the contrary doctrine. The avowal of twofold predestination, in itself even more the expression of a theological speculation than of Christian faith in God the Father, would have meant less than nothing coupled with the retention of ecclesiastical empiricism. Of course the formula of Hinkmar, which no artifice could reconcile with that of Orange, did not mean much either; for, in spite of words, Augustine remained deposed. Gregory I.’s system of doctrine held the field. Men thought of the sacramental Christ, as they rejected, along with Adoptianism, the Augustinian Christology, and it was still this Christ and the good works of believers to which they looked, when, along with twofold predestination, they in fact set aside Augustine’s doctrine of grace.

Gottschalk died in prison, irreconcilable and unreconciled (869), clinging to the prædestinatio ad mortem, which he understood in so “erroneous a sense” that he did not abandon it as Remigius seems to have done. He had prophesied in vain the unmasking and fall of his mortal enemy Hinkmar as Antichrist, that great exemplar of predestination to death.The ill-usage he had suffered seems to have rendered Gottschalk at times irresponsible for his actions in the last years of his life. His dispute with Hinkmar about the phrase “trina deitas” is noteworthy. The latter would not permit it on the ground that it was Arian; Gottschalk and Ratramnus defended it by accusing Hinkmar of Sabellianism. Both phrases “una deitas” and “trina deitas” can be defended from the Augustinian standpoint; see Hinkmar’s writing, De una et non trina deitate (Migne, CXXV., p. 473; Schrörs, Hinkmar, p. 150 ff.), in which Boethius’ notion of personality (“rationabilis naturæ individua subsistentia”) plays a part. The number of theological problems discussed at the date of this renaissance of theology was very great; see Schrörs, Hinkmar, p. 88 ff. But the questions were almost all exceedingly minute and subtle, like those suggested by clever children. Nor was the culture of the period possessed of the scholastic technique required for their treatment.

2. The Controversy regarding the Filioque and Pictures.

By the position it had taken up in the Adoptianist as well as in the predestination controversy, the Church of the Frankish kingdom identified itself, abandoning tendencies to higher characteristics of its own,Of course only tendencies—the confusion that still prevailed at the close of the eighth century as regards Augustinianism is best shown by the fact that the Symbol admitted into the Libri Carolini (symbolum Hieronymi, sermo Augustini) was Pelagius’ Confession of Faith ad Innocentium. But it was also, as late as A.D. 1521, produced by the Sorbonne against Luther as Augustine’s confession. with the popular Church ideas as represented by Constantinople and Rome. The theology it had inherited from Augustine was transformed into an ecclesiastical system such as had long prevailed in those chief Churches. But the West at that time still held tenaciously to its own characteristic position as compared with the East in two doctrines; it supported the filioque and rejected images. Both these subjects have been already discussed in Vol. IV., pp. 133, 317, therefore only a little falls to be added.

Even if we had not known it already, we see very clearly in the controversy regarding the filioque clause that the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology constituted dogma and the legal basis of the Church κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν, even for the West—see the Athanasian Creed.I have dealt with the origin and authority of the Athanasian Symbol in Vol. IV., p. 134. Since then Loofs (R. Encykl., Vol. II.³, pp. 177-194) has published an investigation regarding it, distinguished by a comprehensive knowledge of sources and literature. We are agreed as to the following points. (1) The Symbol, whether we may think it to have risen out of two originally independent documents or not, belongs to Roman Southern Gaul. (2) Its first, longer, Trinitarian half, as well as the second, shorter, Christological portion belongs to the period c. 450—(at latest) 600. In the pre-Carlovingian age the Symbol had only a partial authority—the Canon of Autun proves that it was accepted there c. 670. Not till the Carlovingian period was the way prepared for its universal acceptance. Thus only two important points are in dispute. (1) Did the Symbol originate in a sermo de symbolo, or was it directly conceived as a formulary of the faith? (2) Does it consist of two portions originally independent, or was it framed from the first in its present extent? I may here leave the first question alone. As regards the second, I had supported the original independence of the Trinitarian first half, and supposed that the Christological section was only added a considerable time later, perhaps not till the Carlovingian epoch. Loofs (p. 185 ff.) has convinced me, by his evidence as to the Cod. Paris, 3836, that this date has been put too late. But I never based my opinion of an original independence of the two parts on this external testimony invalidated by Loofs, but on the internal matter of the Symbol. The latter Loofs has practically left alone. The following facts fall to be considered. (1) In the opening of the Symbol, §§ 1-3, the doctrine of the Trinity is alone announced as “catholica fides” (compare the edict of Theodosius I. of A.D. 380); there is nothing to suggest that the author means also to deal with Christology. (2) In § 26 we find, consistently with this, the solemn conclusion reverting to the beginning; “Qui vult ergo salvus esse, ita de trinitate sentiat.” This whole first half is accordingly a rule of faith complete in itself and entire, elaborated by the aid of Augustine and Vincentius, and anti-Arian. Nothing essential is to be found in it which could not have been written by Augustine, if of course the sentences may have been only gradually polished afterwards. (3) The following section, not hitherto introduced, is, indeed, bracketed with the preceding one by §§ 27 and 48; but these brackets testify plainly enough that an original organic unity is not to be supposed. For (a) § 40 is a replica of § 26, yet (b) the language is somewhat different (in the second section we have “fideliter credere,” “fides recta, ut credamus et confiteamur,” “fideliter et firmiterque credere”; in the first section: “catholicam fidem tenere,” or “integram inviolatamque fidem servare”). (4) Looking to the contents, the Christological section, §§ 28-39, shows, first, the Antinestorian (32) and Antimonophysite attitude (34, 35) completely balanced; secondly, the Gallican rescension of the Apostle’s Creed (“passus,” “descendit ad inferos,” “sedet ad dexteram dei patris omnipotentis—these could only be attributed to Spain); thirdly, the influence of the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed (“passus est pro nostra salute,”), so that we can hardly ascend beyond the beginning of the sixth century for this part. (5) Weight is to be given to the fact that the author, who has adhered strictly in §§ 36, 37 to the curt form of the Symbol, has considered it necessary in §§ 38, 39 to make a wordy addition, that at Christ’s coming all men “reddituri sunt de factis propriis rationem, et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam æternam, qui vero mala in ignem æternum.” Is this addition not to be understood as in the interests of Semi-Pelagianism? The two portions may have been combined as early as the sixth century. If we could date the Sermo Trevir. we would know more accurately about this. The filioque, which originated in Augustinian theology, came to the Frankish kingdom from Spain, but we know nothing more precisely as to how it did. It was held to be certain that it belonged to the Symbol, and this conviction was already expressed at the Synod of Gentilly (767).See Hefele, III., p. 432. Charles’s learned theologians confirmed it, as is proved by Alcuin’s work De processione spiritus sancti, and the Libri Carolini.Hefele, III., p. 704; see Libr. Carol. III. 3 (Migne, Vol. 98), where Tarasius is blamed for teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds ex patre per filium instead of ex filio. Official action was provoked by Western monks having had to submit to grave injustice in Jerusalem, because in the Liturgy they added, “sicut erat in principio” to the “Gloria patri,” and “tu solus altissimus” to the “Gloria in excelsis,” and in the Symbol “filioque” to “a patre.” They complained to the Pope, who turned to the Emperor. The latter commissioned Theodulf of Orleans to compose a work, “De spiritu sancto,” and got it decreed at the Synod of Aachen (809) that the filioque belonged to the Symbol.Hefele, III., 750-755. The Pope, however, who had to approve of this decision, still took the East into consideration, and did not permit the admission of the word, though he assented to the doctrine. Even the remonstrance of the Franks that the filioque was necessary to salvation did not move him.See Mansi, XIV., p. 18 sq. It is very important that the Pope objected to the last-mentioned argument of the Franks, saying that other things were also necessary for salvation, and were yet not received into the Symbol, since it could admit of no change at all. This meant (as opposed to the Eastern view) that the Symbol did not embrace everything that belonged to salvation. The Pope says (p. 20): “Verumtamen, quæso, responde mihi: num universa hujusmodi fidei mystica sacramenta, quæ symbolo non continentur, sine quibus quisque, qui ad hoc pertingere potest, catholicus esse non potest, symbolis inserenda et propter compendium minus intellegentium, ut cuique libuerit, addenda sunt?” The Pope, besides, asserted, in a very remarkable way, in the interview with the Frankish missi, he thought that all stages of culture could not take up the same attitude to dogma, hat accordingly what was important to some was not to others. The matter continued thus till the great controversy under Photius, until the filioque became the Symbolic watchword in the whole of the West.The papal legates in Constantinople (A.D. 88o) still subscribed the Symbol without filiogue. On John VIII., see Hefele IV., p. 482. The Frankish kingdom took the liveliest interest in the controversy in that period; but the grounds on which it rested its own view were always the same. It is not known how and when the “filioque” was admitted in Rome into the Symbol; and we know just as little about how and when Rome accepted the Gallican Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian. The most worthless formula of Augustinianism, once recommended by its opposition to Arianism, was thus preserved in the West.

If in this controversy between the West and East the former at first received only a lukewarm support from Rome, which was still half Byzantine, the Pope ranged himself entirely on the side of the pious Eastern theologians in the Oriental controversy about images, and therewith his relations became strained with Frankish theology or the efforts made by Charles I. to promote civilisation. The attitude of that theology in the great conflict is extremely characteristic of the transition time in which it found itself. The spiritual (inner) element introduced into it by Augustine no longer reacted in Christology, and in the conception of the Mass, against mystical superstition and magic sacramentalism. It had been swallowed up by the more powerful Byzantine Roman current. But the Franks could not yet force themselves to adopt the Oriental worship of images.This is true of the cultured, and at that time governing, portion of the clergy. A halt was made at the Host. A spiritual, Augustinian element reacted against image-worship, but, paradoxical as it sounds, the lower state of dogmatic culture had also its effect here. It would indeed seem, on a superficial view, that he who rejects the veneration of images is always the more cultured. But that only holds in circumstances that did not then exist. Where men had once entered, as was the case in the Frankish kingdom, the magic circle of the Byzantine mysticism that enveloped Christ and the cultus, it was simply the sign of a religious faith not yet fully developed on this basis to halt at the Host, and to disdain the riches offered by images to theological thought and pious fancy. The East and Rome made their Christology living for themselves in pictures, and so saw the past mystery in the abiding present. How could a faith dispense with them that already aimed at the sensuous enjoyment of heavenly things and revelled in the worship of relics? But dogmatic culture was still backward in the West, the theosophy of images had not yet been learnt, and—what was most important—but few pictures were possessed.

It has been maintained,Hefele, III., p. 433; Hauck, K.-Gesch. II., p. 278 f. but it is not absolutely certain, that the Synod of Gentilly (767) emitted a declaration as to image-worship satisfactory to the Pope. The Synod of Frankfort (794) unanimously condemned the decision of the seventh Œcumenical Council, which required “service and adoration” (servitium, adoratio) to be rendered to images. The decisions of the Council were undoubtedly extant only in a very bad translation.Mansi, XIII., p. 909. “Certain chapters” had been previously sent to Rome against the worship of images, these being an extract (85 ch.) from the Libri Carolini, which Alcuin had composed shortly before, at the Emperor’s command, in conjunction with other theological Court officials; they were written against the Oriental Councils of 754 and 787.Migne, CII., p. 999 sq. In these iconoclasm, but still more strongly image-worship, are forbidden as foolish and mischievous. It was right to have pictures for decoration and recollection, but not to adore them (Gregory I., Ep. VII. III: “therefore the picture is used in Churches that those who are ignorant of letters may at least read by seeing upon the walls what they cannot read in books,” and, further, Libri Carol. præf.: “having images in the ornaments of our churches and in memory of past events, and worshipping God alone, and exhibiting fit veneration to his saints, we are neither iconoclasts with the one party nor worshippers with the other”). Image-worship is then refuted at greater length, and the addition of the seventh to the six Œcumenical Councils is condemned; the two Synods (of 754 and 787) are “infamous” and “most foolish” (infames, ineptissimæ). Some would see in these books a proof of the Carlovingian “illumination”;Reuter, l.c. I., p. 10 f. but the enlightenment, which is unmistakable in other respects, only went the length of ignorance of the theosophy of images, failure to understand the subtle distinctions between λατρεία (worship) and προσκύνησις (veneration), and the king’s effort to advance civilisation. What the books really show is the self-reliance and sense of power of the Frankish Church, which break out with youthful audacity, convicting with mischievous glee the older and wiser sister of error, and actually summoning, and requiring the Pope formally to prosecute, the Byzantine Emperor and the Empress-Regent.

These books already show that the Roman West and the East could no longer go together, because the former sought to take command. They also reveal a trace of Augustinian spiritual teaching, but knowing what we do of the sort of thing held sacred at that time in the Frankish kingdom, they cannot be taken as proving that men were more enlightened in the Western than in the Eastern Church.The most vigorous defenders of Augustinian spiritual teaching were Claudius of Turin and Agobard; see Reuter, I., p. 16 ff. We are reasonably astonished that Claudius did not fare worse than he did. The study of Augustine had opened his as well as Agobard’s eyes to the contrast between the external, superstitious Christianity of their time and the ideal type of Catholicism that had taken shape to itself in the work of the great African. Pope Hadrian refuted the chapters,Mansi, XIII., p. 759. but took care not to exaggerate the difference. Under Louis the Pious, a Synod convoked at Paris on account of an embassy from Michael the Stammerer (825) pronounced itself decidedly against the image-worshipping Pope, and held strictly to the line laid down in the Libri Carolini: pictures might be set up “in memory of pious love” (pro amoris pii memoria), as ornaments, and, above all, for the sake of the uneducated; but they were not to be adored, and their erection might therefore be dispensed with.Mansi, XIV., p. 415 sq. Hefele, IV., 38 ff. Louis adopted more stringent measures against image-worship than Charles.See Claudius’ mission in Upper Italy, where iconoclasm broke out, and the worship was described as idolatry. Pope Eugene II. wrapped himself in silence; nay, even in A.D. 863 a Lateran Synod, while it recognised image-worship in guarded language, said nothing about the seventh Œcumenical Council.Mansi, XV., p. 178, 244; XIV., p. 106. Hefele, IV., p. 272. Image-worship and the seventh Synod of 787 were gradually accepted only after the time of the eighth general Synod (869).But the dispute between Rome and Byzantium had already become acute, the gap impassable, so that the west was unable to take part in the great renaissance of the sciences experienced by Byzantium from the time of Photius until the beginning of the tenth century. Yet the Carlovingian theologians were still hostile to image-worship at the close of the period. Hinkmar, who wrote a work, no longer preserved, “on the worship of pictures of the Redeemer and the Saints,”See Schrörs, l.c., p. 163. would only admit them as means of instruction (or for ornament); and Agobard,Contra eorum superstitionem, qui picturis et imaginibus sanctorum adorationis obsequium deferendum putant. Migne, CIV., p. 199. Jonas of Orleans,De cultu imaginum, 1. III. Migne, CVI., p. 305. Walafrid Strabo,De eccles. rerum exordiis. Migne, CXIV., p. 927. and Æneas of ParisLib. adv. Græc. Migne, CXXI., p. 685 sq. held the same view. Hinkmar also calls the Council of 787 a Pseudo-Synod, and all Frankish authorities known to us, of the ninth century, reckon only six Councils. Even the (eighth) Council of 869 was at first not recognised by Hinkmar. It was only when the Frankish German Church again came to the light after the dark ages that it also saw the seventh and eighth Councils. Yet the difference with the Pope regarding the pictures hardly did any harm to his prestige in the ninth century. His authority, that is, had not been carried so high or become so sensitive that such shocks could bring about its fall.On the authority of Peter’s Chair itself in Hinkmar’s view, see Schrörs, l.c., p. 165 f. But when men spoke of the Pope, they did not always think of the primacy (which, besides, included no administrative power in other dioceses), but also of the Roman Church. She is the “nurse and teacher” of all churches (Hinkmar). Image-worship was never able to domesticate itself thoroughly where antiquity was not the ruling spirit. Even at the present day Italy is still the classic land of image-worship in the West. While, however, in the East that worship expresses the religious faith and the philosophy of religion themselves, because it is evolved from the Christology, in the West pictures form part of the system of intercessors and helpers in need. In practice, indeed, the difference is pretty well obliterated.

3. The Development of the Practice and Theory of the Mass (the Dogma of the Lord’s Supper) and of Penance.

Three factors co-operated to promote a development of the theory of the Lord’s Supper in the West in the Carlovingian age. Firstly, the influence of Byzantium, where the controversy about images had led their worshippers to disconnect the symbolical conception from the consecrated elements, in order to avoid the necessity of identifying the Sacrament with the images, and of thus robbing the great mystery of its unique character.On the development of the mysteries and Lord’s Supper in the Greek Church, see Vol. IV. p. 268. John of Damascus (De fide orth. IV. 13), declared expressly: οὔκ ἐστι τύπος ὁ ἄρτος τοῦ σώματος ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸ τὸ σῶμα τοῦ κυρίου τεθεωμένον. After the Synod of 754 (Mansi, XIII., p. 261 sq.), had called the consecrated elements types and images, the second Nicene Synod of 787 (l.c. p. 265) expressly declared that they were not that, since neither the Apostles nor Fathers had so named them; by consecration they rather became αὐτὸ σῶμα καὶ αὐτὸ αἶμα. Yet Transubstantiation, taken strictly in the Western sense, was admittedly never taught by the Greeks. Secondly, the practice of the Western Church. The divine service of the Mass was the central point of all Christianity, to which everything referred, and from which every saving influence flowed for the baptized Christian. But if the ordinary life of the Christian was connected with miraculous powers and mysteries, if miracles were in the present, and still more in the accounts of the past, every-day events,See Reuter, I., pp. 24 ff. 41 ff. then the sacred act effected in the Lord’s Supper had to be developed into the wonder of wonders, lest its significance should be impaired by comparison with hundreds of miracles of a common stamp.In order to perceive that the Lord’s Supper needed a special prominence to be given to it, notice the view taken by Hinkmar of ordeals, on which Augustine, indeed, had already laid great stress (Schrörs, p. 190 ff.); he regarded them, namely, as sacraments instituted in Scripture, and placed them on a level with the baptismal ceremonies. Hinkmar was not alone in the value he attached to the oath of purgation and divine judgments (see Rozière, Recueil général des formules, Paris, 1859, n. DLXXXI.-DCXXV.; on p. 70, the ceremony is described as christianæ religionis officium), but Agobard, who opposed them, stood almost alone; see Reuter, I., p. 32 ff. Thirdly, theology and Christology come before us in this connection. The greater the prominence given in the notion of God to the idea that God, because omnipotent, was a mysterious arbitrary power, and the more vague became the perception of God in Christ and the knowledge measured by moral holiness, the more firmly did men cling to the institutions of the Church as the alone manifest, and seek in them, i.e., in mystery and miracle, to apprehend the hidden God. Further, the more the historical Christ was lost in light which no man can approach, and the more resolutely religious speculation, in order to be truly pious, only saw in him the God, who had added human nature to his fulness (see the Adoptian controversy), the more clearly did men feel themselves constrained to seek Christ not in the historical picture or the Word, but where the mystery of his Incarnation and death was present and palpable.The controversies de partu virginis (Bach, I., p. 152 ff.; see Ratramnus, Liber de eo, quod Christus ex virgine natus est; Radbertus, Opusculum de partu virginis, d’Achery, Spicil. I. p. 52, 44), show still better than the Adoptian controversy, the kind of Christology that was honoured by the religion of the community and monks. Ratramnus described as the poison of the old serpent the fact that some Germans denied that Christ had issued from Mary’s womb in the natural way, for thus the reality of Christ’s birth was destroyed, although he also acknowledged Mary’s perpetual virginity and taught the partus clauso utero: “clausa patuit dominanti.” Radbert on the other hand, without answering Ratramnus, consoled some nuns, who had been unsettled by the alleged denial of Mary’s virginity, by saying that the Church held firmly to the “clauso utero”; for if Christ had come to the light in the natural way, he would have been like an ordinary man; everything connected with the incarnation, however, was miraculous. He who did not admit Christ to have been born clauso utero, set him under the common law of nature, i.e. sinful nature, and in that case Christ was not free of sin. The difference between the two scholars thus consisted solely in the fact that while Ratramnus maintained the natural process of birth to have taken place miraculously clauso utero, Radbert taught that the birth was a supernatural process, and that Christ had left his mother in a different way from other children. Radbert here also is the more consistent; Ratramnus seeks to unite natural and supernatural. Radbert, at least, in imparting his curious instruction to the virgins of the cloister, does not display the pruriency of Jerome, who is the father of these gynæcological fancies, and the nuns may have taken this question very seriously, as seriously as Marcion and Augustine, because they recognised all that was sexual to be the hearth of sin. To later scholasticism is clue the credit of having explained the partus clause utero scientifically from the ubiquity of Christ’s body. Such miraculous conceptions having been diffused as to the body of the historical Christ, it being held, in a word, to be already pneumatic in itself, it was by that very reason sacramental (mysterious). But, in that case, it was impossible not to take the next step, and finally and completely identify the real with that sacramental (mysterious) body that was offered in the Lord’s Supper. The lines drawn from the incarnation dogma and the Lord’s Supper necessarily converged in the end. That this did not happen earlier was due, apart from the material hindrance presented by Augustine with his sober conceptions of the historical Christ as a real homo, to formal difficulties caused by the traditional idiom (the sacramental body is figura corporis Christi). These had to be removed. Bach remarks very justly (I. p. 156): “The cause of present day misunderstandings of the ancient controversies regarding the Lord’s Supper, consists in mistaking the law that governs the formation of language, and that also applies to theological idiom. We refer here to the gradual change of meaning of theological words, even when they have become, as regards their outward verbal form, fixed categories, i.e. termini technici.” The admission here frankly made by the Catholic historian of dogma is, we know, not always granted by Lutheran theologians. We have indeed had to listen, in the controversy of our own days, to the wonderful cry that we ought to restore to words their original meaning. As if any one still possessed the old die!