Saint Augustine of Hippo, Angelic Doctor of the Church, Legate and Villain

With the possible exception of Saint Paul, whose epistles are the earliest Christian writings, Saint Augustine of Hippo is arguably the most influential Christian writer of all time.

Paul’s work delineated for the nascent Church its primary creeds and basic beliefs concerning who Jesus was and why his life…and death…should be meaningful to us. He framed the theological context within which the Gospels were written.

Paul did all of that, and yet it is possible that Augustine is even more influential, because Augustine’s interpretation of Paul has dominated Christian thought since the formation of the Imperial Church .

Augustine lived from the mid-fourth century to the mid-fifth century CE. He entered the Church just as Christianity was completing its transformation into the official religion of the Roman Empire, where it came to wield incredible power as the indispensable administrative apparatus of the state. Augustine’s extensive writing fixed that transformative process into the structure we recognize today as the Roman Catholic Church.

Augustine was midway through his career as a public servant before he converted to Christianity, at which point he entered the priesthood. He was a prolific writer, and due to his skill as a legate his career took off at incredible speed; it took only four years for him to be ordained a bishop.

Augustine’s mother was a Christian, but his father was a traditional Roman of North Africa and never converted. His father had wanted Augustine to have a regular career in the traditional Roman mode of life, and for the first part of his adult life he adhered to his father’s wishes, but at the beginning of the fifth century the entire empire was in a process of conversion and all of the good jobs in government were going to Christians. Augustine felt stymied in his career and so he converted. He surmised that apart from the Church he would only encounter dead ends. After becoming convinced that he would been given a good position in the Church he joined up, and his gambit paid off, they put him on the fast track to a Bishopric.

Though he worked tirelessly against heretical groups like the Manicheans (a movement which he had formerly belonged to), the Pelagians and the Donatists, and those writings constitute a large portion of his body of work, he also wrote voluminous commentaries on the scripture and the proper education of Christians, but he is most famous for his autobiography: The Confessions, and his magnum opus, The City of God.

Augustine penned the controversial doctrine of creation ex nihillo, as part of his seminal teaching on original sin. He also gave the its teaching on sacramental theology, arguing as a lawyer for the authority of the Church in all matters private and public.

His theology would dominate Christian thinking up until the scholastic period, but Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most influential of the scholastic theologians, leaned heavily on Augustine for nearly all of his views, which is to say that Augustine continued to exercise an indirect influence on the Church as the preeminent standard of orthodoxy, virtually all of Aquinas’ contemporaries did the same. They all know that to go against Augustine risked being labeled a heretic, having all of your work declared anathema and being burned at the stake.

The trick that the scholastic theologians employed was to find new ways to argue for Augustine’s conclusions and the cosmological schemes that supported them. To the extent that they deviated from Augustinianism they would run afoul of the hierarchy.

By the time of the protestant reformation, both Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that their work represented a realignment of the church with Augustine, and through them Augustine’s theology dominated protestant thinking and continues to do so in the 21^st century.

I have taken on Augustine as my principle opponent for my own work.

His doctrine of original sin, his doctrine of double predestination, his teaching that torture can be considered a form of charity if it brings someone to the point of conversion are anathema to the way of Jesus Christ, representing a stark contradistinction to the life and ministry of the Church’s founder as preserved by the gospels, as well as Paul’s own teaching which asserted a profound hope in the reconciliation of all people with God.    

Saint Augustine of Hippo has the title of Angelic Doctor of the Church, but he on truth he was a villain; he was brutal and cruel and a hypocrite of the highest order, his terrible pessimism regarding the human condition should be exposed and read in the light of the full body of his work which is vicious and inhumane..